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Sadie Kitchen; Dan Coin, of the United Way of Greater Portland; Reverend Kenneth Lewis, Green Memorial AME Zion Church;Wells Lyons, Rogue Industries; Maine League of Young Voters;Tom MacMillan, Maine Green Independent Party; Greg Mitchell, city of Portland;Thalassa Raasch, Portland Buy Local; Ann Nadzo, Goodwill Industries of NNE; Mark Rees, city of Portland; Rebeccah Schaffner, Greater Portland Council of Governments; Father Michael Seavey, Portland Diocese; Mike Tarpinian, Opportunity Alliance; Eliza Townsend, Maine Women’s Lobby; and Danielle West-Chuta, city of Portland.
Randy Billings can be contacted at 791-6346 or at:
[email protected]
Twitter: @randybillings
ShareFollowing Airtel’s violation of Net Neutrality principles, Rahul Khullar, the TRAI Chairman, while acknowledging that Airtel has violated Net Neutrality, made some worrying statements to the Financial Express, and left me wondering about the point of making a case before an already-prejudiced adjudicator, and whether the consultation will end up being a farce to justify a decision already taken by the TRAI.
To the Financial Express, Khullar said:
‘“If the telecom players fall under a set of rules, then should not the OTT players be also brought under some kind of rules? Otherwise there would be a non-level playing field,” he said.’
… Pointing out the ways OTT players could be brought under regulation, Khullar said that there could be licensing norms for them also wherein they have to pay licence fees to the government on a revenue-share basis. The other option, which is simpler, is that a termination charge is put on calls originating from Viber or Skype kind of services.’
Hear the interview on CNBC Awaaz, here, as well. While Khullar explains the case for bringing OTT applications (which, according to telecom operators, includes Social Networking, Instant Messaging (IM), Applications (Apps),VoIP, Cloud Services, Internet Television, IPTV, Machine to Machine communications), arguing about a level playing field, where is he explaining the consumer point of view, or the Internet industry point of view? If he has to present a case (he shouldn’t), shouldn’t he present cases from all three sides, to the audience, as a neutral, unbiased adjudicator? Instead, while he says Airtel’s actions violate net neutrality, he clarifies that it isn’t illegal for Airtel to do so, and mentions the need for a level playing field. Where is the consumer interest perspective?
Frankly, the only level playing field needed is so that Airtel, which runs Wynk, doesn’t use its role as an access service provider to make competitors like Saavn and Gaana more expensive. Remember that Airtel also runs Airtel Talk, a VoIP service. Will VoIP on Skype be made more expensive than on Airtel Talk?
So, I’m left wondering whether the TRAI has already made up its mind, wherein a violation of net neutrality will be legitimized, and services like instant messaging, social networking and VoIP will be carved out for telecom operators to charge extra for, and we will be charged not just for how much of the Internet we use, but also how we use it.
Also read: Net Neutrality, a simple explanation.
The telecom lobby has been working on the TRAI
Here’s the problem: the telecom lobby has been “working” on the TRAI on this issue for a very long time.The COAI, a telecom lobbying body, of which Facebook, incidentally, is a member, has sent a paper explaining its case to the TRAI. It has written to the TRAI asking for the regulation of Whatsapp, given that Whatsapp plans to launch voice services. To quote Khullar from a TRAI seminar on “Regulatory framework for OTT services (essentially regulation of the Internet):
“Over the last 6-8 months, a number of CEOs from the telecom sectors have come and spoken to me about the impending problem of OTT”
At one point, I remember getting a little worked up, and asking the TRAI executives at the seminar (Khullar had left by then) why it was even holding such a discussion – given the implications on net neutrality and freedom of speech – and they said it was merely to understand the issues. In all these years of attending TRAI open house discussions, I don’t remember a full day seminar merely to understand issues.
At the same seminar, Subho Ray, the President of the IAMAI, had mentioned at the seminar that the TRAI had not wished to get into issues of revenue share regarding Mobile VAS and Telecom Operators, but here they have held a seminar, and are now planning a consultation paper.
Consumer issues vs Telecom Industry issues
In 2014, the TRAI has failed to address key consumer issues:
1. Complaints about VAS fraud are back,
2. The TRAI’s own SMS spam guidelines are being violated, with the transaction pipe being used for promotional messages:
However, from an industry perspective, the TRAI has come up with a great paper which recommends spectrum sharing, and possibly the most sensible recommendations around spectrum auctions that I have ever seen, which will greatly ensure the sustenance of the telecom industry. Powerful lobbies are powerful.
It’s time that the regulator took up consumer issues as well. The TRAI did some great work around both VAS fraud and SMS Spam in 2012-13, but in 2014, it failed telecom consumers.
Neutrality is critical
The TRAI needs to approach Net Neutrality without a prejudiced mind. Three core principles of neutrality:
All sites must be equally accessible: ISPs and telecom operators shouldn’t block certain sites or apps just because they don’t pay them. No gateways should be created, in order to give preferential discovery to one site over another. All sites must be accessible at the same speed (at an ISP/telco level): This means no speeding up of certain sites because of business deals. More importantly, it means no slowing down some sites. The cost of access must be the same for all sites (per Kb/Mb or as per data plan): This means no “Zero Rating”. In countries like India, Net Neutrality is more about cost of access than speed of access: all lanes are slow.
It’s important for the growth of the Internet in India, and both consumers and the Internet industry (Digital India, anyone?) that neutrality be absolute, and the principle of the ‘calling party pays’ remain true for the Internet as well.Newly elected Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette won't be in Justin Trudeau's cabinet, which is scheduled to be revealed on Wednesday.
In last month's election, Ouellette beat long-time NDP incumbent Pat Martin to represent the Winnipeg Centre riding, and it was speculated he was a top candidate for a ministerial role in Ottawa.
But on Tuesday, Ouellette said a cabinet post wasn't happening.
"I am not intending to get on an airplane, you know, I'd love to have the call, but obviously, I think there are people who are very well qualified in the caucus," he said. "We could fill up four cabinets at 40-a-piece, literally, with the quality of people we have in the Liberal caucus."
When asked if he was disappointed he didn't make the cut, Ouellette said he has a lot to do in his riding, and now, he'll be able to avoid being "bogged down in trying to deal with bureaucracy in one specific department."
He said for the first 10 days after being elected, he only slept three hours a night.
"I have a lot to do in Winnipeg Centre, and I think it's going to give me a bit more freedom to do what I need to do," he said. "I'm really excited, obviously."Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has an Emmy nomination for his work on Al Jazeera English's The Stream, but that didnt help him with his Uber driver on Sunday night.
At around 10 p.m., Eldin, a correspondent for AJPlus, requested an Uber ride after arriving at Union Station in Washington, D.C., where he had traveled to film interviews with members of Congress about President-elect Donald Trump's proposed Muslim registry. When he received a notification that his driver has arrived, Eldin, wearing a hat with "love" written in Arabic and a suitcase in tow, scurried across the street toward the vehicle.
"I'm aware [my hat] is a political statement in a sense, because Arabic is so politicized," Eldin said in a phone interview.
Eldin told the driver his name was Ahmed. The driver, according to Eldin, said he shouldn't have approached his vehicle in a hurry. "You could be an attacker," the driver said, according to Eldin. The driver then refused to open the trunk of his car and locked his passenger doors. Eldin explained that he was trying to escape the cold, but the driver refused to allow him into the vehicle. After the incident, Eldin shared a screencap of his complaint to Uber on Twitter.
Expriences with discrimination while riding Uber have become commonplace. On Dec. 7, a cab driver in D.C. verbally assaulted Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim and Somali lawmaker in Minnesota. Omar said the driver called her "ISIS" and threatened to remove her headscarf.
The problem doesn't lie solely with drivers, either. Earlier in November, a man verbally assaulted a Muslim Uber driver from another car at an intersection in New York City, calling him an Arab and a terrorist. "They'll deport you soon," the man said, according to The Sun. "Dont worry, you f*cking terrorist." According to the Huffington Post, in November 2015, a white man in his 30s asked his Uber driver if he was Muslim and threatened to kill him.
When asked for comment via phone, an Uber spokesman said that the company was aware of Eldin's incident and had made efforts to contact him and the driver. Uber said it is currently investigating the incident, but in the meantime, the driver will be prohibited from accessing the Uber app.
The spokesman said that Uber has a zero-tolerance policy regarding discrimination.
But Eldin said this was the third instance of racial profiling that he had experienced on Uber this year. The second incident took place two weeks before the election, when Eldin hopped into a vehicle for an Uberpool ride, a lower-cost option for riders to join other riders heading in the same direction. The driver, who was white, told Eldin to get out of his car when he found out his name was Ahmed. The first incident happened in September in Washington, D.C., as Eldin was speaking with his mother on the phone in Arabic while in an Uber car. According to Eldin, the Uber driver was muttering under their breath during Eldin's conversation with his mother. After about three minutes of driving, the driver pulled over and told Eldin to leave the car because he was off-duty.
Eldin said that he shies away from speaking about facing Islamophobia, in part because he fears being stereotyped as a minority with a victimization complex.
"In an era of fake news, where perceptions dictate policy and public opinion, I don't want to just be another Muslim that's complaining," Eldin said. "The reason I did report this is because I am aware of the narrative that exists around Islamophobia and how politicized it is."Mesoamerican god of the wind, air and learning
This article is about a Mesoamerican deity. For the giant pterosaur, see Quetzalcoatlus. For other uses, see Quetzalcoatl (disambiguation)
Quetzalcoatl in feathered serpent form as depicted in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis
Quetzalcoatl (; Spanish: [ketsalˈkoatɬ] (); Classical Nahuatl: Quetzalcohuātl [ket͡saɬˈkowaːt͡ɬ], in honorific form: Quetzalcohuātzin, (help·info) ) is a deity in Mesoamerican culture and literature whose name comes from the Nahuatl language and means "feathered serpent" or "Quetzal-feathered Serpent".[2] The worship of a Feathered Serpent is first documented in Teotihuacan in the first century BC or first century AD.[3] That period lies within the Late Preclassic to Early Classic period (400 BC – 600 AD) of Mesoamerican chronology, and veneration of the figure appears to have spread throughout Mesoamerica by the Late Classic period (600–900 AD).[4]
In the Postclassic period (900–1519 AD), the worship of the feathered serpent deity was based in the primary Mexican religious center of Cholula. It is in this period that the deity is known to have been named "Quetzalcoatl" by his Nahua followers. In the Maya area, he was approximately equivalent to Kukulkan and Gukumatz, names that also roughly translate as "feathered serpent" in different Mayan languages.
Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of wind, air, and learning, wears around his neck the "wind breastplate" ehecailacocozcatl, "the spirally voluted wind jewel" made of a conch shell. This talisman was a conch shell cut at the cross-section and was likely worn as a necklace by religious rulers, as they have been discovered in burials in archaeological sites throughout Mesoamerica, and potentially symbolized patterns witnessed in hurricanes, dust devils, seashells, and whirlpools, which were elemental forces that had significance in Aztec mythology. In codex drawings, Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl were both pictured as wearing an ehecailacocozcatl around each of their necks.[5] There has additionally been at least one major cache of offerings with knives and idols adorned with the symbols of more than one god, some of which were adorned with wind jewels.[6]
In the era following the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, a number of sources were written that conflate Quetzalcoatl with Ce Acatl Topiltzin, a ruler of the mythico-historic city of Tollan. It is a matter of much debate among historians to which degree, or whether at all, these narratives about this legendary Toltec ruler describe historical events.[7] Furthermore, early Spanish sources written by clerics tend to identify the god-ruler Quetzalcoatl of these narratives with either Hernán Cortés or Thomas the Apostle—an identification which is also a source of a diversity of opinions about the nature of Quetzalcoatl.[8]
Among the Aztecs, whose beliefs are the best-documented in the historical sources, Quetzalcoatl was related to gods of the wind, of the planet Venus, of the dawn, of merchants and of arts, crafts and knowledge. He was also the patron god of the Aztec priesthood, of learning and knowledge.[9] Quetzalcoatl was one of several important gods in the Aztec pantheon, along with the gods Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli. Two other gods represented by the planet Venus are Quetzalcoatl's ally Tlaloc who is the god of rain, and Quetzalcoatl's twin and psychopomp, who is named Xolotl.
Animals thought to represent Quetzalcoatl include resplendent quetzals, rattlesnakes (coatl meaning serpent in Nahuatl), crows, and macaws. In his form as Ehecatl he is the wind, and is represented by spider monkeys, ducks, and the wind itself.[10] In his form as the morning star, Venus, he is also depicted as a harpy eagle.[11] In Mazatec legends, the astrologer deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, who is also represented by Venus, bears a close relationship with Quetzalcoatl.[12]
Feathered serpent deity in Mesoamerica [ edit ]
A feathered serpent deity has been worshiped by many different ethnopolitical groups in Mesoamerican history. The existence of such worship can be seen through studies of the iconography of different Mesoamerican cultures, in which serpent motifs are frequent. On the basis of the different symbolic systems used in portrayals of the feathered serpent deity in different cultures and periods, scholars have interpreted the religious and symbolic meaning of the feathered serpent deity in Mesoamerican cultures.
Iconographic depictions [ edit ]
The earliest iconographic depiction of the deity is believed to be found on Stela 19 at the Olmec site of La Venta, depicting a serpent rising up behind a person probably engaged in a shamanic ritual. This depiction is believed to have been made around 900 BC. Although probably not exactly a depiction of the same feathered serpent deity worshipped in classic and post-classic periods, it shows the continuity of symbolism of feathered snakes in Mesoamerica from the formative period and on, for example in comparison to the Mayan Vision Serpent shown below.
Vision Serpent depicted on lintel 15 from Yaxchilan
The first culture to use the symbol of a feathered serpent as an important religious and political symbol was Teotihuacan. At temples such as the aptly named "Quetzalcoatl temple" in the Ciudadela complex, feathered serpents figure prominently and alternate with a different kind of serpent head. The earliest depictions of the feathered serpent deity were fully zoomorphic, depicting the serpent as an actual snake, but already among the Classic Maya, the deity began acquiring human features.
In the iconography of the classic period, Maya serpent imagery is also prevalent: a snake is often seen as the embodiment of the sky itself, and a vision serpent is a shamanic helper presenting Maya kings with visions of the underworld.
The archaeological record shows that after the fall of Teotihuacan that marked the beginning of the epi-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology around 600 AD, the cult of the feathered serpent spread to the new religious and political centers in central Mexico, centers such as Xochicalco, Cacaxtla and Cholula.[4] Feathered serpent iconography is prominent at all of these sites. Cholula is known to have remained the most important center of worship to Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec/Nahua version of the feathered serpent deity, in the post-classic period.
During the epi-classic period, a dramatic spread of feathered serpent iconography is evidenced throughout Mesoamerica, and during this period begins to figure prominently at sites such as Chichén Itzá, El Tajín, and throughout the Maya area. Colonial documentary sources from the Maya area frequently speak of the arrival of foreigners from the central Mexican plateau, often led by a man whose name translates as "Feathered Serpent". It has been suggested that these stories recall the spread of the feathered serpent cult in the epi-classic and early post-classic periods.[4]
Represented as the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl was also manifest in the wind, one of the most powerful forces of nature, and this relationship was captured in a text in the Nahuatl language:
Quetzalcoatl; yn ehecatl ynteiacancauh yntlachpancauh in tlaloque, yn aoaque, yn qujqujiauhti. Auh yn jquac molhuja eheca, mjtoa: teuhtli quaqualaca, ycoioca, tetecujca, tlatlaiooa, tlatlapitza, tlatlatzinj, motlatlaueltia. Quetzalcoatl—he was the wind, the guide and road sweeper of the rain gods, of the masters of the water, of those who brought rain. And when the wind rose, when the dust rumbled, and it crack and there was a great din, became it became dark and the wind blew in many directions, and it thundered; then it was said: "[Quetzalcoatl] is wrathful."[13]
Quetzalcoatl was also linked to rulership and priestly office; additionally, among the Toltec, it was used as a military title and emblem.[14]
In the post-classic Nahua civilization of central Mexico (Aztec), the worship of Quetzalcoatl was ubiquitous. Cult worship may have involved the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms (psilocybes), considered sacred.[15] The most important center was Cholula where the world's largest pyramid was dedicated to his worship. In Aztec culture, depictions of Quetzalcoatl were fully anthropomorphic. Quetzalcoatl was associated with the wind god Ehecatl and is often depicted with his insignia: a beak-like mask.
Interpretations [ edit ]
Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Xochicalco, adorned with a fully zoomorphic feathered Serpent.
On the basis of the Teotihuacan iconographical depictions of the feathered serpent, archaeologist Karl Taube has argued that the feathered serpent was a symbol of fertility and internal political structures contrasting with the War Serpent symbolizing the outwards military expansion of the Teotihuacan empire.[16] Historian Enrique Florescano also analyzing Teotihuacan iconography argues that the Feathered Serpent was part of a triad of agricultural deities: the Goddess of the Cave symbolizing motherhood, reproduction and life, Tlaloc, god of rain, lightning and thunder and the feathered serpent, god of vegetational renewal. The feathered serpent was furthermore connected to the planet Venus because of this planet's importance as a sign of the beginning of the rainy season. To both Teotihuacan and Mayan cultures, Venus was in turn also symbolically connected with warfare.[17]
While not usually feathered, classic Maya serpent iconography seems related to the belief in a sky-, Venus-, creator-, war- and fertility-related serpent deity. In the example from Yaxchilan, the Vision Serpent has the human face of the young maize god, further suggesting a connection to fertility and vegetational renewal; the Mayan Young Maize god was also connected to Venus.
In Xochicalco, depictions of the feathered serpent are accompanied by the image of a seated, armed ruler and the hieroglyph for the day sign 9 Wind. The date 9 Wind is known to be associated with fertility, Venus and war among the Maya and frequently occurs in relation to Quetzalcoatl in other Mesoamerican cultures.
On the basis of the iconography of the feathered serpent deity at sites such as Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, Chichén Itzá, Tula and Tenochtitlan combined with certain ethnohistorical sources, historian David Carrasco has argued that the preeminent function of the feathered serpent deity throughout Mesoamerican history was the patron deity of the Urban center, a god of culture and civilization.[18]
In Aztec culture [ edit ]
To the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was, as his name indicates, a feathered serpent, a flying reptile (much like a dragon), who was a boundary-maker (and transgressor) between earth and sky. He was a creator deity having contributed essentially to the creation of Mankind. He also had anthropomorphic forms, for example in his aspects as Ehecatl the wind god. Among the Aztecs, the name Quetzalcoatl was also a priestly title, as the two most important priests of the Aztec Templo Mayor were called "Quetzalcoatl Tlamacazqui". In the Aztec ritual calendar, different deities were associated with the cycle-of-year names: Quetzalcoatl was tied to the year Ce Acatl (One Reed), which correlates to the year 1519.[19]
Myths [ edit ]
Attributes [ edit ]
The exact significance and attributes of Quetzalcoatl varied somewhat between civilizations and through history. There are several stories about the birth of Quetzalcoatl. In a version of the myth, Quetzalcoatl was born by a virgin named Chimalman, to whom the god Onteol appeared in a dream.[20] In another story, the virgin Chimalman conceived Quetzalcoatl swallowing an emerald.[21] A third story narrates that Chimalman was hit in the womb by an arrow shot by Mixcoatl and nine months later she gave birth to a child which was called Quetzalcoatl.[20] A fourth story narrates that Quetzalcoatl was born from Coatlicue, who already had four hundred children who formed the stars of the Milky Way.[20]
According to another version of the myth, Quetzalcoatl is one of the four sons of Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, the four Tezcatlipocas, each of whom presides over one of the four cardinal directions. Over the West presides the White Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, the god of light, justice, mercy and wind. Over the South presides the Blue Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. Over the East presides the Red Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec, the god of gold, farming and springtime. And over the North presides the Black Tezcatlipoca, known by no other name than Tezcatlipoca, the god of judgment, night, deceit, sorcery and the Earth.[22] Quetzalcoatl was often considered the god of the morning star, and his twin brother Xolotl was the evening star (Venus). As the morning star, he was known by the title Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, meaning "lord of the star of the dawn". He was known as the inventor of books and the calendar, the giver of maize (corn) to mankind, and sometimes as a symbol of death and resurrection. Quetzalcoatl was also the patron of the priests and the title of the twin Aztec high priests. Some legends describe him as opposed to human sacrifice[23] while others describe him practicing it.[24][25]
Most Mesoamerican beliefs included cycles of suns. Often our current time was considered the fifth sun,[citation needed] the previous four having been destroyed by flood, fire and the like. Quetzalcoatl went to Mictlan, the underworld, and created fifth-world mankind from the bones of the previous races (with the help of Cihuacoatl), using his own blood, from a wound he inflicted on his earlobes, calves, tongue, and penis, to imbue the bones with new life.
It is also suggested that he was a son of Xochiquetzal and Mixcoatl.[citation needed]
In the Codex Chimalpopoca, it is said Quetzalcoatl was coerced by Tezcatlipoca into becoming drunk on pulque, cavorting with his sister, Quetzalpetlatl, a celibate priestess, and neglecting their religious duties. (Many academics conclude this passage implies incest.) The next morning, Quetzalcoatl, feeling shame and regret, had his servants build him a stone chest, adorn him in turquoise, and then, laying in the chest, set himself on fire. His ashes rose into the sky and then his heart followed, becoming the morning star (see Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli).[26]
Belief in Cortés as Quetzalcoatl [ edit ]
Since the sixteenth century, it has been widely held that the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II initially believed the landing of Hernán Cortés in 1519 to be Quetzalcoatl's return. This view has been questioned by ethno-historians who argue that the Quetzalcoatl-Cortés connection is not found in any document that was created independently of post-Conquest Spanish influence, and that there is little proof of a pre-Hispanic belief in Quetzalcoatl's return.[27][28][29][30][31] Most documents expounding this theory are of entirely Spanish origin, such as Cortés's letters to Charles V of Spain, in which Cortés goes to great pains to present the naive gullibility of the Aztecs in general as a great aid in his conquest of Mexico.
Much of the idea of Cortés being seen as a deity can be traced back to the Florentine Codex written down some 50 years after the conquest. In the Codex's description of the first meeting between Moctezuma and Cortés, the Aztec ruler is described as giving a prepared speech in classical oratorial Nahuatl, a speech which, as described in the codex written by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún and his Tlatelolcan informants, included such prostrate declarations of divine or near-divine admiration as:
You have graciously come on earth, you have graciously approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you.
and:
You have graciously arrived, you have known pain, you have known weariness, now come on earth, take your rest, enter into your palace, rest your limbs; may our lords come on earth.
Subtleties in, and an imperfect scholarly understanding of, high Nahuatl rhetorical style make the exact intent of these comments tricky to ascertain, but Restall argues that Moctezuma's politely offering his throne to Cortés (if indeed he did ever give the speech as reported) may well have been meant as the exact opposite of what it was taken to mean: politeness in Aztec culture was a way to assert dominance and show superiority. This speech, which has been widely referred to, has been a factor in the widespread belief that Moctezuma was addressing Cortés as the returning god Quetzalcoatl.
Other parties have also promulgated the idea that the Mesoamericans believed the conquistadors, and in particular Cortés, to be awaited gods: most notably the historians of the Franciscan order such as Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta.[32] Some Franciscans at this time held millennarian beliefs[33] and some of them believed that Cortés' coming to the New World ushered in the final era of evangelization before the coming of the millennium. Franciscans such as Toribio de Benavente "Motolinia" saw elements of Christianity in the precolumbian religions and therefore believed that Mesoamerica had been evangelized before, possibly by St. Thomas whom legend had it had "gone to preach beyond the Ganges". Franciscans then equated the original Quetzalcoatl with St. Thomas and imagined that the Indians had long-awaited his return to take part once again in God's kingdom. Historian Matthew Restall concludes that:
The legend of the returning lords, originated during the Spanish-Mexica war in Cortés' reworking of Moctezuma's welcome speech, had by the 1550's merged with the Cortés-as-Quetzalcoatl legend that the Franciscans had started spreading in the 1530s. (Restall 2001:114 )
Some scholarship maintains the view that the Aztec Empire's fall may be attributed in part to the belief in Cortés as the returning Quetzalcoatl, notably in works by David Carrasco (1982), H. B. Nicholson (2001 (1957)) and John Pohl (2016). However, a majority of Mesoamericanist scholars such as Matthew Restall (2003), James Lockhart (1994), Susan D. Gillespie (1989), Camilla Townsend (2003a, 2003b), Louise Burkhart, Michel Graulich and Michael E. Smith (2001) among others, consider the "Quetzalcoatl/Cortés myth" as one of many myths about the Spanish conquest which have risen in the early post-conquest period. It should be furthered noted that the idea that Cortes or Spaniards as a group or specific other individuals were a specific god (e.g., Quetzalcoatl) or gods in general is not present among any other Mesoamerican peoples (Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Maya, Quiche, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, etc.).
There is no question that the legend of Quetzalcoatl played a significant role in the colonial period. However, this legend likely has a foundation in events that took place immediately prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. A 2012 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, "The Children of the Plumed Serpent: the Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico", demonstrated the existence of a powerful confederacy of Eastern Nahuas, Mixtecs and Zapotecs, along with the peoples they dominated throughout southern Mexico between 1200–1600 (Pohl, Fields, and Lyall 2012, Harvey 2012, Pohl 2003). They maintained a major pilgrimage and commercial center at Cholula, Puebla which the Spaniards compared to both Rome and Mecca because the cult of the god united its constituents through a field of common social, political, and religious values without dominating them militarily. This confederacy engaged in almost seventy-five years of nearly continuous conflict with the Aztec Empire of the Triple Alliance until the arrival of Cortés. Members of this confederacy from Tlaxcala, Puebla, and Oaxaca provided the Spaniards with the army that first reclaimed the city of Cholula from its pro-Aztec ruling faction, and ultimately defeated the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The Tlaxcalteca, along with other city-states across the Plain of Puebla, then supplied the auxiliary and logistical support for the conquests of Guatemala and West Mexico while Mixtec and Zapotec caciques (Colonial indigenous rulers) gained monopolies in the overland transport of Manila galleon trade through Mexico, and formed highly lucrative relationships with the Dominican order in the new Spanish imperial world economic system that explains so much of the enduring legacy of indigenous life-ways that characterize southern Mexico and explain the popularity of the Quetzalcoatl legends that continued through the colonial period to the present day.
Contemporary use [ edit ]
Latter-day Saints [ edit ]
Some Mormons believe that Quetzalcoatl was historically Jesus Christ, but believe His name and the details of the event were gradually lost over time. According to the Book of Mormon, the resurrected Christ came down from the clouds and visited the people of the American continent, shortly after his resurrection. Quetzalcoatl is not a religious symbol in the Latter-day Saint faith, and is not taught as such, nor is it in their doctrine.[34] One President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, John Taylor, wrote:[35]
The story of the life of the Mexican divinity, Quetzalcoatl, closely resembles that of the Savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being. But the history of the former has been handed down to us through an impure Lamanitish source, which has sadly disfigured and perverted the original incidents and teachings of the Savior's life and ministry." (Mediation and Atonement, p. 194.)
Latter-day Saint author Brant Gardner, after investigating the link between Quetzalcoatl and Jesus, concluded that the association amounts to nothing more than folklore.[36] In a 1986 paper for Sunstone, he noted that during the Spanish Conquest, the Native Americans and the Catholic priests who sympathized with them felt pressure to link Native American beliefs with Christianity, thus making the Native Americans seem more human and less savage. Over time, Quetzalcoatl's appearance, clothing, malevolent nature, and status among the gods were reshaped to fit a more Christian framework.[37]
In media [ edit ]
Quetzalcoatl was fictionalized in the 1982 film Q as a monster that terrorizes New York City.[38][39] The deity has been featured as a character in the manga and anime series Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Beyblade and Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid (the latter depicting Quetzalcoatl as a female dragon deity); the Persona video game franchise; the video games Fate/Grand Order, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XV, Smite (as an alternate costume for his Mayan counterpart, Kukulkan), and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine; and in the last of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel books. Quetzelcoatl also appeared on (Season 3) of the Animal Planet mockumentary Lost Tapes in an episode entitled Q the Serpent God.[40]
In 1971 Tony Shearer published a book called Lord of the dawn: Quetzalcoatl and the Tree of Life, inspiring New Age followers to visit Chichen Itza at the summer solstice when dragon-shaped shadows are cast by the Kulkulcan pyramid.[41]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Beginning during the crisis at Standing Rock in 2016, in parallel with the phrase "Mni Wiconi" ("Water is Life"), support from Mexican, Mexican-American, and Mexican indigenous populations included use of the phrase in Spanish "Agua es Vida". Frequently pictured with this phrase was either Tlaloc or Quetzalcoatl as a serpent, or at times both. Quetzalcoatl being the teotl of life, and Tlaloc being the teotl of rain and sustenance, they are often paired with each other dating back to Pre-Columbian times, and this practice continues today, as was seen in support of the Standing Rock Lakota and in other contemporary struggles for water rights.
Terminology [ edit ]
It is only since the colonial period that Quetzalcoatl and the rest of the Nahua pantheon are understood as "gods". Traditionally speaking, he belongs to what are known collectively as the teteoh (plural form of "teotl", a Nahuatl word of ambiguous meaning). Teotl itself is an abstract notion referring to energy or power. The teteoh are not understood to wield power as gods do, but rather |
those with a history of infection had a greater percentage of body fat over time.
Most studies done to date on adults have found a connection between exposure to this virus and obesity, and all of the studies done so far on childhood obesity show an increase in prevalence of infection in obese compared to non-obese children. Now we’re up to more than a thousand children studied with similar findings. Obese children who tested positive for the virus weighed 35 pounds more than children who tested negative.
The virus appears to increase the number of fat cells by mobilizing fat cell precursor stem cells, and then may increase the accumulation of fat within the cells. If you take liposuction samples of fat from people, the fat cell precursors turn into fat cells at about 5 time the rate in people who came to the liposuction clinic already infected. And fat taken from noninfected people exposed to the virus start sucking up fat at a faster rate, so may induce obesity without increasing food intake.
Just like adenovirus 36 infection can be transmitted horizontally from one infected chicken to another in the same cage, and then they subsequently became obese. This same virus is also easily transmitted among humans, this raises the question as to whether at least some cases of childhood obesity can be considered an infectious disease. They speculate that this animal adenovirus may have mutated to become a human adenovirus capable of infecting humans and causing obesity.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Katie Schloer.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.It's still on Earth for the next two years, but the James Webb Space Telescope turned around to face the world this week, as it moved into position for preliminary optics testing. Once it's launched, JWST will study galaxy, star and planet formation in the universe using infrared wavelengths. For now, you can spy on the cleanroom at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland where JWST is hanging out for the next few months, via the Webb Cam, here.
For the past two months, during final levels of assembly, its big, shiny face of mirrors has been facing away from the viewing gallery, JWST senior engineer Mike Menzel tells Popular Science, "It's a really beautiful sight."
Webb's 18 sections of ultra-lightweight beryllium, making up its 21-foot-wide mirror were assembled in February 2016 at Goddard, and the Webb Cam has been following its construction progress ever since. At the end of the year, Webb moves to Johnson Space Center in Houston and then a Northrop Grumman-led team will take over, developing the deployable sunshield and system integration.
The waves emanating from the center aren't beacons from another dimension, but reflections of the room on the telescope's mirrors:nemuke Profile Joined April 2011 31 Posts Last Edited: 2014-02-05 14:54:50 #1
Hi, I brought good news those sc2 fans who live nearby tokyo.
"e-Sports SQUARE", a facility specializing in the participation and enjoyment of e-sports that opened in Akihabara on January 25th, will be hosting Barcraft on the 11th of February.
The event has been sanctioned by Proleague, so it will be an officially licensed Barcraft.
There will also be an exhibision match between the two strongest Japanese SC2 players.
Event Details:
Place: e-sports SQUARE, Akihabara (
Entry fee: Free
* The facility will be operating as normal
* No registration necessary
* Food and Drinks are available for purchase
Schedule:
Hi, I brought good news those sc2 fans who live nearby tokyo."e-Sports SQUARE", a facility specializing in the participation and enjoyment of e-sports that opened in Akihabara on January 25th, will be hosting Barcraft on the 11th of February.The event has been sanctioned by Proleague, so it will be an officially licensed Barcraft.There will also be an exhibision match between the two strongest Japanese SC2 players.Event Details:Place: e-sports SQUARE, Akihabara ( Map Entry fee: Free* The facility will be operating as normal* No registration necessary* Food and Drinks are available for purchaseSchedule: 08:30 GMT (+00:00) : Exhibition match live on stage - Z:Vaisravana vs Crimson!
: Exhibition match live on stage - Z:Vaisravana vsCrimson! 09:30 GMT (+00:00) : 2014 SKTelecom Proleague Round1 Final (KT Rolster vs TBD) on the big screen!
There will be a prize raffle after the Proleague Final viewing session!
*This event will not be streamed.
Source: : 2014 SKTelecom Proleague Round1 Final (KT Rolster vs TBD) on the big screen!There will be a prize raffle after the Proleague Final viewing session!*This event will not be streamed.Source: http://e-sports-square.com/stadium/event/barcraft/Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took part in a racist joke as part of a skit with Hamilton cast member Leslie Odom Jr. It went about as badly as everyone — except apparently Clinton and de Blasio — would expect.
Here is the joke:
Clinton: Thanks for the endorsement, Bill. It took you long enough. De Blasio: Sorry, Hillary, I was running on CP time. Odom: That's not— I don't like jokes like that, Bill. Clinton: Cautious politician time. I've been there.
The racist aspect of this joke is the reference to CP time, which is typically read as "colored people's time" — the stereotype that people of color, particularly African Americans, are always running late.
People are, as one would expect, not happy about it. Gawker called it "awkward." Salon said it was "cringeworthy." The New York Daily News's front page put the skit on blast:
STOP THE PRESSES! New page 1
SKIT FOR BRAINS
Hil, Blaz bashed for 'colored people time' jokehttps://t.co/XnThd3NSWk pic.twitter.com/HwsW2ZNElr — New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) April 12, 2016
At first, de Blasio defended the joke. "It was clearly a staged show," he said on CNN. "It was a scripted show. And the whole idea was to do the counterintuitive and say 'cautious politician time.' Every actor involved, including Hillary Clinton and Leslie Odom Jr., thought it was a joke on a different convention. That was the whole idea. So I think people are missing the point here."
But de Blasio's office followed up with somewhat of an apology in a statement: "Let's be clear: In an evening of satire, the only person this was meant to mock was the mayor himself, period. Certainly no one intended to offend anyone."
This shouldn't be too hard to understand: Even if the use of "CP time" was intended as part of a skit, people don't want their political leaders playing into racist stereotypes that defame minorities. That's especially true for Clinton, whose big advantage over Bernie Sanders has been higher support among minority voters.
During a campaign in which Donald Trump has made actual racist statements, and in a country that has a real history of systemic racism, that doesn't seem like too much to ask for from supposedly progressive politicians.
Watch: Race isn't biologically real“All happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Imagine, as Lenin liked to do, that a country is a marriage of different nationalities. Lenin believed, and he enshrined this principle in the Soviet constitution, that if the federal family was unhappy and one of the partners in the polyamorous union wanted out, it could initiate divorce proceedings. The Soviets were big on secession—at least in theory.
In practice, Moscow was more a believer in traditional family values. It tried to hold on to the wayward Baltic republics—even as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were claiming the transnational equivalent of spousal abuse in their case for dissolution—all the way up to the point when the mother of all divorces took place in 1991 and the Soviet family broke into its constituent parts.
Today, one of the offspring of that unhappy union, modern-day Ukraine, is facing its own family problem. Russian-speaking separatists in the eastern part of the country have been fighting for a divorce for the last six months. The government in Kiev argues that it’s just a minor spat that outsiders—namely, Russia—are fueling for their own advantage.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, echoing Lenin, recently gave a thumb’s up to secession by raising the possibility of statehood for eastern Ukraine. Or perhaps, as his spokesman later backtracked, he was just talking about initiating talks between rebels and the Ukrainian government. It’s hard to tell with Putin. He has also said that Russia is not providing assistance to the separatists and has not introduced its own forces across the border, two assertions that fly in the face of the evidence.
Divorce has been on Putin’s mind recently, ever since announcing his own split from Lyudmila Putina, his wife of 30 years. She declared the separation a “civilized divorce.” But rumors of affairs and even illegitimate children continue to swirl. Putin wasn’t exactly the most public of family men. He never referred to his daughters by name, only mentioning them as “they.” And he stopped appearing publicly with his wife long ago, suggesting that the estrangement was not of recent vintage. Commentators speculate that Putin intends to bolster his image of virility by marrying a gymnast half his age.
But perhaps the real reason for the divorce is geopolitical. Putin simply wanted to send a signal to Ukraine that it should not be so emphatic about maintaining what Russia believes is an unhappy family. “Divorce is in the air,” the Russian president could be heard singing. “Everywhere I look around, divorce is in the air, every sight and every sound.”
Europe is full of unhappy families, and they are all different. The divorce proceedings taking place in Ukraine today are violent. But elsewhere, the respective partners are considering more amicable partings of the ways. Scotland, for instance, offers an entirely different version of divorce, European-style.
Later this month, Scots will go to the polls to vote on a referendum on whether to stay in the United Kingdom or not. Over the summer, it looked as though voters would easily defeat the measure and Scotland would remain more-or-less happily married to England and Wales. At the beginning of August, public opinion polls indicated that the vote would be 61 percent against independence and 39 percent in favor. The most recent polling shows a considerable narrowing of the margin, with the “yes to divorce” vote rising to 47 percent and the “no” faction dropping by the same percentage.
However amicable the divorce might be, if it goes through, the consequences will be messy, and I’m not just talking about scratching out the Scottish part of the Union Jack. For instance, London will have to figure out a new place to locate its Trident nuclear submarines, which currently hang out at the Scottish port of Gare Loch. Apparently, it would take nearly a decade for the UK to build another facility for the Tridents, and it would cost more money than it’s worth to maintain the deterrence. So, a vote for Scottish independence becomes a de facto vote for nuclear abolition, a happy consequence of the divorce proceedings.
Other concerns are less felicitous, such as the question of EU membership. If Scottish voters back independence, the new country would no longer be part of the European Union. After that, however, the situation gets murky. If the EU invokes Article 49 of the Treaties of the European Union, Scotland will have to apply just like Serbia or Turkey, and readmission might take years. Or the EU could opt for Article 48, which would initiate an “amendment” process that might get Scotland in through the back door in a matter of months.
But wait—it gets even murkier. It turns out, paradoxically, that Scotland is far more pro-EU than the rest of the UK. So, if Scotland goes independent, rump UK might very well take the opportunity to do what the right-wing UK Independence Party has been urging all along: give Brussels the middle finger.
And then there are the economic implications of Scottish independence. Scotland is considerably more left-wing than the rest of the UK. If it leaves, what remains will be little more than Thatcherism warmed over. As The Guardian has lamented, the independence debate reveals that “it’s become impossible to express opposition to free market economics via the main Westminster parties.” Note to the British Left: step up your game or your Scottish comrades will abandon you to the wolves.
Whichever way the vote goes, however, it has been a model of democratic procedure—unlike the referendum in Crimea last March, which took place in an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. Indeed, the Crimeans never really had an option of independence. Divorce wasn’t on the ballot—only a shotgun marriage to Russia. Park Geun-Hye, the unattached president of South Korea, likes to say that she is married to her nation. Perhaps that’s the real reason why Putin jettisoned Lyudmila—so he could take Crimea to the altar (cue the Percy Sledge wedding song: When a Man Loves a Peninsula).
Scotland and Ukraine will be on minds of the heads of state of NATO countries when they meet in Wales this week. It’s already been called the most important NATO summit since the fall of the Berlin Wall. After all, up until recently, NATO was having its own family problems. The mission in Afghanistan was a costly fiasco and introduced numerous divisions into the alliance. The intervention in Libya not only left that country in chaos but revealed the enormous gap in capabilities among members. And despite U.S. entreaties, alliance members are not even meeting their budgetary obligation of spending 2 percent of GDP on their militaries, which suggests considerable differences in threat perception.
Then the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out, and the 65-year-old NATO started to get frisky again. Indeed, NATO ministers should give an award to Vladimir Putin. After all, the Russian leader has given the alliance more collective purpose than it’s had in years. The conspiracy-minded might well believe that NATO expanded to the borders of Russia precisely to provoke the bear to lash out with its claws. NATO, after all, needs a raison d’être. No enemies, in the long run, means no NATO.
Even with Putin providing the glue to stick NATO back together, this week’s family gathering in Wales will not be all sweetness and light. There will be disagreements over whether to place NATO troops in Eastern Europe as Poland has urged, whether to target Russian missiles with European missile defense batteries as the Baltic countries are proposing, and whether to fast-track membership for Georgia as John McCain has lobbied for. And not only European issues will generate controversy. There’s also Afghanistan, Iraq, global partnerships, and so on. But thanks to Vladimir Putin, these disagreements pale in comparison to the overall consensus on Russia, and NATO won’t join the ranks of unhappy families any time soon.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is leaning toward trading its non-aligned status for membership in NATO. It’s entirely understandable why a militarily weak country facing an incomparably stronger neighbor would want to have NATO on its side. But with the war bogging down in the east, Ukraine would be wise to use its current non-aligned status as a bargaining chip with Russia to negotiate an end to the conflict, greater autonomy for the eastern realms, and a return of all Russian soldiers and war materiel to their home country.
At stake is not only the happiness of the Ukrainian family but the happiness of the common Europe home. We can still avoid an Anna Karenina ending. There’s still time to prevent the train wreck of a new Cold War.President Obama entered office eight years ago on a wave of optimism that he was heralding substantive change, even if it was ill-defined on the campaign trail. On the foreign policy front, that meant ending the Iraq war, refocusing on the war in Afghanistan, and being willing to engage with America's enemies.
Next week, Obama leaves office with the United States military engaged in operations to varying degrees of intensity in more than half a dozen countries against a number of radical Islamist terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their various affiliates, plus Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, where the U.S. has provided crucial backing to the authoritarian regime of Yoweri Museveni.
Some of the interventions Obama is bequeathing his successor were ones he himself inherited. The Afghanistan war has now gone on for longer than the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II combined. President Obama ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009—a concomitant "surge" of diplomatic personnel was supposed to accelerate the end of the war. Instead, any opportunity to take advantage of the surge to end the war was wasted by bureaucratic infighting and inertia. The withdrawal date for U.S. troops in Afghanistan was regularly delayed, and is now set for later this year, after President Obama leaves office. U.S. troops are fighting not just the Taliban, the Al-Qaeda ally that drew the U.S. into Afghanistan after 9/11, but also the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has recently been operating in Afghanistan. Ending the war in Afghanistan will be up to Obama's successor.
President Obama did preside over the end of the Iraq war, and in the 2012 election he took credit for ending it as part of his campaign, even though the war ended based on a status of forces agreement negotiated by the Bush administration. President Obama tried to delay that negotiated end by keeping U.S. forces in Iraq past the withdrawal date. In 2014, U.S. troops began to return to Iraq as part of the campaign against ISIS. That campaign also finally opened the door for the Obama administration to send the U.S. military into Syria, after a previous effort motivated by the Assad regime's purported use of chemical weapons against civilians failed. Opponents of ending the war in Iraq pointed to the return of U.S. troops as vindicating their position, since they had argued a U.S. withdrawal would destabilize Iraq. That was very much a self-fulfilling prophecy. The U.S. invasion of Iraq destabilized the country, while the extended occupation enfeebled the post-Hussein government, fostering in it a dependence on foreign support.
Other disasters are entirely of the Obama administration's making. The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya was heralded as a different kind of intervention than the invasion of Iraq, because it was supported by the Arab League, did not involve a significant number of U.S. troops on the ground, and did not lead to an extended occupation. Many of the effects, however, were similar. The intervention destabilized Libya. Weapons from the former Qaddafi regime were spread far and wide, from Nigeria to Syria, aggravating conflicts across North Africa and the Middle East. Mali, which the U.S. had a few years earlier identified as one of Africa's "most enlightened democracies," suffered a coup and was beset by Islamist militants from Libya, bringing it to the verge of collapse. The U.S. intervention in Libya also contributed to the refugee crisis with which European countries are now dealing. U.S. special forces are in Libya fighting against ISIS, which, along with Al-Qaeda and other smaller terrorist groups, did not exist in Libya prior to the intervention.
The Obama administration has also opened up fronts in the global war on terror (though they dropped the terminology) in West Africa, sending U.S. troops to aid local forces in the fight against Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group which has aligned itself with ISIS and Al-Qaeda. The U.S. is building a $100 million drone base in Niger. In East Africa, U.S. troops were first deployed toward the end of the Bush administration to aid in the hunt against Kony. The U.S. now also uses Uganda to stage incursions to battle Al-Shabaab, another African Islamist militant group that's aligned itself with both ISIS and Al-Qaeda, in Somalia, a country the U.S. has intervened in on-and-off since the elder Bush administration in 1991.
A few short years ago, President Obama pointed to U.S. involvement in Yemen, which consisted largely of drone strikes against alleged Al-Qaeda leaders and operatives, many of whom were identified by the authoritarian regime in Yemen, as a model of success in the war on terror. It was, according to the Obama, a limited intervention focused on taking out Al-Qaeda leadership that did not have broader side effects. The model fell apart when Yemen did. The drone campaign helped destabilize the country, leading to a coup by Houthi rebels and a two year long civil war in which U.S. ally Saudi Arabia has intervened. Saudi Arabia has used U.S. bombs in unlawful airstrikes and committing other alleged war crimes, often with U.S. weapons.
President Obama also insisted on an "Asia pivot" to go along with his purported disengagement from the Middle East (a disengagement that never really happened). That pivot, meant to strengthen U.S. relations with other Pacific countries not named China, contributed to China taking a more confrontational stance in the region. The Obama administration professed not to understand the provenance of this more confrontational posture by China. The Asia pivot was an unnecessary and counterproductive show of U.S. strength. Meant to contain China, it actually encouraged the country to be more aggressive. Tragically, it also closed the door on potential cooperation between the U.S. and China on issues like trade and terrorism. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, effectively nixed by President-Elect Donald Trump, notably did not include China, contributing to the sense that the U.S. was interested in containing a global power that had not articulated any national security agenda explicitly or implicitly opposed to the U.S.
At the same time, while President Obama points to the Iran nuclear deal as a prime example of his successes on the diplomatic foreign policy front, relations with Iran did not actually improve. The U.S. finds itself regularly "harassed" by Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz, an important passage in international trade. The deal itself, bypassing the Senate as it did, can be easily overturned after Obama leaves office. Any thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations looks increasingly illusory.
Relations with Russia, meanwhile, have significantly deteriorated. After the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain took a more strident posture toward Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin than his opponent Barack Obama or even Republican President George W. Bush. In 2012, Mitt Romney warned that Russia was the U.S.'s number one geopolitical enemy. John Kerry, an Obama surrogate during the campaign, mocked Romney's position, calling it a "preposterous notion" and saying that Romney "talks like he's only seen Russia by watching Rocky IV." By 2014, Kerry, at that point already secretary of state, was using the Rocky IV line on Russia—telling the Russians not to treat the conflict in Ukraine as a Cold War confrontation. "We're hoping that Russia will not see this as a sort of a continuation of the Cold War, we don't see it that way," Kerry said on MSNBC at the time. "We do not believe this should be an East-West, Russia-United States—this is not 'Rocky IV.'" Russia's involvement in Ukraine led to limited sanctions by the U.S. and Europe, and President Obama announced the imposition of more sanctions last month.
Those sanctions came after the U.S. intelligence community accused Russia of trying to "interfere" in the U.S. presidential election and of being behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee that is believed to have led to a trove of emails pertinent to the election being disclosed by Wikileaks. Since the election, Democrats have increasingly adopted the idea that the U.S. and Russia may be in a new Cold War. Even before the election, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was campaigning on a platform of taking a more confrontational stance against Russia. This week, the U.S. made its first deployment of troops in Poland.
The deterioration of relations with Russia are emblematic of the aimless and reactive yet also interventionist U.S. foreign policy advanced by the Obama administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised Russia a "reset" at the beginning of the Obama administration. Instead U.S.-Russia relations are at their lowest point since Russia was part of the Soviet Union. The Obama administration dropped the terminology of the "global war on terror," promising a more nuanced approach, yet the president leaves office with a war on terror at least as global as the one he inherited from Bush, and no less ad hoc. His first official act as president was to order the closure of Guantanamo Bay, but it will have remained open for the entirety of his eight years in office. Tragically, Obama, who had a background as a constitutional lawyer and who often spoke critically of a unilateral executive foreign policy and war-making, did not do anything to limit himself or future presidents or to roll back any of the powers that have amassed in the executive branch in regards to the prosecution of the foreign policy and the war on terror, leaving Donald Trump even more powers than he himself inherited from Bush.Triple H recently spoke withJonathan Selvaraj for ESPN.com ahead of this week’s WWE live event in India; you can read a few highlights below:
Triple H on the reaction he might get facing Jinder Mahal in India this week:
“I don’t know. I’m a lot better at being the villain. It would be interesting to see when we get there. I’ve been cheered and I’ve been booed. If the fans want to support me because they have been watching me for the last 20-plus years, that’s great.”
Triple H Compares Roman Reigns To John Cena, Calls Him ‘One Of The Best In The WWE’; Hypes UAE Match
HHH comments on Jinder proving himself in front of his hometown crowd:
“You could get some support because of nationalism. But once you are in the WWE, you become a global icon. When I was in India, a lot of people asked about him (Mahal) and what I thought about him. Did I respect him? A lot of people have mixed feelings about Jinder Mahal as a representative. In some ways he represents India, but a lot of people don’t like the way he represents himself as a WWE superstar. The question was asked so many times that I thought what better way to prove what I thought than stepping into the ring with him. If Jinder wants to prove it to the fans in India, there could be no better way than by doing it against me there.”
HHH comments on why he continues to wrestle:Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and some conservative intellectuals embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished.
The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump. Historians, of course, are not called upon to be seers. Our professional canons warn us against presentism — we are supposed to weigh the evidence of the past on its own terms — but at the same time, the questions we ask are conditioned by the present. That is, ultimately, what we are called upon to explain. Which poses a question: If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?
American historians’ relationship to conservatism itself has a troubled history. Even after Ronald Reagan’s electoral-college landslide in 1980, we paid little attention to the right: The central narrative of America’s political development was still believed to be the rise of the liberal state. But as Newt Gingrich’s right-wing revolutionaries prepared to take over the House of Representatives in 1994, the scholar Alan Brinkley published an essay called “The Problem of American Conservatism” in The American Historical Review. American conservatism, Brinkley argued, “had been something of an orphan in historical scholarship,” and that was “coming to seem an ever-more-curious omission.” The article inaugurated the boom in scholarship that brought us the story, now widely accepted, of conservatism’s triumphant rise.
That story was in part a rejection of an older story. Until the 1990s, the most influential writer on the subject of the American right was Richard Hofstadter, a colleague of Trilling’s at Columbia University in the postwar years. Hofstadter was the leader of the “consensus” school of historians; the “consensus” being Americans’ supposed agreement upon moderate liberalism as the nation’s natural governing philosophy. He didn’t take the self-identified conservatives of his own time at all seriously. He called them “pseudoconservatives” and described, for instance, followers of the red-baiting Republican senator Joseph McCarthy as cranks who salved their “status anxiety” with conspiracy theories and bizarre panaceas. He named this attitude “the paranoid style in American politics” and, in an article published a month before Barry Goldwater’s presidential defeat, asked, “When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever gone so far?”
It was a strangely ahistoric question; many of Goldwater’s ideas hewed closely to a well-established American distrust of statism that goes back all the way to the nation’s founding. It betokened too a certain willful blindness toward the evidence that was already emerging of a popular backlash against liberalism. Reagan’s gubernatorial victory in California two years later, followed by his two landslide presidential wins, made a mockery of Hofstadter. Historians seeking to grasp conservatism’s newly revealed mass appeal would have to take the movement on its own terms.Intel has acquired computer vision and machine learning startup Itseez to develop better navigation for self-driving cars. The value of the deal was undisclosed.
Founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco, Itseez makes computer vision algorithms and software. The company’s products include a suite of algorithms for automobiles it calls “advanced driver assistance systems,” which allows car hardware to recognize pedestrians and traffic signs and warn about potential collisions.
The acquisition of Itseez comes one month Intel announced the purchase of Yogitech, another Internet of Things-related company. Based in Italy, Yogitech works on functional safety for semiconductors (which means its tech makes sure the chips powering autonomous vehicles are working properly).
Last year it also bought Lantiq, which makes chips for smart objects. Intel already makes chips, software, and a development kit for self-driving cars.
In Intel’s announcement, Doug Davis, Intel senior vice president and general manager of its Internet of Things Group (IOTG), said, “Itseez will become a key ingredient for Intel’s Internet of Things Group roadmap, and will help Intel’s customers create innovative deep-learning-based [computer vision] applications like autonomous driving, digital security and surveillance, and industrial application.”
Itseez has also developed algorithms for robotics, surveillance, smartphones, and sports analytics.
The acquisition is part of Intel’s strategic shift, which it announced last month, from PC chip maker to cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and analyzing data from those devices. Intel says its data center and Internet of Things businesses, which make up 40 percent of its total revenue, are already its “primary growth engines,” and have helped it weather a decline in the PC market by creating a total of $2.2 billion in revenue growth last year.
But the restructuring has already come at a huge cost—Intel is laying off 12,000 employees, or 11 percent of its workforce. Intel CEO Brian Crzanich said the job cuts are part of Intel’s “restructuring to accelerate its transformation.”Operators of the historical Auschwitz concentration camp site set up misting showers outside prison gates, angering Israeli tourists who were shocked by the insensitivity.
Nazis used showers to kill millions of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust, so modern-day tourists were taken aback when they saw an outdoor sprinkler shower system — installed to cool down summer visitors – on the solemn grounds in Poland, according to the news Web site Ynet.
“As soon as I got off the bus I walked into the shower contraption,” said Israeli tourist Meyer Bolka. “I was in shock. It was a punch to the gut. I walked up to the reception and asked the worker there about the showers, she said it was a hot day. I told her: ‘With all due respect it reminds me of the gas chambers.’ She told me she is very sorry.”
Temperatures in the area were in the high 90s over the weekend.
Bolka said the imagery and context of Auschwitz should have been obvious to museum operators.
“I think that places like this need to think of the connotations these types of things can inspire,” Bolka said. “If you want to cool the people down, you need to find another solution. It was not a pleasant sight to see those sprinklers.”
The infamous death camp slaughtered more than a million Jews, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war between 1942 and 1945.
Many victims believed they were being led into shower facilities — which pumped poison gas instead of water.
Bolka, the tourist, admitted many younger visitors took advantage of the outdoor showers to cool themselves.
“Youth groups that were there didn’t really notice [the cruel historical connection] and treated it like fun, but for me it was deja vu of the selection and extermination in the showers,” Bolka told Channel 2 of Israel. “People came by and had a shower.”
A museum rep said Monday that operators had to do something to keep tourists cool and keep them from fainting.
“Because of the heat wave in Poland, sprinklers which cool the wait were placed near the entrance,” according to a statement by museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki. “We must do everything possible to [minimize] the risks connected with the heat and high temperatures and take care of the safety … of our visitors. The health of our visitors is for us the priority during the time of these extreme [high temperatures] and the sprinklers have been really helpful.”
He said the misting showers will be removed when the temperatures fall.What's probably one of the most obvious things that you need to review every year (if not more often) is also one of the most important. Your Demo Reels are the heart of your marketing tools as a VO Talent and it is essential that they are always current, relevant, and high-quality.
What to Check:
First, review what demo reels you actually have. Do you no longer pursue audiobook work? Maybe it's time for that one to go. Have you been getting some promo work and think that can be a good niche to start targeting? Maybe it's time to have a proper Promo Reel. Review the demos you do and don't have, and make sure you have one for each area of VO you are pursuing work in.
Next check your reels to make sure they reflect who you are as a VO talent, today. Has your recording chain improved over the past year, are you just flat-out better as a talent? Demos that don't reflect these changes aren't serving you as they should be, make sure your demos represent the talent you are today.
Not only should your demos reflect the talent you are currently, they should reflect that talent at it's best. Any high profile or really high quality work, (the kind of stuff you tell people about when they ask what you've done VO for) belongs on your reels as long the client is ok with it. If you haven't done any super high profile work yet, that's ok too - just ask yourself if you're capable of delivering something better than what is on your reel right now, if the answer is yes, create some new material for it.
Website:Google released a second Android N developer preview two weeks ago for the Nexus 5X, 6P, 6, 9, 9 LTE, and Pixel C. That's quite the list, but there was one circular Nexus device that didn't make it.
That's the Nexus Player, and now Google's quirky little set-top box is having its turn to experience the love. This was the only device to be delayed. The build has gone out as version NPC91O.
It's okay if this is the first time you're installing Android N. Things should still work, and you don't need to join the beta.
You can download the factory image for fastboot or opt to sideload the OTA using adb instead. Then enjoy trying out Android N on the one current Nexus device without a touchscreen.Michael Phelps won his 21st Olympic gold medal Tuesday night, his 12th individual Olympic title.
Fellow American swimmer Katie Ledecky also added a new gold medal to her growing collection, placing first in the 200-meter freestyle.
Ledecky's impressive performance in Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games has led some people to refer to the up-and-coming Olympian as the " female Michael Phelps."
To be fair, the comparison is meant as a compliment: Phelps is widely considered the greatest swimmer of all time. Yet one can't help but wonder, in the midst of an Olympics that has been tainted by commentators using sexist language to describe female athletes: What if it's not that Ledecky is the female Phelps?
What if Phelps is the male Ledecky?
Exhibit A: He swims like a woman.
An Olympic commentator recently said Ledecky "swims like a man." But this commenter is wrong. Ledecky doesn't "swim like a man" (whatever the hell that means) — rather, Phelps swims like a woman.
Just look at that woman swimming, in such a dainty, womanly fashion. Would you like some tea and crumpets when you get out of the pool, ma'am?
Exhibit B: Phelps, like Ledecky, has beaten men.
Sports Illustrated, Phelps' teammate Conor Dwyer described what it was like to swim alongside Ledecky: "She'd just start beating me every single 100, and slowly but surely you get broken — and your morale goes down quickly when you get broken by a female in practice." In an interview withPhelps' teammate Conor Dwyer described what it was like to swim alongside Ledecky: "She'd just |
if you want to aim it at a specific characterI was thinking of maybe making this a print...anyone interested? I'll make a poll either wayHarry Trotter [link] Ron Neighsley [link] Hermaney Granger [link] Ginny Neighsley [link] Poneville Longflank [link] Luna Lovehoof [link] Dracolt Malfoy [link] Fillytrix LeStrange [link] Rubeus Haygrid [link] Stablerus Snape [link] Voldipony [link] and Humbebronybundledore [link] Parasprite by Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling and WBMLP; FiM © HasbroMSNBC is blaming the National Rifle Association (NRA) for Ebola’s arrival in the U.S., as well as for the fear of a greater outbreak that has followed.
According to MSNBC, the NRA made “the Ebola crisis worse” by opposing Dr. Vivek Murthy’s nomination to the position of Surgeon General in 2013.
Had things been different–had Murthy been confirmed to the position of surgeon general–he could speak to the American people and relieve the “heightened public health anxiety.” But the NRA ruined that when they opposed his plans to label gun crime a “public health crisis” and then use that avenue for backdoor gun control.
Now we have no Surgeon General and no comfort.
Missing from MSNBC’s claims is that the fact that Murthy had far more opponents than the NRA, and many of those opponents were fellow doctors.
For example, Fox News’ Dr. Manny Alveraz opposed Murthy’s confirmation as Surgeon General by pointing out that Murthy was not even qualified to run a “medical department” at an “academic medical center.” Alveraz also pointed out that all Murthy’s achievements at that time had been political, not medical, in nature.
On March 19, Breitbart News reported that one of the main reasons Murthy was nominated was because of his work in helping to get Obama elected in 2008 via “Doctors for Obama.”
But MSNBC overlooks these things to talk about how the angry white men at NRA headquarters have somehow made the Ebola crisis worse than it had to be.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.Stamos was arrested in June for driving under the influence.
John Stamos has entered a rehab facility for substance abuse.
The actor checked himself into a residential program, People reported Friday evening.
News of his admission to rehab for substance abuse treatment comes a month following his DUI arrest in Beverly Hills on June 12.
After Stamos was pulled over by police and evaluated, he was transported to the hospital by the fire department and later released and issued a citation. Stamos told fans via Twitter on June 13 that he was "home and well," which he followed up later with, "Thanks to everyone for their love & support. I'm home & well. Very appreciative of the BHPD & Cedars for their care."
Stamos is set to appear Sept. 11, 2015 at the LAX Courthouse for his citation.
He will appear in the upcoming Netflix reboot, Fuller House, alongside former Full House co-stars Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin, Andrea Barber, Dave Coulier, Lori Loughlin and Bob Saget.
Stamos' rep did not immediately respond to The Hollywood Reporter's request for comment.That was the ONLY time I've ever seen a fancy kick work in a street fight. But I gotta say, that shiet was awesome as hell.
A friend of mine has competed in the youth freestyle martial arts tournament since he was 13. He is 5'3, kinda chubby, very guido looking. He is a really nice kid, one of my most genuine friends.
the beginning of last summer we were at a teen dance, we are both 17. I look 22ish, he looks about 19. I know the security, I know the bartenders, I know a few of the "city kids" - im a bit of a legend for dancing with girls who WORK THERE on the bar. My friend is pretty shy, and only talks to girls if I wing for him.
Im walking thru the dance floor, slowly making my way to the bar, when I see this GORGEOUS puerto rican girl. I smile and wave at her. She flips me off?! So I walk up, and say "Im anthony, whats your name!" She sceptically raises an eyebrow... I lean close "forget it" and turn around, stick my ass out, and dance like a girl with my butt on her crotch. Surprisingly, she starts dancing too!
A few songs later she was grinding on me so hard I thought my cell was going to break. Strong eyecontact... I was leaning in to kiss... and someone pulls me, by the collar of the shirt, off this girl. I imagined it was some huge boyfriend, so i instinctively put up my hands and get ready to fight... IT WAS A FAT GIRL!!! She started yelling at me "who do you think you are!?" blablabla. I just laughed at her. She started swearing and pushing me. I told her she was too fat to be *****y. While I was laughing, she punched me in the face - HARD! I caught my balance, and grabbed her other hand (which was about to connect, too) and push her onto her fat ass. I turn to the hot girl, tell her to find me when her friends cool-out, and go to the bar.
I am sipping my water laughing, telling my friend (from above) what happened when 3 semi-ghetto (dressed like thugs, but not from the city) kids walked up talking ****:
Thug1 - Yo ***** you think its cool to be hitting girls?
Anth - *****? Me? My names Anthony, whats your name?
Thug1 - **** you!
Thug2 - shut the **** up
Anth - You guys seem really angry about something, whats bothering you?
Thug1 - Why'd you hit <girls name>
Anth - Ohhh youre angry about me tussling with that fat girl?
Thug3 <pushes me>
Anth <I put my hands up, smiling> - Cant we be friends?
Thug1 <puts his chest agaisnt mine>
My friend, whos name is also anthony, stands up, sets his drink down, and kicks of his shoes.
Anth <slowly extends arms, pushing the kid away from me> - Are you sure you dont want to be friends?
Thug3 - This kid things hes funny
Anth - I AM funny. Hey Anthony, these kids dont wanna be our friends?
The kids get really angry, start yelling, but its obvious they are kinda afraid.
Anth - If we cant be friends, you guys should probably leave. <they are still talking ****, I look at my watch> If you arent out of my sight in 30 seconds Im going to have to kick your ass.
The kids all laugh and step a little closer. I begin counting... when 30, 29, 28... and then my friend hits thug3 in the face, catching him by surprise knocking him clean over. I headbut thug 1 (whos in my face) and then tackle him, he hits me in the face once or twice, but as soon as I hit him and his head hits the floor, hes done.
My friend had kicked thug2 in the stomach and kneed him in the face, so he was done. I am finishing up with thug1 when thug 3 gets up and rushes my friend anthony.
Now, the kid is about 5'11 - thats 8 inches taller than my friend. He begins runnin at him from 7-10 ft away. My friend dodges his swing. They square up, the kids hands in tight fists, my friends are loosely at his sides. The kid takes a step forward and my friend lunges forward and roundhouses the kid in the face!! Ive never seen someone so short and pudgy jump so high... it was ****ing ridiculous! The kid goes down hard, and the bouncers run in ready to kill us... but they saw it was me, and let us leave out the back before the cops showed up. Good ****ing times.YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS. Kurdish politician Ahmet Türk who has been recently dismissed from the post of Mardin Mayor, has been detained as part of the ongoing terror probe in Turkey, “Armenpress” reports citing Anadolu.
Ahmet Türk apologized for the Armenian Genocide for many times.
On November 17 the Turkish Interior Ministry dismissed Ahmet Türk from the Mayor’s post.
The investigation was launched against him on the charges of “violating the state union and unity, giving money to and being a member of armed terrorist group, abuse of power, humiliating the Turkish people, the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish Parliament”.
Ahmet Türk delivered a number of speeches on the Armenian Genocide. He acknowledged the Kurds’ role in the Armenian Genocide and apologized to the Armenians on behalf of the Kurdish people. He explained that the Kurdish population was used to commit the crimes against Armenians in 1915. “Our grandfathers and fathers were used in the injustices perpetrated against Armenians, Assyrians and Yezidis. There’s blood on their hands. With the blood of these peoples they bloodied their own hands. Thus, as their children and grandchildren, we apologize.”It turns out you don’t need a firearm and a mean mug to protect your turf. Robert Bond, a Systems Software Engineer at Nvidia, has shown that there are less intensive ways to get the job done.
The personae non gratae in this case were cats that seemed to enjoy hanging out on Bond’s well-manicured lawn. Since he happens to be studying neural networks, the 65-year-old decided to see if there was a way he could combine his present field of study with his need to keep the encroaching felines at bay. Some people like cats so much they want to lick them; Bond finds them annoying enough that he staged an informal audition for NASA to keep them from pooping on his grass.
The product of his motivations is a high-tech repellent system that automatically triggers sprinklers on the lawn every time a cat’s presence is detected – specifically, cats.
The brains of the system is an Nvidia Jetson TX1, an embedded module with high-performance deep learning and computer vision features. To ensure that only the intended culprits get doused, the Jetson was trained on thousands of images of cats. The convolutional neural network running on the module studies these images to learn exactly what its target looks like, then locating those same features and figures in a series of images.
The images are sourced from a feed captured by a Foscam IP camera. The camera watches for changes in the components in its field of view, which in this case is the yard. As soon as there is a change, the camera takes seven pictures over seven seconds. These images are sent to the Jetson.
On receiving the images, the deep learning algorithms in the Jetson take over to figure out if the change was caused by a cat sauntering across the lawn, possibly looking to drop a deuce or simply lay in the grass while plotting the end of the world (because that’s what cats do). If it was, the Jetson connects with a Particle Photon, which is a prototyping tool for IoT products. The Photon is used to trigger the sprinklers, which stay on a whole two minutes – enough agua to shoo even the most daring of felines.
If you’re surprised by the sophistication of the cat repellent system, you should know that this isn’t Bond’s first time using technology to mess with invasive animals; his past projects include an “ant annoyer” that focuses a laser beam on ants caught trespassing on his kitchen floor.
In case you’d like to get in on the high-tech pest-control action, you can check out the firmware and code used to create the project on GitHub. You can find Nvidia’s self-paced course on deep learning here.During a Feb. 5 campaign stop at Exeter Town Hall in New Hampshire, a supporter holds a copy of the Phillips Exeter Academy school newspaper, the Exonian, which endorsed Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee. | AP Photo Clinton dominating Sanders in newspaper endorsement primary
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders fought to a draw on Wednesday: neither candidate won the endorsement of Chicago's biggest newspaper.
The Chicago Tribune opted to endorse Marco Rubio on the Republican side but declined to endorse on the Democratic side, marking a rare instance where a major metropolitan daily failed to recommend Clinton.
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The Democratic frontrunner has so far dominated the newspaper endorsement primary, winning the imprimatur of 40 daily newspapers across the map – The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, just to name a few.
In comparison, Sanders has scooped up just a small handful: the Seattle Times, the Quad-City Times, and The Daily Nonpareil of Council Bluffs, Iowa.
The endorsements have been a boon for Clinton, Democratic strategist Jeff Link argued, both in terms of the number of endorsements and the consistency of the arguments.
"If you said there were 39 different endorsements for 39 different reasons I would say that's a campaign in trouble because they're not getting anything across,” said Link. “I would say this is a victory in clarity of message."
Broadly speaking, the overall editorial board critique of Sanders is that he is unprepared for the White House and unrealistic about what he could achieve.
"The gap between the two candidates in support from those who have worked with them is vast, and suggests Clinton is far more likely to actually get things done," wrote the Orlando Sentinel.
"Where Sanders has called for what is surely impossible, Clinton has called for the tough but possible," said the Chicago Sun-Times.
His command of foreign policy and national security has also been singled out for criticism, especially when compared to Clinton, the former secretary of state.
“His lack of a coherent foreign policy and tendency toward isolationist positions are particularly concerning,” wrote the historically liberal editorial board of the Tampa Bay Times. “There is no indication Sanders is prepared to effectively protect the United States from terrorists or manage the complicated relationships this nation must nurture around the world.”
Some endorsement editorials have been even blunter, framing Sanders as a rigid ideologue incapable of governing.
"Sanders, cloaked in ideological purity, hasn’t occupied positions that required him to build coalitions through compromise, a strategy so vital in governing and achieving goals that our Founding Fathers created a system around it," The Las Vegas Sun said.
“Sanders is so far out of the mainstream, and so ideologically rigid, that he's unlikely to find traction for his ideas even were he to be elected -- leaving him, and the nation, adrift. Given Sanders' self-identification as a democratic socialist, he is also likely to be a far more polarizing figure in the White House,” wrote the editorial board of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer newspaper.
The Sanders campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
For Sanders, it hasn’t been a total loss. Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer newspaper, for example, noted that a significant minority of the editorial board supported Sanders, leading to the posting of an “opposing view” that lauded his honesty, consistency and transparency.
“The United States wants and needs a leader of probity with fresh ideas and approaches,” the ed board wrote.
One of the few newspaper endorsements won by Sanders also lauded the Vermont senator’s willingness to speak his mind and break with politics as usual.
"Sanders’ strength lies in his ability to generate important discussions on topics other entrenched politicians are too timid to touch," the Seattle Times' editorial reads.
How much impact the endorsements have at a time of declining newspaper circulation is subject to debate. In Michigan, where Clinton was endorsed by both the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press ahead of Tuesday’s primary, they meant very little -- Sanders narrowly won the state.
"I would assume that as chief editorial writers of newspapers who are busy investigating policy questions rather than psychological questions before they make the endorsement they would come to the conclusion that Bernie is great in a revolution but it wouldn't happen if he should be elected," said Stephen Hess, a former adviser to former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter who focuses on the media at the Brookings Institution. "So I think you're talking [about] a group of practical people who see Hillary, at this stage, as the practical candidate. The one who can get things done. And that would tend to appeal to somebody who's writing an editorial for the Des Moines Register or something."But the fact that some of the investments soured, and that, in all, Mr. Rajaratnam lost money, could be powerful evidence for defendants. Inside information is, by definition, information that is material to investors, and thus could cause a company’s stock to move in a direction that will be obvious in advance.
For example, if a company’s stock is trading at $75 and someone learns that the company will be taken over for $100 a share, that information would be material. But routine corporate news — a retailer announcing new store openings, for instance — is generally not considered material.
“The violation is trading on material nonpublic information,” said Robert A. Mintz, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the white-collar defense practice at the law firm McCarter & English. “There’s no requirement that that trade results in a gain to the defendant. But if it turns out to have been a money-loser, it obviously gives the defense some fodder to argue that the information was not material.”
Utpal Bhattacharya, a professor at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the co-author of a study on insider trading convictions from 1995 to 2004, said that convicted defendants had profited in every one of the cases he examined.
“A loss is likely to weaken the prosecution’s case,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. But he added that prosecutors had wiretaps in which defendants expressed concerns about their actions, which could strengthen the case.
A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan said the office could not comment beyond the criminal complaint or press statement from last week.
That statement refers in its headline to a “$20 million insider trading case” and explains that Mr. Rajaratnam and other defendants “are charged in insider trading schemes that together netted more than $20 million in illegal profits.”
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A one-page graphic released by prosecutors mentions six trades made by Mr. Rajaratnam that netted Galleon, his hedge fund, total profits of $20.6 million.
Missing from that handout is a 2008 trade that moved badly against Mr. Rajaratnam and Danielle Chiesi, who also is charged in the fraud case. Ms. Chiesi worked at New Castle Funds, another hedge fund, and is accused of supplying insider information to both Mr. Rajaratnam and New Castle.
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From August 2008 to October 2008, Mr. Rajaratnam ordered Galleon to buy at least 16 million shares of A.M.D., a computer chip maker, according to the federal criminal complaint against him and a related complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
During the same period, New Castle bought about 2.5 million A.M.D. shares, according to another criminal complaint that focuses on Ms. Chiesi.
Galleon and New Castle bought the shares because Mr. Rajaratnam and Ms. Chiesi received information from an I.B.M. executive in August that the government of Abu Dhabi would invest billions of dollars in A.M.D. as part of a deal for A.M.D. to spin off its manufacturing facilities, according to the complaints.
But the possibility of a deal between A.M.D. and Abu Dhabi had been rumored before Galleon and New Castle began buying.
“Some analysts speculate that the spinoff will require a substantial investment from the government of Abu Dhabi,” The Austin American-Statesman reported on July 18.
Galleon spent $85 million to $90 million on the 16 million share purchases that are disclosed in the two complaints, an average of about $5.50 a share. But as global stock markets plunged in September and October, A.M.D. shares sank too. By Oct. 6, Galleon’s shares in A.M.D. were worth only about $68 million, a loss of roughly 25 percent. On Oct. 7, A.M.D. announced its deal with Abu Dhabi. Its stock closed about 8 percent higher that day, but was still significantly lower than Galleon’s purchase price.
Galleon then held on to nearly all its A.M.D. stock after the deal was announced, and A.M.D. stock resumed its plunge during the rest of October.
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The criminal complaint acknowledges that “most of the shares, however, were held until at least later in October 2008,” at which point A.M.D. stock was trading between $3 and $4 a share and Galleon had lost about $30 million. A person close to Galleon confirmed the figure.
The fact that Mr. Rajaratnam lost money on the trades could mean he and other defendants will receive a short sentence even if they are convicted, said Steven D. Feldman, partner in the white-collar criminal litigation practice at Herrick, Feinstein.
“The higher the gain, the higher the recommended sentence,” he said.
Mr. Feldman added that prosecutors might choose to remove the A.M.D. transactions if and when they formally indict the defendants.
Mr. Rajaratnam and the other defendants were arrested last week on a complaint from prosecutors. They have not been formally indicted, a procedure that requires a grand jury’s vote.
Mr. Feldman, who once worked as an assistant federal prosecutor in the securities fraud department in Manhattan, said the lack of an indictment, as well as the fact that there were two separate complaints, indicated that the investigation might have been chaotic at the end.
“Traditionally, you’re going to want to bring these cases by indictment,” Mr. Feldman said. “The fact that they didn’t is evidence they were rushed.”Ever since Hitler not one Western country with a single (exclusive) identity has been allowed to exist.
The chaos caused by the highly controversial (Obama mandated?) reintroduction of the word “God” and the sentence “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel” at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, is ominously foreboding of the fate that awaits Israel in the near future.
Ironically enough, it is mainly due to the utopianism of secular Jews that Israel now finds herself in the current predicament where she is increasingly vilified by the world media and protesters in the world’s capitals. From Karl Marx to KGB agent Joe Slovo (Mandela’s mentor/handler) in South Africa, these secular Jews have done their utmost to destroy cultural and racial hegemony in the name of global “Equality/Diversity”.
Jerusalem, a physical territory, is symbolic of the wider physical territory called Israel. And the State of Israel is defined by a single (exclusive) identity namely Jewishness. And that is why Israel will fall.
Ever since Hitler not one Western country with a single (exclusive) identity has been allowed to exist. Apartheid South Africa’s whites-only territory is no more, like Milosevic’s Orthodox Christian-only Yugoslavia.
The same fate awaits Israel. Its singular identity, its Jewishness, is also its Achilles heel; for the rights of the individual and the rights of non-territorial groupings is the flavor of the month in the year dominated by Pax Americana.
According to the Ten Commandments of Pax Americana, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a gay, an African, a Muslim, a Jew, et cetera, has the a-historical right to exercise his/her unique individuality in any physical territory under direct dominion of the West.
These same rights are afforded to all other non-territorial groupings like, for example, lesbians and the illegal Hispanic immigrants in Arizona – and the Somalis (and other Africans) gathered together in the world’s largest detention centre (in Saharonim) and then deported from Israeli territory.
The quirks of History never cease to amaze. Not unlike the Germanic tribes with their Völkerwanderung, the Jewish tribes had to literally wander the earth for ages in order to finally find their Heimat…only to be denied that final place of rest where they can simply be themselves and enjoy the fruits of that which they have struggled and suffered for, for so long.
Is this fair? Does anybody in the world have the moral right to deny the Jews their Heimat called Israel – a tiny 20 770 square kilometer territory in the Middle East? Haven’t the Jews suffered enough, especially given the fact that they have been physically kicked out of more than 100 countries during the past 1800 years, and have suffered innumerable pogroms – the latest being the Crown Heights Riot in Brooklyn, New York, in 1991.
Obviously this is not fair, but that is obviously also not good enough. The trials and tribulations of the Jews in Israel are about to treble exponentially.
According to an 82-page research paper called “Preparations for a Post-Israeli Middle East” – compiled by the American intelligence community and presented by Franklin Lamb – America’s leadership is urged to stop supporting Israel lest a permanent two-state solution for the Palestinian question is found forthwith. In short; America, via its foreign policy, can no longer afford to be seen as a supporter of an “Apartheid Israel”, as Desmond Tutu calls it so fondly.
Will America throw Israel to the wolves? Yes; it is a demographic inevitability. Israel’s staunchest supporters in America – white Christian males forming the base of the Republican Party – have a maximum of 10 years left to steer America’s foreign policy before they are demographically swamped by the very “individual-rights” holders and non-territorial groupings who jeered so loudly and proudly when the sentence “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel” was reintroduced into the Democratic platform a few years ago.
The end of the GOP is nigh. The vultures are circling. Just ask Paul Krugman, who unabashedly proclaimed that the Republican base is formed, “by and large [by] elderly white people arguing with empty chairs.”
Be that as it may; what can Israel try to do to maintain its unique Jewish identity once America, the (current) dominant global power, has withdrawn its support?
Well, it is quite elementary. By the nature of things, you have to exclude if you want to include, and vice versa. Male lions do it when they take over a territory – as do women when they choose a man to marry, to the exclusion of all others. This is just the way life works. And the Jews have learned this the hard way, throughout their tragic history.
Israel is now building a physical wall around its territory in order to protect its unique identity. The building of this wall – much to the chagrin of, amongst others, Pax Americana and the Muslim countries completely surrounding Israel – is, apart from the projection of its formidable military might, the only soft-power option left to maintain the physical integrity of its territory.
Will this work? No. Even Milosevic’s mighty hard-power army succumbed eventually, as did Apartheid South Africa’s soft-power pass system. It is truly game over for the state of Israel.
The identity/body politics of the secular-humanist West tops any and all soft and hard power projections aimed at maintaining a singularly exclusive identity within a clearly defined physical territory.
In Pax Americana, to paraphrase Foucault; physical territory is the prison of the individual.The backbone of the process was a series of etiquette classes in which boys and girls would learn to don white gloves, wear corsages and boutonnieres, write thank-you notes, and mind their p’s and q’s (and R-rated hand movements). Jews, of course, were not invited.
These days, the tables have been turned. Jewish communities around the country, horrified by the appalling lack of manners their children display at bar and bat mitzvahs, are increasingly turning to more-formalized training efforts.
At the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, a Modern Orthodox day school in Lawrence, N.Y., the school holds weekly academic classes to prepare boys and girls to become bar and bat mitzvah scholars.
But administrators added a separate, in-school program to rehearse the proper etiquette guests should display at these events. The highlight is a mock service in which teachers coach students on how to sit quietly during prayers and listen attentively to remarks made by the rabbi, parents and grandparents. Members of the school staff even make telephone calls to students’ cellphones to prepare them for that eventuality.
“Like many things in life,” said Rabbi Dovid Kupchik, a principal at the school, “if you actually talk to the students about how to behave instead of just assuming they’re going to act a certain way, it’s fresh in their heads. For adults, it’s challenging enough to sit through 20 or 30 minutes of speeches, but for 12- and 13-year-old kids, it’s especially difficult.”
The school also offers instruction on how to behave at the after-party, teaching students the polite way to wait in line at a coat check and how to thank and wish mazel tov to the parents of the celebrant.
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At the conclusion of the class, students are asked to sign a contract promising they will uphold certain standards of behavior and be a positive reflection on the school. “It reminds them that it’s not a glorified birthday party they’re attending,” said Rabbi Kupchik, “but a religious celebration.”
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In Detroit, Joe Cornell Entertainment has been offering dance classes for preteens since the 1950s. The 12-week courses, which this fall will have over 300 students, are often held in synagogues and are made up primarily of Jewish sixth graders entering the bar and bat mitzvah years, said Steve Jasgur, who bought the company in 1991.
Along with teaching ballroom dancing and popular line dances like the Hustle, Wobble and Gangnam Style, instructors devote special time to teaching bar and bat mitzvah etiquette. Lessons include how to ask someone to dance and why you shouldn’t run off with the decorations.
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“One of the things we tell students is they shouldn’t steal the neon-colored cloth napkins and stick them on their heads like bandannas,” Mr. Jasgur said. “For every napkin that isn’t there at the end of the night, Johnny’s family is going to be charged. It’s $4, $4, $4, and all of a sudden it’s a lot of money.”
Instructors also talk about grooming. Boys have to be told to hike up their sagging trousers and not show off their boxers. Girls have to be told to pull down their shrinking dresses and not reveal inappropriate amounts of skin, and they are also encouraged to sit with their knees together and ankles crossed.
Last year, after a deluge of rabbis asked if they could visit the classes to warn students about their behavior, Mr. Jasgur introduced a one-hour course called Mitzvah Circuit 101, which he offers free to synagogues and Jewish community centers. The course includes a questionnaire about the proper way to respond to an invitation and what to do during the video montage. The following question addresses what Mr. Jasgur says is a common sore point for parents — students dismantling the centerpieces:
On your table you discover the following: ketchup, sugar, water, a movie-themed centerpiece and a bowl of mini chocolate Academy Awards. Do you a) quickly remove the two DVDs from the centerpiece and claim them as your own; b) take the glass of water, add two parts ketchup, three spoonfuls of sugar, four Academy Awards, and see if Mickey will drink it; c) arm yourself with the mini chocolates and see if you can hit Jason at Table 5 without his knowing where it’s coming from; or d) none of the above?
Why the need for the new course after so many years? “Should we blame it on society? Should we blame it on parents? I’m not sure,” Mr. Jasgur said. “Today’s kids are just overprogrammed. Their focus isn’t there. Many of their parents are also part of this younger generation, so it’s not their fault. It’s the way they were raised.”
Rabbi Adam Englander, a principal at the Hillel Day School of Boca Raton in Florida, lectures students three or four times a year about their behavior at bar and bat mitzvahs. He believes the new interest in decorum represents a larger shift in society.
“In my opinion, I don’t see it as a function of kids being poorly mannered,” he said. “I see it more as a function of schools being involved in much more than education. Schools are increasingly being asked to take on roles that years ago would have been considered the realm of parents.”
Stressed-out parents have less time to raise their children, he said. And with synagogues and day schools competing for customers, the misconduct of students often reflects poorly on the institutions they attend. “If one or two of my kids misbehave, even though it’s a weekend, I’m going to hear about it on Monday,” Rabbi Englander said. “That wouldn’t have happened 20 or 30 years ago. The inclination would have been to call the parents.”
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Not everyone is happy about this trend. Ms. Ramer said she believes families should still be responsible for teaching their children manners. “I expect my kids’ day school to reinforce etiquette,” she said, “but I don’t expect my kids’ day school to be the primary teacher of the etiquette.”
But she understands she may be in the minority. What tips do these veterans of the manners wars have for those considering such classes? “Don’t call it a dance class,” Mr. Jasgur said. “And certainly don’t call it an etiquette class.” Instead, make the sessions part of the standard curriculum of your institution, so students won’t have to be persuaded to attend. Also, include a D.J. and teach some party games.
And as Ms. Ramer pointed out, include the parents. “I’m disappointed this is happening,” she said, “yet I’m resigned.” Still, the only way to truly solve the problem, she suggested, is to put children and their parents into the same room and teach them both how to behave.Bernie Sanders shows no sign of dropping out of the presidential race anytime soon, but the vultures are already circling over his email list — perhaps the most coveted and valuable catalog of potential voters and donors in the Democratic Party at the moment.
The post-campaign fate of Sanders’ list — his 2016 crown jewel, and the backbone of the Vermont senator's online fundraising juggernaut — is the topic of frequent conversation among operatives working with the Democratic Party committees, down-ballot candidates and a variety of liberal interest groups. Some have already begun strategizing about how to access the list through informal conversations with people close to the Sanders campaign.
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For those fighting for the issues Sanders has made the centerpiece of his campaign — like campaign finance reform, the environment and economic justice — his list of several million fervent activists willing to volunteer and donate money, often repeatedly, is regarded as something of an electoral gold mine.
But Sanders, still a White House candidate facing an uphill battle for the Democratic nomination, has all the leverage and control. So for now, any talk about his data trove takes place behind closed doors among Democrats eager not to offend him. Those close to his campaign recognize that if he started sharing his list now, he runs the risk of watering down his own fundraising potential as he focuses on defeating Hillary Clinton.
Democrats of all stripes also know that another, bigger, question looms: how — or even if —Clinton’s campaign will get any access to Sanders’ roster of young liberals, the group she’s struggled to reach for months.
Sanders staffers are routinely peppered with queries from like-minded activists and party types about the list’s fate — “everybody and their brothers,” said one person close to Sanders’ White House bid. Sanders’ recent move to share some of the love by sending three fundraising emails for House candidates in early April sparked a new rush of interest in the data — assembled by Revolution Messaging, the Democratic digital firm founded by Scott Goodstein, an alum of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. The email list is managed in a cloud constructed with tools from Blue State Digital, another firm with deep ties to Obama.
Still, the campaign’s posture has been not to budge, and Democrats close to his White House bid don’t expect that to change as long as Sanders is a candidate and can continue tapping the “Sisters and Brothers” to whom he addresses each fundraising appeal — a group that’s handed him roughly $180 million so far.
“It makes total sense, people wanted to know the same thing about the Obama list, the [Howard] Dean list,” said Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who managed Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, the first to use such an effective online fundraising mechanism.
“I’m not surprised they’ve been pretty much, ‘My precious’ — [like the character] Gollum from 'Lord of the Rings' — during the campaign,” added Trippi, noting that he’s recently fielded questions from people involved with other campaigns, asking if he knows who they should contact on the Sanders team to ask about the list.
Several Senate and House campaigns are respectfully hanging back and waiting to formally ask for access to the Sanders list as soon as he officially exits the race, according to multiple operatives involved with down-ballot 2016 races. Several sources said they’d prefer |
. And I’m proud to and honored to stand for that community.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to an interview that KGO, local ABC in San Francisco, did with a Chevron refinery spokesperson, Walt Gill, shortly after the Chevron fire began.
KGO: Well, we heard some of our viewers tell us that they heard an explosion around 6:35, 6:40. Are you aware of that?
WALT GILL: No, we have no understanding of anything in the way of explosions here, just the fire that resulted from an unknown source at our crude unit.
KGO: So, the crews on scene there, as you mentioned, immediately were on that at 6:15. Were they unable to really get control of that? Is that why we saw things really erupt around 6:35?
WALT GILL: Well, part of what you saw—by the way, we do have a world-class fire—
KGO: Yeah.
WALT GILL: —department on hand—
KGO: Yes, absolutely.
WALT GILL: —that’s well stocked. Part of the flame that’s being seen is due to our flares, and flares are safety devices that are used to burn off the hydrocarbons and the fuels that are in the units, so they can safely be depressurized. So that’s some of the smoke and fire that people are seeing.
AMY GOODMAN: That is a Chevron spokesperson. Andres Soto also with us, Richmond organizer for Communities for a Better Environment. Andres, describe for us what exactly it’s like to be there right now in Richmond. What are—how—talk about the fire, the chemicals that have been released, what you understand happened, and how residents are responding.
ANDRES SOTO: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me, Amy, as well.
You know, this was a very dramatic and shocking event, particularly in Richmond and San Pablo and the areas that were subject to the shelter-in-place-order. It was—you know, it started out with these explosions and then a huge mushroom cloud over the city. And at first, you know, there was no news coverage. It was—at least locally, the Bay Area hadn’t—the media hadn’t gotten aware of it. And then, all of a sudden it was on, you know, all the television, radio stations, everybody was paying attention. By then, that cloud started to spread both eastward and then over the hills going northward and eastward, blanketing neighboring communities.
And so, you know, this is one of the most serious environmental disasters that’s happened to the Bay Area. We’ve seen a number of them, like the Cosco Busan and a shipping disaster and other environmental disasters, but this one, you know, with the sirens, when they finally went off, it was like living in a war zone, where you have, you know, this toxic cloud overhead and these sirens going on. It was a very scary place to be. Many people then started showing up at the hospitals locally, as you reported. And so, it’s a major trauma to the community. And last night, at the dog and pony show that Chevron put on at the Richmond Auditorium, it was clear that the emotions, the anger that the community was feeling really boiled over. And the Chevron people, you know, heard that voice loud and clear.
And, you know, from moving forward now, they’re trying to get approval of their so-called plant upgrade, and they have to go through an approval process of the city of Richmond, with—that includes the planning commission and the city council. In the past when they did it, they tried to push through their approval with an inadequate EIR. Communities for a Better Environment went to court. The judge upheld the action and—you know, against Chevron’s desires. And they now have to deal with the city in a new and different fashion. They’ve also attempted to influence local politics and have influenced local politics for a century. And just in the most recent election, 2010, they spent a million dollars alone on three candidates. And all three of those candidates lost. So they have a very difficult public relations problem with the community of Richmond. And we’re going to hold their feet to the fire as we move forward.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Chevron says it’s fully prepared to deal with the situation. Let’s turn to another excerpt of the company’s voice message on its Richmond community hotline yesterday.
CHEVRON GENERAL INFORMATION HOTLINE: We have comprehensive plans and procedures in place to respond to situations like this one, and we are responding to this incident as quickly as we can and are deploying highly trained personnel to assess and manage the situation. We are currently taking the appropriate measures necessary to address and provide for the safety and security of our facilities, our employees, contractor personnel and surrounding community and residents.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Andres Soto, could you comment on what the Chevron spokesperson said? Chevron is also the largest private employer, by far, in Richmond.
ANDRES SOTO: Right. Well, yeah, the history of Chevron actually predates the incorporation of the city of Richmond by a few years. And so, it’s always been a specter looming within the city—largest taxpayer, largest employer. But right now, as it exists, Chevron employs—less than 5 percent of its employees are actually local Richmond residents. So, it’s a misnomer that they’re a solution to the local jobs situation.
But, you know, realistically, what we’ve seen is nothing but spin out of the refinery. On the one hand, they apologize to the community, is how they always lead their statements off. But realistically, they came out and they were blaming the same community and the environmentalists for them not being able to modernize and upgrade their operation there at the Richmond refinery, when in fact we know that this unit, the crude unit that actually caught on fire and blew up, it was never part of that upgrade program. And they could have ensured the safety of this thing, in general. But it’s that mendacity, you know, the misrepresentation of the truth that Chevron is engaging in that, you know, makes it very difficult to deal with them. They refuse to sit at the table. They refuse to negotiate in good faith with the community over a wide range of issues, whether it’s fair taxation or whether it’s environmental safety and environmental justice.
AMY GOODMAN: Andres, can you tell us—
ANDRES SOTO: You know, they’re an international corporation.
AMY GOODMAN: Andres, can you tell us—
ANDRES SOTO: Sure, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you know the chemicals that have been released into the environment?
ANDRES SOTO: Well, what I understand from the people who study the science, it’s a whole range of hydrocarbons. You know, we suspect that this is some of that high sulfur content, dirtier crude from the Canadian tar sands that may have been involved with this. And so, you know, there’s exotic metals. It’s a whole toxic stew of chemicals that were released into the broader environment, and not just in our local community but throughout the region.
AMY GOODMAN: And I interrupted you when you were talking about Chevron being an international corporation.
ANDRES SOTO: Right. I mean, this is one of the biggest, you know, international, multinational corporations. And, you know, we’ve seen how they’ve dealt with the people in Nigeria. In fact, their mouthpiece in Richmond, Heather Kulp, was assigned to Nigeria before they assigned her to Richmond, you know, where they’ve actually used the Nigerian army to kill people. We know in Ecuador they bought, you know, the processing of the oil there, the wells there and the extraction, and have left a toxic mess, you know, that was started by Texaco. And they’re ignoring the fine that the Ecuadorean government has imposed. Then, down in Brazil, we see them taking action where they’ve actually indicted Chevron executives for offshore oil drilling accidents and spills. And so, you know, looking at that, that’s actually a role model. Unfortunately, over here, nobody is talking about arresting Nigel Hearne and his crew for the Chevron experience the other day, the environmental disaster we suffered.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Andres Soto, I want to ask you more about Chevron in Ecuador. Earlier this year, Ecuadorean plaintiffs launched a new effort to recoup the $18 billion in damages that Chevron has refused to pay for polluting Ecuador’s rainforest since the 1970s. Amazonian residents won the judgment last year after a long-running case seeking damages for Chevron’s dumping of toxic oil waste. Chevron has helped avoid the fine by dissolving its assets inside Ecuador. In late June, the plaintiffs filed suit against Chevron Holdings in Brazil in a bid to target Chevron Worldwide. A similar lawsuit was filed in Canada in May. Juan Pablo Sáenz, a lawyer in the case, said Chevron’s actions had left the plaintiffs with with no choice but to pursue the company around the globe.
JUAN PABLO SÁENZ: [translated] Because Chevron is failing to comply with the sentences in Ecuador, we are obligated to look for a series of countries where they have interests and directly attack those interests to be able to collect the amount of money ordered to repair the Ecuadorean Amazon.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Andres Soto?
ANDRES SOTO: Yeah, well, you know, Chevron is behaving as an international criminal corporation. In fact last night in Richmond, that’s what some folks were calling them. And this kind of behavior, this irresponsible corporate behavior, is, in our community, masked by, you know, giving chump change out to local nonprofits to keep them quiet, to remove them from the debate, you know, community leadership. But at the same time, you know, they’re not fooling everybody. And we see this reckless behavior of avoiding these judgments in other countries, while right in our own county they’ve been appealing their property taxes and found—actually were found to owe more taxes than they actually paid. We’ve seen where they’ve tried to evade revealing their energy usage to avoid paying utility users’ tax locally. They had to reach a settlement on that. And yet and still, they have millions of dollars to spend on influencing local politics. And this kind of, you know, corporate criminal behavior is not fooling the people of Richmond.
MAYOR GAYLE McLAUGHLIN: We actually have a—
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we just have about 30 seconds, and I did want to go back to Mayor McLaughlin. You are one of the only Green Party mayors in the country. And under your watch here, the Chevron plant has had this major fire. Your final comments about what you feel needs to happen?
MAYOR GAYLE McLAUGHLIN: Absolutely. Well, we have been fighting Chevron since I was elected, and by efforts of a councilmember before I was elected, we have a progressive movement in the city of Richmond. And since our efforts, the progressives on the council, Chevron has no longer dominated city hall. And we have two new progressives running this particular election, and we need to get them on board, because we have two continued councilmembers in the pockets of Chevron. So our—we’re, in so many ways, a leading environmental city based on our initiatives. So, with a stronger voice, with a super majority of progressives through the Richmond Progressive Alliance on the city council, we will be able to hold Chevron totally accountable by our votes, by regulating them, by not giving them a permit for their new proposal, unless they put in the highest safety precautions and the highest assurance that they won’t be refining this dirty, heavy crude that can cause more explosions and cause more harm to our community.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank—
MAYOR GAYLE McLAUGHLIN: So we have the political muscle—
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both very much—
MAYOR GAYLE McLAUGHLIN: —and we want to keep it moving.
AMY GOODMAN: —for being with us. Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, California, member of the Green Party, seeking a full investigation from both Chevron and independent sources into the fire, and Andres Soto, Richmond organizer for Communities for a Better Environment. We’re going to take a brief break and then go to Texas to talk about Marvin Wilson, the execution of a man whose IQ was 61. Stay with us.Ken Reid of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors doesn’t think much of nonbelievers who stand up for church-state separation.
“It’s strictly this group of terrorists,” he told the Washington Times. “They’re fanatics who basically want to stamp out religion in all public life and property.”
Reid’s harsh words came in response to a recent flap over holiday displays outside the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg, Va. Unless you’ve got a really good memory, you may not recall the mess that has unfolded there over the past few years.
In 2009, Loudoun’s Courthouse Grounds Facility Committee decided not to allow any displays outside the courthouse including a creche that was displayed there annually.
Creche fans didn’t like that idea much, so a few days later the decision was overturned and all sorts of displays were welcomed. It was an all-or-nothing approach, and that’s perfectly acceptable from a constitutional standpoint. Everyone has an equal chance to air his or her views.
But not everyone has relished this display-and-let-display policy. Last year, one exhibit – a skeleton dressed in a Santa Claus suit and hanging on a cross – vividly blasted the over-commercialization of Christmas.
That didn’t sit well with a Leesburg woman who was so upset that she disassembled the display and placed it on the ground. The work was later put back together, but was eventually vandalized again and a piece of it was stolen.
Rather than simply putting an end to this fiasco by banning all displays, the Loudoun supervisors decided that this year all displays put up by the public must be attended by the sponsors or other persons. (The board also approved a Christmas tree, Nativity scene, Santa and a menorah for the courthouse lawn.)
The Washington Times reported that so far, only one group has taken advantage of the new policy – American Atheists. The Times said that Rick Wingrove, the group’s Virginia director, will have a booth in December featuring banners with quotations from atheists like Albert Einstein and John Adams. It will also feature public readings of books such as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Wingrove received a permit for his display in November as well, the Times said, and has spent weekends manning his booth. He said there probably won’t be an attendant available every day in December, and so far, the display has been taken down each evening in November.
Wingrove protested the new policy mildly, telling the Times that fewer public displays will mean less attention for his group than in the past. In 2011, there were nine displays, the Times said.
“The board made it really onerous for everyone but religious groups to put up displays,” Wingrove said.
But Supervisor Reid said folks like Wingrove are terrorists, and “none of the religious organizations in the county have had any problem with what we’re doing.”
Why would they? Anyone from the community has an equal opportunity to put up a display provided they take it down at the end of the day or attend it. That’s fair.
Wingrove’s display and his mild displeasure with the board’s policy don’t exactly qualify as terrorist activities, and just throwing around the word “terrorist” is pretty reckless at a time when there are actual terrorists at work.
The fact that only an atheist group has chosen to put up a display riled Reid like a lump of coal in his stocking. It’s likely he had hoped the new rules would lead to more participation from Christian groups, and when that didn’t happen, he got pretty bitter.
It’s a shame that some people can’t stand the idea of all viewpoints being represented in a public forum, but that’s just reality.Alan Crawford and Daphne Ridenour (5News/Screenshot)
An Arkansas family was forced to leave a shopping mall over the weekend, and when they spoke out about the incident Tuesday they chalked it up to fears over their Muslim faith, 5News reports.
Alan Crawford and Daphne Ridenour, who both wear traditional Muslim garb including a head scarf for Daphne and robe garment for Alan, were out shopping at the Central Mall in Fort Smith, in western Arkansas, when mall patrons reported them to mall security.
“I had two unknown subjects come up to me and advise me that a male subject wearing a thobe was video recording everyone in the mall and he was video-taping the entrances of several stores,” officer Anthony Cox wrote in a police report, using the traditional name for Crawford’s garment.
Mall security informed Crawford he was not allowed to film inside the mall and escorted him, his wife and small son off the property. 5News reports multiple patrons shared photos on social media of the family leaving, with captions like, “Muslims have been scoping the layout of the mall.”
This post, shared nearly 1,000 as of Tuesday, shows photos of the family being escorted out with the caption, “Cops escorting terrorists from the mall.” It shows several officers and security guards following the family as they were made to leave.
In the comments section, the Facebook user accuses the Crawford family of “hollering alqueda (sic)” though the police report only mentions Crawford was filming, which is against mall policy.
When asked by 5News if he was planning an attack on Central Mall, Alan Crawford responded with humor but made his point nonetheless.
“I would probably absolutely destroy a bacon cheeseburger or some fries with bacon on them, or something like that,” he responded. Devout Muslims generally do not eat pork. “When we were scouting out the mall, quote-unquote, we ate a load of bacon cheese fries, which ISIS would happily kill me for.”
He said he found it odd that five police officers showed up to “enforce mall law” when he voluntarily followed their directives. Crawford was accused of filming mall store entrances, which he says is a lie.
No charges were filed because police told 5News no crime was committed. There is no evidence of a terror plot against the mall, authorities told the station.
Watch the report, from 5News, as posted here:With the hopes of showcasing mental health struggles faced by marginalized communities, Dior Vargas, a Latina mental health activist, shared her personal experience with depression to a crowd of University of Wisconsin students as part of a mental health lecture.
The Thursday event, titled “The Intersectionality of Mental Health,” focused on the absence of minority representation in mental health issues. The event, sponsored by the Multicultural Student Center and University Health Services, is part of the ongoing Social Justice Speaker Series.
Growing up Latina affected her journey with depression, Vargas said. Typically, it is not common to express problems of mental illness within her respective community.
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“No matter where you come from, there are going to be negatives and positives,” Vargas said.
At a young age, Vargas’ parents separated, which led to her first suicide attempt.
When Vargas began high school, she started to search for the source of her troubles and ended up ordering a book on depression — what she called a “first step” in her recovery process. The second step included talking to a counselor for several weeks and then starting medication.
Though she had to struggle alone for a long time, later on, Vargas said she found she could help others by becoming a mental health activist and even a volunteer crisis counselor.
“In silence, there is a sense of dignity that is misplaced,” Vargas said.
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While at first she felt she could not talk to her family about her mental health struggles, Vargas said she still wanted to keep her family involved and continued to talk to her family about them.
Surprised by the lack of access to help in her own community and the absence of people of color in the mental health care industry, Vargas said she sought to help others gain representation in the discussion of mental health.
In her photo series, the “People of Color and Mental Illness Project,” she captures images of people of color struggling with a variety of issues, ranging from depression to anxiety.
The project aims to increase awareness of minorities with mental health issues.
UHS strives to expand mental health services despite financial restraintsDespite the University of Wisconsin’s budgetary challenges, University Health Services is expanding its services to better serve the needs of Read…
“I just hope that from there, we can evolve into them getting the help that they need,” Vargas said.
Currently, the project features photos of 35 different individuals holding up signs with their names and their respective mental health struggle. Each message ends with #NoStigma or #EndTheStigma.
Since not everyone has access to the internet, Vargas hopes to one day publish a book of the photos and showcase them in a gallery to reach a broader audience.
“Mental illness doesn’t discriminate,” Vargas said. “People do.”To abide by Environmental Protection Agency rules when mining or drilling you have "to take caution not to disturb bodies of water barely bigger than a puddle."
On the presidential campaign trail in Ohio, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called for reversing some of President Barack Obama’s environmental policies and vowed to allow more drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
Rubio argued that Environmental Protection Agency rules are too burdensome, pointing to two businesspeople who joined him at his speech, James Mackall, president of Artex Oil, and Tom Mackall, president of East Fairfield Coal.
"The EPA has unilaterally changed how the Clean Water Act is interpreted. Now it not only protects rivers and lakes, but also drainage ditches and private retaining ponds. So when mining or drilling, Jerry and Tom now have to take caution not to disturb bodies of water barely bigger than a puddle."
We wondered: Does the Clean Water Act allow the government to regulate how mining and drilling affects bodies of water "barely bigger than a puddle?"
A spokesman for Rubio declined to comment. However, Rubio was presumably referring to a recent rule change to the Clean Water Act in which "puddles" have emerged as a matter of contention.
A Clean Water Act rule change stayed by court
First, some background. The Clean Water Act originally passed in 1972, in the wake of a highly publicized incident in which Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. Another factor that led to the passage of the federal law was a record number of fish kills caused by pollution -- of which the largest was in Florida at Lake Thonotosassa in 1969.
Broadly, its goal was to regulate discharges. But which bodies of water should be included has been a hotly contested issue for many years.
U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2001 and 2006 created uncertainty about the law’s reach. EPA officials said those decisions rolled back federal protections for about 60 percent of streams and for millions of acres of wetlands.
In May 2015, the EPA announced a new rule intended to clarify which bodies of water fall under the act. The new rule followed months of public comment and took effect on Aug. 28, except in 13 states where a court held up its enactment. Then, earlier this month, a different court held up enactment nationwide.
The first thing to know about the new rule is that size doesn’t matter. What matters is whether a body of water can carry pollution into other larger waters. Under the rule, the federal government intends to regulate bodies of water -- including tributaries, ponds, streams, and wetlands -- so that companies or other entities do not dump waste that could flow into larger ecosystems.
This definition of a water of federal jurisdiction actually pre-dates the new rule, stemming instead from the Supreme Court cases. In 2001, the court held that the use of "isolated" non-navigable intrastate ponds by migratory birds was not by itself a sufficient basis to apply the Clean Water Act. In the 2006 case, Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded that a critical factor in determining whether the Clean Water Act applies is whether a water has a ‘‘significant nexus’’ to traditional navigable waters.
So a narrow stream -- even if it dries up for part of the year -- could still fall under federal jurisdiction if it can flow into more significant waters during the rainy season. But an isolated pond that doesn’t connect to other major waters doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the act.
"Even if some very small bodies of water may be covered by the Clean Water Act when they are sufficiently connected with another body of water, his statement evokes the image of a small, isolated body of water that would not be covered," said Todd Aagaard, vice dean at Villanova law school and former Justice Department environmental lawyer.
Even though jurisdiction under the act is determined by connectedness, rather than size, it was the size of water bodies that became a rallying cry for critics who saw the new rule as federal overreach.
During the comment period, the regulation of puddles became a talking point for conservatives and business advocates. Presumably for that reason, the final rule explicitly addressed the question of puddles:
"The proposed rule did not explicitly exclude puddles because the agencies have never considered puddles to meet the minimum standard for being a 'water of the United States,' and it is an inexact term. A puddle is commonly considered a very small, shallow, and highly transitory pool of water that forms on pavement or uplands during or immediately after a rainstorm or similar precipitation event. However, numerous commenters asked that the agencies expressly exclude them in a rule. The final rule does so."
The rule also specifically excludes certain types of water in addition to puddles, including groundwater, most ditches and small ornamental waters, for example.
So would it include puddles or anything similar?
So if the rule specifically says puddles do not fall under the rule’s jurisdiction, why have critics continued to argue that it encompasses puddles or something not much bigger?
We interviewed seven environmental experts, including one who works for an organization that sued the EPA. All of them were skeptical that the rule would cover anything resembling a puddle. That’s because a small body like a puddle, or something a little larger, that doesn’t connect to other waters should have no ultimate impact on the types of navigable waters the Clean Water Act regulates.
"What type of water body is barely bigger than a puddle? How large is the puddle? If he is referring to a small puddle that a kid splashes in, a fair reading of the rule is that it does not cover such an area," said Stetson University law professor Royal Gardner, an expert in wetland law and policy.
Meanwhile, Rubio specifically mentioned mining and drilling -- two activities that are already highly regulated. While mining and drilling can adversely affect groundwater, the law explicitly excludes groundwater.
We reached out to some of the industry groups that have sued the EPA over the rule, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the U.S Chamber of Commerce. Both argue that the rule language is so broad that it could ultimately include something not much larger than a puddle.
Don Parrish, a senior adviser to the federation, pointed to the first footnote in the new rule:
"The agencies use the term ‘water’ and ‘waters’ in categorical reference to rivers, streams, ditches, wetlands, ponds, lakes, oxbows, and other types of natural or man-made aquatic systems, identifiable by the water contained in these aquatic systems or by their chemical, physical, and biological indicators. The agencies use the terms ‘waters’ and ‘water bodies’ interchangeably in this preamble."
To Parrish, this means "you don’t even need water in them. You just need indicators of chemicals, physical and biological indicators. What in the hell is that? It's very broad."
Asked for real-world examples in which the EPA regulated something roughly the size of a puddle, farm bureau spokesman Will Rodger sent us a photograph of a farm field in Tennessee that appears to show the beginning of a nearly dry stream. He said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declared this swath of land as "waters of the United States" by virtue of being a tributary. (This occurred in 2014 before the new rule took effect.)
Environmental experts we checked with said that water on land that appears even during only part of the year can end up flowing to larger bodies of water. But again, the key is that the water must be poised to flow into other significant waters, which seems distinct from a small, isolated puddle.
"It’s true that headwaters of streams are small, but small rivulets goes into a river," said Karl Coplan, of Pace law school. "The whole point of the Clean Water Act is to cover that river up to the point where it starts."
Environmental experts, for their part, said they could not think of any examples in which the EPA attempted to regulate something barely bigger than a puddle.
"It is an absurd assertion, said William L. Andreen, University of Alabama law professor. "There are no cases on point because the agencies have never asserted jurisdiction in such fantastical situations."
Our ruling
Rubio said that to abide by EPA rules when mining or drilling you have "to take caution not to disturb bodies of water barely bigger than a puddle."
A new final rule -- currently on hold due to lawsuits -- does seek to clarify what types of bodies of water the EPA can oversee through the Clean Water Act. But the rule explicitly excludes puddles, along with most ditches and ornamental bodies of water.
In addition, the key factor for determining Clean Water Act jurisdiction is how connected a body of water is, not how big or small it is. To the extent that a puddle, or something slightly larger, shouldn’t be a "significant" contributor to bigger, navigable waters located far away -- a standard set by the 2006 Supreme Court decision -- it should not be subject to regulation under the new rule.
This issue remains in litigation, but the best evidence we have collected suggests that Rubio’s claim is at least significantly exaggerated. We rate it Mostly False.A recent report from ABI Research highlights the rise of mobile Linux, estimating that 23 percent of the world’s smartphones will have a Linux operating system by 2013. It appears that much of that growth will come at the expense of Nokia’s Symbian, and that LiMo and Android will be the main beneficiaries. What the report doesn’t note is that last year ABI predicted that 31 percent of smartphones will have Linux by 2012.
Either there’s something to explain the change in numbers, or we should perhaps take our analyst reports with a grain of salt. However, Linux is undoubtedly moving fast: 15 handsets were launched earlier this year with LiMo, and after several demos and prototypes, anticipation for the Android is running high. But the jury is still out on which framework will win out with carriers and application developers.
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LiMo has the backing of NEC, Motorola and Samsung as well as SK Telecom and Verizon. Android, through the Open Handset Alliance, has T-Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, China Telecom, Telefonica, Google and several others. The stated goal behind both efforts is to eliminate some of the costs associated with developing mobile applications for multiple operating systems by using open source. It’s a laudable goal, but the fight between the two for market share demonstrates how hard it will be to lower costs, as developers will still have to build for multiple platforms.
photo courtesy of the LiMo Foundation and NTT DoCoMoSalinas and the second or maternal family name is de Gortari. This name uses Spanish naming customs : the first or paternal family name isand the second or maternal family name is
Carlos Salinas de Gortari ( Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkaɾlos saˈlinaz ðe ɣoɾˈtaɾi]; born 3 April 1948) is a Mexican economist and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. He is widely regarded as the most influential politician in Mexico over the last 30 years. Earlier in his career he worked in the Budget Secretariat eventually becoming Secretary. He was the PRI presidential candidate in 1988, and was declared elected on 6 July 1988 after a controversial electoral process and accusations of electoral fraud.[3]
His presidency was characterized by a profundization of the neoliberal, free trade economic policies initiated by his predecessor Miguel de la Madrid, mass privatizations of state-run companies, Mexico's entry into NAFTA,[4] negotiations with the right-wing opposition party PAN to recognize their victories in gubernatorial elections in exchange for supporting Salinas' policies,[5] normalization of relations with the Catholic clergy,[6] and the adoption of a new currency, among other things.
After years of economic growth, however, his last year in office saw the Zapatista uprising in January 1994 and the assassinations of Luis Donaldo Colosio (the PRI candidate for the 1994 presidential elections) and secretary-general of the PRI José Francisco Ruiz Massieu.[7] This surge of political violence led to economic uncertainty, and less than a month after Salinas left office, Mexico entered into the worst economic crisis of its history.[8][9] Shortly after, his brother Raúl Salinas de Gortari was arrested for ordering the assassination of Ruiz Massieu[10] and Carlos left the country for many years.
Salinas returned to Mexico in the late 1990s and has continued to influence Mexican politics since then.[11][12]
Early life and education [ edit ]
Carlos Salinas was born 3 April 1948, the second son and one of five children of economist and government official Raúl Salinas Lozano and Margarita De Gortari De Salinas. Salinas's father served as President Adolfo López Mateos's minister of industry and commerce, but was passed over as the PRI's presidential candidate in favor of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–70). When Carlos Salinas was chosen the PRI's presidential candidate for the 1988 election, he told his father, "It took us more than 20 years, but we made it."[13]
A tragedy occurred early in Carlos Salinas's life. On 18 December 1951, when he was four years old, he, his older brother Raúl, then five, and an eight-year-old friend were playing and the Salinas family's twelve-year-old maid, Manuela, was shot. It was never determined which of the three boys pulled the trigger—and the incident was declared an accident; it was given newspaper coverage in Excélsior at and La Prensa at the time. A judge blamed the Salinas parents for leaving a loaded weapon accessible to their small children.[14] The Salinas family did not know the last name of their 12-year-old maid Manuela—only that she came from San Pedro Atzcapotzaltongo—and it is unknown whether her family ever claimed her body.[15] They were also exonerated with the assistance of Gilberto Bolaños Cacho, maternal uncle of legendary Mexican comedian Chespirito,[16] He has not commented publicly on this tragic early childhood incident.[17] who is also nephew to Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños, who will become president of Mexico in 1964.[18]
Salinas attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico as an undergraduate, studying economics. He was an undergraduate when the student movement in Mexico organized against the 1968 Summer Olympics, but there is no evidence of his participation. He was an active member of the PRI youth movement and a political club, the Revolutionary Policy and Professional Association, whose members continued to be his close friends when he was president.[17] Salinas was a skilled dressage horseman, and was a member of the Mexico national team at the Pan-American Games in Cali, Colombia in 1971.[17]
Salinas was one of the Mexicans of his generation who studied at elite foreign universities. He earned a master's degree in Public Administration from Harvard University in 1973 and went on to earn a PhD from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1978.[17] His doctoral dissertation was published as Political Participation, Public Investment and Support for the System: A Comparative Study of Rural Communities in Mexico.[19]
Presidential Election 1988 [ edit ]
Carlos Salinas became presidential candidate in a difficult time for the PRI which for the first time was faced by significant opposition from the left (National Democratic Front) and from the right (National Action Party, PAN). The candidate of the PAN was Manuel Clouthier.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano registered as an opposing candidate from a left-wing coalition called Frente Democrático Nacional. He rapidly became a popular figure, and became the first opposing candidate to fill the Zócalo with sympathizers and to seriously threaten the PRI, which had won all presidential elections since its inception in 1929. The Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación), through its Federal Electoral Commission, was the institution in charge of the electoral process, and installed a modern computing system to count the votes. On July 6, 1988, the day of the elections, the system "crashed", and when it was finally restored, Carlos Salinas was declared the official winner. Even though the elections are extremely controversial, and some maintain that Salinas won legally, the expression se cayó el sistema (the system crashed, lit. "the system fell down") became a colloquial euphemism for electoral fraud. As one observer put it, "For the ordinary citizen, it was not the computer network but the Mexican political system that had crashed."[20]
The process involved two suspicious shutdowns of the computer system used to keep track of the number of votes.[21] Suspicions later grew as Congress voted (with support from the Revolutionary Institutional and National Action parties)[22] to destroy without opening the electoral documentation. Other people believed that Salinas, in fact, won the ballot, albeit probably not with an absolute majority as the official figures suggested, although that is not required under Mexican election law.
During a television interview in September 2005, Miguel de la Madrid acknowledged that the PRI lost the 1988 elections.[23] However, he immediately clarified his comment by saying that the PRI had "at least lost a significant amount of voters".[23] Asked for comment on De la Madrid's statements, Senator Manuel Bartlett, who was the president of the Federal Electoral Commission (Comisión Federal Electoral) during the De la Madrid administration, declared Salinas won the |
“rapists” and “drug dealers,” Gonzales said a president must be very careful about his or her choice of words because of the power and resonance the presidency holds.
“There are consequences to words when a president makes a statement, and I talk about that in the book -- once a president makes a statement it’s very, very difficult to walk that back. So I think someone in the Oval Office has to be very careful about the words they say because there are consequences and quite frankly there should be consequences.”Introducing David Opreska, Star Citizen’s latest environment artist! David is currently hard at work on the upcoming Hangar Module, where his artwork will be on full display! He’s based in the Los Angeles office but is visiting Austin this week… just in time for an appearance on Wingman’s Hangar! Learn more about David and his work on the show this Friday at 11 AM CST (-5 GMT.)
How did you get started in the game industry?
I got my foot in the door through a QA job about 7 years ago. I was working for NCSoft. What I did there was work in Hardware Compatibility and helped out with general QA testing. What was great about that job was it helped me understand how gaming graphics work with different hardware. It made me more efficient with how I make game art.
What projects have you worked on?
I’ve worked on Tabula Rasa, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter Nights Onlin and a couple of unpublished titles.
What are you doing for Cloud Imperium?
I’m an Envrionment Artist. I do 3d modeling, textures, lighting and build worlds.
What are you most excited to see in Star Citizen/Squadron 42?
I’ve always wanted to work on a Space Sim with this level of fidelity. I’m also excited to see what we can pull off with the Dogfighting and Occulus Rift.
What are you playing right now?
Right now I’m so busy with Star Citizen, I haven’t had much time for gaming unfortunately. Bioshock Infinite is next on my list.About This Game
Over 160 hand-crafted levels with fine-tuned difficulty progression
Over a dozen beautifully drawn retro-inspired environments
Over 20 chip-tune music tracks
4 difficulty modes that allow new and veteran gamers to be challenged
Dozens of secret rooms filled with treasure
Hundreds of small secrets for true adventures to find
Achievements for gamers to unlock
Community Trading cards, emoticons, and backgrounds
And more!
Adventure in the Tower of Flight is a retro-styled platformer in which you fly instead of jump! You are Wing, a young adventurer. Wing must climb a seeming endless the tower and collect all five known relics held within to become the ruler of the known world. Each relic, however, is protected by a series of battles, puzzles, and precision-platforming rooms. Do you have the skill it takes guide wing while he ascends the tower?In ages past, five kingdoms ruled the known world. Each kingdom possessed a sacred relic given to the kings of old by the god themselves. The relics guided and protected their armies in battles. As time passed, younger kings desired to gain absolute power of the land and waged countless wars with each other. The gods were displeased with the reckless actions and greed each kingdom took part in, so they took back the relics, hid them in a large tower, and proclaimed: "Whomever is able to pass the challenges of this tower will become the ruler of all known land." Years passed. generations passed. No one, man woman, or child has been able to complete the challenges within the tower. This is the story of one such adventurer, Wing, and hisUpdate (September 21, 2016) – we’ve just launched Quiz Cat Premium. Quiz Cat Premium comes with tons of cool features, including social sharing & email capture. Click here to learn more.
We’ve just launched a new WordPress Quiz Plugin – Quiz Cat.
Quiz Cat is a simple WordPress Quiz Plugin that lets you build engaging quizzes with ease.
Here’s a live demo:
The Ultimate Star Wars Quiz Padawan or Jedi Master? Try this Quiz Cat live demo. Start Quiz Question Your answer: Correct answer: Next You got {{SCORE_CORRECT}} out of {{SCORE_TOTAL}} SHARE YOUR RESULTS Pin Email Enter Your Email to Get Your Results In order to comply with privacy regulations in the European Union we'll need you to provide consent before confirming you to our email list: I agree to receive occasional email newsletters (unsubscribe anytime). For more information, view our privacy policy.
Show My Results
Skip this step Your Answers
Image credits: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
Why would you want to build quizzes? No matter if you want to get more traffic, get social shares or generate more leads, quizzes are a blogger’s and marketer’s friend.
Building Viral Quizzes For Your WordPress Blog
You’ve probably seen some of BuzzFeed’s quizzes in your friends’ Facebook newsfeed. This type of content is highly popular, fun and shareable.
Say the “Which Star Wars character are you?” quiz you just did declared you’re Lord Vader – why wouldn’t you want to share this with your friends?
Here are some examples of viral quizzes:
Quiz Cat lets you build these kind of buzzfeed-esque quizzes in minutes. Simply create a quiz, add some share buttons and you’re good to go. Quiz Cat Premium lets you add social sharing buttons to your quizzes. Click here to learn more.
Setting Up Quizzes (“Tests”) For Your WordPress Membership Site
If you run an information product or membership site, quizzes are a great way for your users to test their knowledge and see how much they learned.
No matter if you’re using Wishlist, MemberPress, iThemes Exchange, WooCommerce Memberships, S2Member or any other WordPress membership plugin, our WordPress quiz plugin works with all of them. You can easily add your quiz using our shortcode anywhere on your site, including member-only areas.
Using Quizzes For Lead Generation*
*Our lead generation feature is part of Quiz Cat Premium. Click here to learn more..
Lead generation quizzes work ridiculously well for collecting emails.
Simply ask people for their email at the end of a quiz, in order to see their results, and you’ll be collecting tons of new emails in no time.
Some examples of lead generation quizzes:
Wanna learn more about building lead generation quizzes?
Check out these articles:
Why Build Another WordPress Quiz Plugin?
We only build products if we think there’s an opportunity to create something useful and unique in the marketplace.
We built Easy Pricing Tables because there wasn’t any other pricing table plugin on the market that was beautiful and easy to use.
We built Optin Cat because there weren’t any email capture plugins available on WordPress.org that were built for marketers & small business owners and optimized for conversions. (All the existing solutions were built for developers).
While there are plenty of free WordPress Quiz plugins available on WordPress.org, most of them are hard to use (complicated interfaces with too many settings), the quizzes don’t look good and the plugins as a whole aren’t optimized for the use cases we mentioned above: membership quizzes, lead gen quizzes & viral quizzes.
There’s some great SaaS solutions on the market, but we believe there are many people who’d rather use a native WordPress plugin instead of an external service. It’s also worth mentioning that these SaaS solutions are overly expensive – they could easily set you back $500 per year.
Using Quiz Cat
Need help getting started? Download the plugin here, then watch the video below:
Roadmap for our WordPress Quiz plugin
This is just the beginning, we’ve got a lot of exciting features on the roadmap, including:
Personality quizzes (eg. “Which Star Wars character are you?”)
Lead generation quizzes (ask people for their email address before showing them results)
Built-in social sharing
Update (September 21, 2016): We’ve now added personality quizzes, lead generation quizzes and social sharing to Quiz Cat Premium.
If you have feedback on what you’d like to see, leave a comment here or post in our forums on WordPress.org.
Ready to Create Quizzes That Drive Viral Traffic & Engage Users?
Click here to learn more.Jenny Craig, the United States diet chain that sparked controversy when it hired Monica Lewinsky as the public face of its weight loss programme, has relaunched its television campaign without the former White House intern.
Ms Lewinsky, who was at the centre of President Bill Clinton's impeachment scandal, has lost 14 kg (31 lbs) since last summer.
I'm in a position right now where I'm trying to support myself and pay my legal bills
Monica Lewinsky
She was reportedly offered $1m if she slimmed down another 7kg (15 lbs). "I feel good. I feel better about myself, but I don't think I'm quite ready to wear a bikini yet," said 26-year old Ms Lewinsky. Commercials featuring testimonials from Ms Lewinsky had a five-week run in January and February. Some privately-owned Jenny Craig franchises, criticising the selections as inappropriate, kept running older adverts rather than using the Lewinsky campaign. Denial The company denied they were dropping Ms Lewinsky because of her weight, citing a policy of using non-celebrity models. However, Patti Larchet, Jenny Craig's chief operating officer, said the company might consider "revisiting" Ms Lewinksy if she lost another 5kh-7kg (10-15 lbs). When she started the campaign, Ms Lewinsky noted the irony of appearing in advertising material while trying to escape the spotlight surrounding her affair with President Bill Clinton, which led to his impeachment trial.(Part of this is a repost. The problem it described have been solved, at least until someone finds the next hole in WordPress. I have restored it to keep the record complete.)
Sometime late Sunday night or Monday, I wrote:
My blog is being raped by a spambot. I first noticed about a half an hour ago that some older posts had become inaccessible through search. Then I actually accessed an old post (“Women With Guns”) twice, a few mnutes apart, and saw that the 8 comments there originally had been replaced by one spam comment. What’s probably happeniing is some sort of SQL attack on the database behind the blog engine. I don’t recommend commenting until after we can close the hole and restore from a backup.
My rm -fr blunder on Friday proved to be but the entr’acte of a four-day descent into system-administration hell, from which I shall not even yet say I am delivered lest the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy laugh at my presumption and turn their awful gaze upon me. The aftermath of the spambot rape was actually mere a divertimento, playing as several different unrelated hardware and software snafus delivered a finely orchestrated attack upon my sanity.
Did I say merely my sanity? The consequences actually drew blood, which has done a pretty good job of soaking through the bandage over the laceration on my thumb. I have learned several different lessons which are unlikely to grow dim or doubtful.
1. Do not trust KVM splitters. They are flaky and can interfere with your diagnostic process, especially if you are having boot-time problems.
2. Ubuntu 10.10 is fucked up. I mean really fucked up, as in I have seen it hang during install on four different machines in the last 24 hours (and that was trying two different media). I had to drop back to 10.04 to get anywhere.
3. Ancient optical drives are an insidious horror. They can cause installations to fail in un-obvious ways. I replaced three today. It helped, but didn’t help enough by itself.
And most generally…if you are you one of those people, like me, who tends to never throws away superannuated hardware until it fails catastrophically, recycling old drives and cases and cables through multiple motherboard upgrades…stop now. You’ll feel virtuous and thrifty right up until the day you have a system emergency that snowballs into a major nightmare because some of your fallback hardware is marginal-to-the-point-of-near collapse and more of it is obsolete.
(Memo to self: Both PS/2 trackballs get replaced with USB devices as soon as I can get to MicroCenter. Who knew a brand-new motherboard would refuse to see them on the port?)
I’ve learned my lesson. I bought my way out of this disaster by paying $400 for a shiny new mailserver/webhost/DMZ machine. The machine it’s replacing is going to the recyclers. No parts are going to get saved to be built into Frankenboxes this time.
Now I gotta go wrestle with more consequences. My mail isn’t back up yet. The new machine needs configured.Interview with Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei
'The State Is Scared'
In a SPIEGEL interview, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, 57, discusses the continuing repression faced by civil rights activists in China, why he believes progressive change in the country is inevitable and shameful human rights violations in the United States.
DPA Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Beijing: "The Internet has established a public sphere and developed a pressure which the government can no longer ignore."
Interview Conducted By Bernhard Zand
SPIEGEL: Ai Weiwei, Amnesty International will present you with its "Ambassador of Conscience Award" this week in Berlin -- another honor you will be unable to accept in person because your government still does not allow you to travel abroad. What would you do if your passport were returned to you?
Ai: I would check if all the data is correct and if the passport is valid (laughs). No, I would call my son, of course, who lives with his mother in Berlin and misses me. It is painful for a father to be so limited and far away from your son. He once remarked to his mother: "I'm sure, they will never give him his passport back. I had a dream about this!"
SPIEGEL: Your son Ai Lao is six years old.
Ai: Yes, and he is an emotional and imaginative child. When he tried to cheer me up, he said: "In fact, your persecutors aren't that much better off than you. You may have to run away from them -- but they have to run after you all the time, too." That really cheered me up and gave me a fresh perspective: My minders may be just as frustrated as I am. And my angst and my insecurity reflect the state's angst and insecurity. The state is scared too.
SPIEGEL: Over the past two-and-a-half years, the human rights situation in China has deteriorated. Why does the new administration arrest so many of its critics? Why doesn't it allow even a bit more free speech?
Ai: I am not surprised by this, I have experienced even much worse times before. Of course, you ask yourself: Is the government so harsh for tactical reasons or is there a deeper ideological reason for this? In the end, I think, the state's rigidity is a function of its own insecurity, its indecisiveness.
SPIEGEL: One theory goes like this: The new administration is still in the process of consolidating its power. Once that is done, things might improve.
Ai: I think such theories are wrong -- no matter if they predict an improvement or further deterioration. What counts in the end is what the government does. It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that. There are crises and emergencies all the time, we might not even be aware of some. But I am afraid we'll have to wait and observe precisely what the government is up to.
SPIEGEL: If you wanted to highlight one of the many human rights cases in China today, which one would it be?
Ai: I would direct the world's attention to the case of Pu Zhiqiang -- a man who represents the new China in a way few others do. He is a lawyer, a highly educated, considerate man who has helped in so many human rights cases himself. He is a man deeply rooted in the Deng Xiaoping era -- not the Mao years before -- and he has contributed much to the building of this new society. But he refuses to forget what happened in 1989. And for crossing this line he has been in jail for a year now and is accused of the unthinkable crimes. There is not a shred of evidence, of course. No one knows what is going to happen to him. But his case will show where China will move in the coming years. Will he get a fair trial? Will there be rule of law in China? Will we ever respect each other's free speech and opinion?
SPIEGEL: How should foreign governments handle cases like Pu Zhiqiang's? Diplomats often say dissidents can only be helped by discussing their cases behind closed doors.
Ai: This is wrong. If human rights are supposed to have any meaning, then they have to be discussed openly. Any politician who respects China's government should tell it openly what is in his heart. It is disrespectful to keep quiet about such issues -- both vis-a-vis the government and the people concerned.
SPIEGEL: Only two or three years ago, China was defensive when questioned about human rights issues. Now officials often reverse the accusation: What about the cases of racism in the United States? What about the violation of privacy by Western secret services?
Ai: No state or society can claim to have established human rights once and for all. What we have seen in the US lately is shameful. I use this word advisedly. If people are being abused or even killed during an arrest, this is highly disturbing. There are many cases and layers of racist behavior in the US -- from police treatment to the issues of education and job opportunities. In America, however, such cases are being discussed publically.
SPIEGEL: And in China?
Ai: China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here. There is the current case of a policeman who shot a man at a railway station right in front of his family. At least, there was a public investigation against this policeman (which cleared him of wrongful action in the first instance). Something like this would never have happened only a few years ago, never. Such a case would have been dealt with as an "internal police matter," no one would ever have heard of it again. This can't be done anymore. The Internet has established a public sphere and developed a pressure which the government can no longer ignore. We should use this public sphere and redefine -- beyond China's borders -- what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen's privacy begins.
SPIEGEL: China's government has been arresting more civil rights activists lately than in many years before, but at the same time many citizens are growing more self-confident. China's blogosphere is full of irony and sarcasm, and the censors often can't keep up deleting posts as fast as they pop up.
Ai: We just had a few cool days in Beijing. Still, summer will come. And this is true for China as a whole. At the moment about 350,000 students return to China from abroad each year -- 350,000 young and educated people. I know about them because they know me and often ask me in the street if they can take a selfie with me. These folks are creative and ironic, and the government can ultimately not control what is going on in their heads. Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China's society is opening.
SPIEGEL: Is this opening sustainable -- or could those prevail who would like to isolate China and turn the clock back?
Ai: I don't think many people really want to do this. The government doesn't want to do it and person Nr. 1 doesn't want to do it either.
SPIEGEL: You mean Xi Jinping, the president?
Ai: The leadership knows that you cannot solve the issues of China's future with the means of the past. The demographic consequences of the one-child policy, the build-up of the welfare state, the jobs for 7 million university graduates every year, the immense corruption: Even some Western governments would have to scramble to find solutions to such problems.A small company in France plans to make bitcoin easier to handle early next year by issuing debit cards linked to payment accounts that can accept the alternative currency.
The Paris-based company, Paymium, has operated a website called Bitcoin-Central since 2010 where people can purchase bitcoins, an electronic currency that uses peer-to-peer networking and cryptography to securely transfer funds around the world within an hour.
Bitcoin enthusiasts gush on forums about the potential for it to replace government-issued money. But Paymium's "ultimate goal is to offer banking services at a lower cost than the traditional banking system," said CEO and co-founder, Pierre Noizat, in an interview by phone on Monday.
Transferring bitcoins to someone is as easy as sending an email using a compatible software client, such as Bitcoin-QT. A bitcoin is essentially just a secret number, which is protected from unauthorized transfers by public key cryptography. The bitcoin is associated with an 34-character alphanumeric "address" that a user holds. Transactions are verified by the peer-to-peer system.
But the processes around buying bitcoins and then converting bitcoins in usable currency through exchanges are cumbersome.
Last week, Paymium announced a partnership with Aqoba, a payment services provider (PSP), that will make it easier for people to handle bitcoins with respect to traditional banking systems while also utilizing bitcoin's cheaper transaction fees.
Entities that handle third-party deposits and payments are required to be registered PSPs in most countries, Noizat said. Paymium was handling Euro deposits for bitcoin purchases, but was not a PSP and didn't have an agreement with one.
Without a partnership with a PSP, Paymium was "basically in uncharted territory, and you don't know when the regulator is going to hit you," Noizat said. Paymium is a technology company, not a bank, he said. A widespread concern with bitcoin is how governments may eventually intervene or regulate its trade.
Aqoba will administer accounts for people who want to buy bitcoins through Paymium. The accounts are classified as "payment accounts" rather than bank accounts, but have an international bank account number (IBAN). Account funds qualify for insurance from the French government, similar to the FDIC in the U.S., Noizat said.
Aqoba is linked to the traditional banking system through its partner, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa bank, which provides Aquoba with its financial infrastructure in order to operate as a PSP, Noizat said.
Early next year, Noizat said Paymium is planning to offer debit cards, which would make it easier for people to withdraw funds. Bitcoins could be sold through the Bitcoin-Central exchange, with funds deposited in the Aqoba payment account and withdrawn through a debit card. Noizat said Paymium is still investigating whether non-French citizens can legally open accounts.
Paymium's announcement marks an incremental progression in making bitcoin easier to use. Noizat said his company is focused on bitcoin from a transactional standpoint since it is faster and cheaper than the banks for overseas wire transfers.
Banks often charge flat fees for overseas wire transfers, regardless of the value. For example, a bank may charge ¬15 (US$19) for the transfer fee and ¬15 to send funds in a different currency. Recipients may also be charged to receive the money. To send just ¬100 out of a country in a different currency, it could cost the sender around ¬30.
Bitcoin offers a cheaper alternative. Bitcoin-Central, for example, charges a.498 percent transactional fee to buy bitcoins. The bitcoin network charges a fraction of a cent to the sender for processing the transaction, but receiving bitcoin is free.
The recipient can then use a local exchange to covert their bitcoins to cash. In-country wire transfers from the exchange to the recipient's account are usually low cost or free. In this example, the sender would pay around ¬0.50 rather than ¬30 to send ¬100.
"The smaller the amount, the more bitcoin makes sense," Noizat said.
Since bitcoin launched in 2009, people have become very passionate and political when talking about it, Noizat said. But the technical innovations of bitcoin have the potential to introduce competition to traditional banking systems, which have lacked innovation, he alleged.
Bitcoin is "not the next currency. It first has to prove itself as a high-performance, reliable transaction network first," Noizat said.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirkHe was forced by his employer to bring down the internet media channel and most of his social media sites in 2017. He was fired in 2018 from CBS affiliate WGCL-TV in Atlanta, Georgia for pursuing his Reality Check show and alt-right theories, particularly Pizzagate.
Benjamin Swann (born July 17, 1978) is an American television news anchor, political commentator and journalist. Initially a Baptist pastor, he became a sports producer for TV, and later a news journalist and producer, and managing editor on network affiliates, FOX, and RT America of the Russian state-owned TV network RT. He received a National Edward R. Murrow Award in 2002.
Swann's initial and ongoing interest has been to be a church leader. At the age of 15 he became a youth pastor at his local Baptist Church in Canutillo in El Paso County, Texas. At the age of 19, he began preaching at revivals in Texas. Unable to find a position as a pastor in El Paso, he followed one of his brother's suggestion to get a job in TV news. At that time, four of his brothers worked in television.[3] Three were news cameramen.[1] He worked for a period of time for KDBC-TV. In 1998, he moved to KFOX to work as a news cameraman.[3]
After working in Portland, Oregon, as an assistant pastor, Swann returned to the Fox station KFOX in El Paso as a sports producer.[3] He then filmed, edited, and reported his own news and sports stories. Swan became a morning co-anchor and managing editor at the station.[1][2] In 2008, he became an evening news anchor for the NBC affiliate KTSM-TV.[1][2][4] He won regional Emmy Awards in 2005[5] and 2009,[6] as well as a national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2002 for Continuing Coverage of Alexandra Flores.[2][7] During this period, Swann was an investigative journalist for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN News), writing about Mexico's drug wars on the Texas border.[2]
He left El Paso in December 2010 to become an evening TV news presenter at Cincinnati, Ohio's Fox affiliate WXIX-TV, co-anchoring with Tricia Macke.[1][2] He produced a series entitled Reality Check that garnered media attention for his advocacy of Ron Paul's positions.[8] While he was at WXIX-TV, he started a Facebook page called "Full Disclosure" where, according to Adweek, he asked "questions about controversial subjects he says are ignored by the national media."[9]
On October 23, 2012, Swann served as a panel member on a third-party presidential candidates debate hosted by Larry King in Chicago, Illinois, and broadcast on C-SPAN, Al Jazeera America, and online through the sponsorship of the Free & Equal Elections Foundation.[10][11]
In April 2013, Swann announced he would be leaving WXIX-TV Fox 19 at the end of May,[9] and then started a social media channel called "Truth In Media" to continue production of his show Reality Check.[12] Truth in Media was a collaboration with Republican Liberty Caucus and Joshua Cook.[13] His Reality Check, according to the The Daily Beast, echo talking points from media outlets such as RT and InfoWars that are rarely seen in more mainstream news media.[13] Swann's Reality Check segments were uploaded to his YouTube channel and had garnered 10,376,570 views and over 73,500 subscribers before he took his channel offline.[14] One theme of Swann's Reality Check has been his support of Ron Paul's presidential campaigns, with his goal of providing fairer coverage for Paul than the conservative or liberal national press. However, he provided more misinformation, particularly regarding the authorship and the veracity of questionable content in the newsletters put out by the campaign.[15]
From May 2013 until June 2015, Swann appeared regularly on RT America in Washington, D.C.[13] For three months in 2014 he hosted the Ben Swann Radio Show on the Republic Broadcasting Network, a far-right network that has aired holocaust denial and other antisemitic conspiracy theories.[16]
In 2015, he was hired by CBS affiliate WGCL-TV in Atlanta, Georgia.[17] He was suspended in January 2017 for running a story attempting to revive the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and was reinstated after he took down his Truth in Media and Reality Check sites.[18][19] He was fired on January 29, 2018, after the station learned that he had been trying to revive Reality Check without their knowledge and permission.[18][20] The station's general manager said that Swann's Reality Check program had "often veered into alt-right conspiracy theories."[21] According to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, he has lost credibility as an objective journalist due to his interest in furthering conspiracy theories.[22]
Swann relaunched Reality Check in 2018 after he was fired by WGCL-TV.[23] Starting in 2018 he began publishing pieces for the Liberty Nation website.[24]
Swann launched the Isegoria social media platform,[25], named from the ancient Greek meaning "Equality of all in freedom of speech".[26]The smart bulb / smart switch dilemma: smartening up a dumb wall switch
by snm, December 9th, 2017
How to make a “dumb” wall switch into a smart switch. We all have switches on our walls, such as these:
which controls power to an AC wall outlet.
As a new user of home automation, I plugged a lamp with a smart light bulb into this switched outlet. This creates a problem: when the dumb light switch is off, you can’t turn on the smart bulb. Obviously, because the switch cuts the power. But it is annoying because I would have to whip out my smartphone whenever I want to turn on/off the lights! Despite the ability to change bulb color etc. remotely e.g. via smart speakers or smartphones, installing this smart bulb was a step backwards.
This isn’t an unknown problem, and there are possible solutions on the market. Smart light switches? But they are $25-45 and are installed into the wall, replacing the dumb switch. Very invasive, not to mention costly. My landlord probably won’t appreciate ripping out her switches. I wanted to use my existing wall switch, efficiently. Hence this blog post. I’ll be using an ESP8266 WeMos D1 mini purchased from Aliexpress for a couple bucks (varies about $2-5 + shipping), with two spare USB chargers and a few small inexpensive miscellaneous electronic components. Here’s the behavior before, which sucks:
State Desired Result Action Needed Lamp on Turn off Flip switch or use app Lamp off Turn on If the switch was on: flip it twice (off then on) or use the app
If the switch was off: flip the switch, you can’t use the app
Behavior after implementing the “smartened up” device for the dumb switch, it all just works:
State Desired Result Action Needed Lamp on Turn off Flip switch or use app Lamp off Turn on Flip switch or use app
This I believe achieves the best of both worlds. If you only use a smart bulb with a dumb switch, then the problems above arise. If you only use a smart switch, then you lose the ability to control the color of the bulb, and have to change out or alter your wall switches. By using a smart bulb and dumb light switch plus this device we’ll build soon, both these problems are solved.
Design overview
In my case, I have a dual-outlet face plate, the top is switched, the second is always-on:
We’ll wire the switched socket to GPIO on a microcontroller powered by the always-on socket, in order to sense when the dumb switch is on or off, allowing it to smoothly integrate with the rest of the home automation network.
USB +5V power to GPIO digital inputs
Connect a USB charger to the wall socket, break out the +5V power from the USB cable, then connect to an ESP8266 GPIO input. The ESP8266 is a 3.3V device, but the input pins are 5 volt tolerant so no level shifter is needed. I took a WeMos D1 Mini ESP8266, cannabilized an old USB cable, split out the +5 V power supply line (red wire) to the D4 GPIO input, and ground (black wire and shield) to ground, via a header plugged into the WeMos:
Wrote an Arduino sketch to loop and digitalRead(D4), logging any changes, as in the Arduino StateChangeDetection example. First I tested with the ESP8266 powered by my computer plugged into USB, and the D4/GND cable plugged into a USB wall charger not plugged into the wall. When the charger is off, yet +5V from its USB cable is wired to D4, we consistently read a low, and when disconnected, a high. The built-in LED also illuminates respectively. So far so good.
However I ran into trouble powering the ESP8266 itself from another USB charger plugged into the wall. The built-in LED would light up dimly:
and if I plug it into an AC outlet, the ESP8266 crashes. Fortunately it doesn’t kill it, and I can recover by cycling power, but something is clearly wrong. Measuring the voltage from the USB charger output shows 5.1 volts with no load, maybe this is too much for the 5-volt tolerant ESP8266 GPIO inputs? Maybe the USB charger expects a load, or the GPIO inputs need pull-down resistors to not float open? If anyone has more insight into why I can’t simply connect +5V USB power to GPIO inputs I’d be interested but until then, time to try a different approach.
Voltage divider to analog input
The ESP8266 has one analog ADC input pin, A0. Read it in Arduino using analogRead(A0). But when I read it in a tight loop, the Wi-Fi became unresponsive, see: ESP8266 Analog read interferes with wifi?. Read it only every 50 ms:
static int analog_value = 0 ; void loop () { server. handleClient (); if ( millis () % 50 == 0 ) { analog_value = analogRead ( A0 ); } }
but don’t connect it just yet. The analog pin only accepts 1 V max, so the 5 V has to be divided using a voltage divider. With 10 kΩ and 47 kΩ, 5 volts will read as 5 * 10 / (10 + 47) = 0.877 volts, providing some margin of error if it exceeds this voltage, up to 5.7 V for 1.0 V. Current is I=V/R, so 5V/(10kΩ) = 0.5 mA, and 5V/(47kΩ) = 0.11 mA, with power dissipation of P=IV, (0.5 mA)(5 V) = 0.53 mW. The common 1/4 W or 1/8 W resistors or even smaller will be more than enough. Wire it up:
Reads 0.888 V with the USB charger plugged into the wall socket with the light switch on:
Good, it is safe to connect to the ESP8266 analog input:
Moving from a breadboard to protoboard, solder it up:
Back to the software. This voltage is 264 or 263 units from analogRead. When flipped off, the voltage quickly drops to 3 or 2 units (the units are 1024th of a volt). If the USB cable is unplugged, then it instantly drops, but if the charger is unplugged, then it drops slower, due to residual charge. A bigger load may make it drop faster, but we can detect the change in software. If it drops below a threshold, consider it off:
int analog_value = analogRead ( A0 ); input = analog_value > 260 ;
Detecting when the light switch turns on is visually instanteous, but even using a closer threshold, detecting when it turns off is noticeably slower. Would like it to be instant. RE: WHAT IS SAMPLE RATE OF ANALOGREAD()? #16837 says it is 200 Hz. With the 1/(50 ms) delay we were reading only 20 Hz. Tenfold increase, sampling at the maximum rate:
if ( millis () % 5!= 0 ) { return ; }
With this change, the web server still works. And yet, off detection remains perceptably slow. Not good enough.
Not a complete loss, I kept this circuit, but the voltage is shown (converted to for display: /1024*(47.0+10)/10 ) only for informational purposes, on the ESP8266 web server interface. However for triggering will be done digitally instead:
Optocoupler to digital input
The slow sample rate of the ESP8266’s analog-to-digital converter is unbearable, so how about going back to digital? We may be able to get the resistive voltage divider working for logic level input, or use a fancier MOSFET-based level shifter, but for better isolation (avoiding tying together both grounds), one can use an optocoupler. I had one lying around I wanted to use anyways, the Fairchild FOD817 4-pin DIP phototranistor optocoupler:
Per the data sheet, the absolute maximum continuous forward current is 50 mA, so like with any LED, we need a current-limiting resistor. R=V/I, (5 volts) / (50 mA) = 100 Ω. To allow for tolerances and overvoltages, a higher resistance of 220 Ω gives 22.7 mA, not far from typical LED current. On the other side, 10 kΩ resistor from the collector pulls up to 3.3V. An instructive diagram from WestFlorida components (pardon the blurriness and low resolution):
)
Construct the circuit on a breadboard:
Now when the light switch is turned on, the optocoupler emitter activates and the detector turns on, pulling the GPIO input (using D2 on the ESP8266) low. When the light switch is off, it is pulled high (3.3V). Since it works, solder it |
about how different your life has become because of things that aren’t natural. The advancements in the telephone, medicine, internet porn…
Think about that for a few minutes. And then stop goddamn advocating for nature. Because nature is not advocating for you.
-SciBabe
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The fest begins Saturday with a free bazaar at Agricenter International, featuring all things India with sales of native clothing, jewelry, crafts, and other accessories. Vendors also will be peddling food from the various regions of India.
"There will be booths representing 10 different states, and people can taste the cuisine from each. Regionally, there's quite a difference in the way food is prepared in terms of spices," says Neeraj Gupta, president of the India Association of Memphis.
When the belly is full, be sure to work off those calories with free yoga and Indian dance lessons.
On Sunday, the party will move to the Michael Rose Theater at the University of Memphis. Musicians, dancers, and specialists in "hand shadowgraphy" will take the stage for "Yaadein: An Evening of Entertainment To Celebrate Six Decades of Independence."
"India is so unique, and it has so much to offer," Gupta says. "We want to make the broader community aware of the arts of India."
India Fest Bazaar, Agricenter International, 7777 Walnut Grove, Saturday, August 18th, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Free.
"Yaadein," Michael Rose Theater, University of Memphis, Sunday, August 19th, 4-8 p.m. $10 (advance), $15 Day of show.
--by Bianca PhillipsLuminosity are through to the grand final of MLG Columbus after edging past Team Liquid 2-0 (19-15 on Mirage and 19-16 on Cache).
The early stages of Mirage were played at a incredibly high pace as rounds went back and forth following insane individual actions. Luminosity opened up the game with a fast push, storming through the A site, but then Spencer "Hiko" Martin replied in the first eco round with a quad kill, taking advantage of a poor plant attempt from the Brazilians. Liquid were in for a hard reset, however, as Lincoln "fnx" Lau picked up two crucial kills with the Desert Eagle to give his team a clear route to A.
Luminosity kept pressing hard and won five of the next six rounds, but then Liquid finally managed to put their foot down to hold back their South American rival, cutting the gap to 5-7 after winning three rounds in a row. Marcelo "coldzera" David put an end to Liquid's streak with three important kills, but then the home side bagged the final two rounds to keep the deficit to a minimum.
Liquid came from the break looking very strong and won the first four rounds to force Luminosity to call a timeout. After the pep talk, Gabriel "FalleN" Toledo gave Luminosity a much-needed round with a quad kill inside B, but Liquid hit right back, resetting the economy of the Brazilians.
coldzera pulled off one of the highlights of the year
Eric "adreN" Hoag's side followed it up by winning the next five rounds to bring it to map point, and that is when insanity began. coldzera went huge and stopped an apartment push with four kills with the AWP, including a jumping double kill, and Luminosity started picking up round after round. Liquid were crumbling under pressure, and not even a timetout at 15-13 allowed them to prevent the game from going to overtime, in which the Brazilians would string four rounds rogether to take the lead in the series.
Next up was Cache, where Liquid were in dominant form during the early stages of the game, strolling to a 4-0 lead. Luminosity were then on the brink of claiming a round but were denied by Hiko, who sensationally won a 1vs4 clutch with the bomb planted. The game was already threatening to spiral out of control for Luminosity, but FalleN made sure to remind everyone that his side would not go down without a fight and won a 1vs2 clutch.
Hiko had a 24-5 half as CT on Cache, but it was not enough
Luminosity then went on a great run and brought the scoreline to 6-6, but they were unable to take the lead as Liquid managed to claim the final three rounds courtesy of Hiko, who ended the half with a 24-5 score.
Liquid carried the momentum into the second half and won six rounds in a row to bring the scoreline to 15-6. Many believed that the game was about to come to a close, but it was a repeat of the first map as the North Americans were unable to apply the finishing blow. As rounds went on, Liquid spiraled into a state of disarray, and some very questionable decisions in a number of rounds allowed Luminosity to force overtime once again.
Starting out on the CT side, Luminosity picked up the first two rounds of overtime before Liquid finally got one on the board, bringing an end to an 11-round winning streak from the Brazilians. But it did little in the way of stopping Luminosity, who would claim back-to-back rounds on the Terrorist side to seal a dramatic and hard-fought 2-0 victory and progress to the grand final of the Major.Excerpt: "Actress Rosario Dawson travels to Flint, Michigan, to investigate the man-made disaster behind the city's water crisis. And legendary TV producer Norman Lear investigates gentrification and displacement in New York City and goes undercover to expose racial discrimination in housing."
Children in East Baltimore. (photo: Patrick Semansk/AP)
'America Divided': New TV Series Explores Inequality From Water to Housing to Mass Incarceration
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
ith the presidential election less than five weeks away, the explosive new documentary "America Divided" explores inequality in America. The show follows high-profile correspondents as they explore aspects of inequality in education, housing, healthcare, labor, criminal justice and the political system. Oscar-winning hip-hop artist Common returns to his hometown of Chicago to examine disparities in the criminal justice system. Actress Rosario Dawson travels to Flint, Michigan, to investigate the man-made disaster behind the city’s water crisis. And legendary TV producer Norman Lear investigates gentrification and displacement in New York City and goes undercover to expose racial discrimination in housing. For more on this groundbreaking series, we speak with the three creators of "America Divided": Rick Rowley, Solly Granatstein and Lucian Read.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: What do Rosario Dawson, Common, Norman Lear, Peter Sarsgaard, America Ferrera and Zach Galifianakis have in common? With the presidential election less than five weeks away, they have all teamed up for a new television series, America Divided, which explores inequality in the United States.
ROSARIO DAWSON: My name is Rosario Dawson. I’m conducting interviews about the water crisis here, and I would love to be able to speak to Governor Snyder. America is in crisis. UNIDENTIFIED: Did we invest in those communities? No, instead we declared war. ROSARIO DAWSON: Our democracy threatened. ZACH GALIFIANAKIS: There’s a darker element to control the uneducated and the poor. ROSARIO DAWSON: Our society, frayed. Our economy, split. UNIDENTIFIED: I don’t feel that young people have the feeling they have that chance. ROSARIO DAWSON: We inherited a promise of justice, democracy, equality under the law. But we live in an America divided. NORMAN LEAR: This is America. Equal opportunity. UNIDENTIFIED: Nobody has a right to have our communities under siege and have people live in fear. COMMON: Communities don’t feel safe, that the police are going to keep them safe. What about people who say, "Well, that’s not our problem. Why doesn’t—why don’t the governments in those countries deal with it?" ZACH GALIFIANAKIS: I see things, people getting taken advantage of. The rich guys, yeah, they get money. They get to hire people, lower-income. But where’s the middle people? AMY POEHLER: What you don’t like about this bill is it is taking some control away from how you can operate your business. BUSINESSWOMAN: Well, no. AMY POEHLER: It’s about money. ROSARIO DAWSON: When was the moment that you started to see an effect or that there might be something wrong? TAMMY LOREN: They’re completely different kids. And these days, he can’t even get out of bed. NORMAN LEAR: And he wants to go from $900 to $2,100 in one leap. PETER SARSGAARD: So, if I want heroin right now, where do I go out there? PRISONER: Go out here and take a left, then go up the street right there to the first gas station and stand there. SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICER: As a school resource officer, you have to have a desire and a love to work with young people. JESSE WILLIAMS: What’s on your belt today? You have a—you have a gun. You have what? Some kind of mace. Same things you would have on the street. That’s pretty alarming. PROTESTER: The way things are working aren’t working at all. ROSARIO DAWSON: It’s time to cut through the noise. It’s time to uncover the roots of the problem and how it affects us all. Once in a generation, a window opens for a real conversation that cuts to the heart of who we are as a nation. REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: If you just keep pushing, if you just keep trying, if you refuse to let the nightmares have the last say, eventually the dawn will break, the sun will come out, and you will be in a brand-new day. ROSARIO DAWSON: The conversation starts now.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s the trailer for the new five-part Epix network series America Divided. The show follows high-profile correspondents as they explore aspects of inequality in education, housing, healthcare, labor, the criminal justice system and the political system. Oscar-winning hip-hop artist Common returns to his hometown of Chicago to examine disparities in the criminal justice system. Actress Rosario Dawson travels to Flint, Michigan, to investigate the man-made disaster behind the city’s water crisis. And legendary TV producer Norman Lear investigates gentrification and displacement in New York City and goes undercover to expose racial discrimination in housing.
AMY GOODMAN: For more on this groundbreaking series, we’re joined in our studio by three—the three creators of America Divided: Rick Rowley, Solly Granatstein and Lucian Read.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Solly, why don’t you talk about the overall concept? Then we’re going to quickly go through the clips of the different media personalities, actors, and as they delve into these critical issues.
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Well, we felt like the country is really at a crisis point when it comes to inequality. The fruits of the economic recovery were going, as we all know, to the 1 percent, and not to most of the people. And we wanted to examine different aspects of inequality in people’s daily lives. And so, we went to different parts of the country. Each one explored a different aspect of inequality. And each of these stories was presented and explored by a high-profile correspondent, who each have their own entrée into the different stories. So, you have Jesse Williams, for instance, who used to be a high school teacher, exploring a story about segregation in education. And the—
AMY GOODMAN: Before he starred in Grey’s Anatomy and was a fake doctor.
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Before—before he was a fake doctor, he was a teacher. And so—
AMY GOODMAN: A real teacher.
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: And so, he—so, rather than do a, you know, sort of medical inequality, he did education inequality, and so forth and so on.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, one of the high-profile correspondents in America Divided is Oscar-winning hip-hop artist Common, who was both an executive producer and a correspondent for the series. He returned to his hometown of Chicago to examine disparities in the criminal justice system there. In this clip, he speaks with Ben Breit, an official at Chicago’s Cook County Jail.
COMMON: Police shootings are only the most visible symptoms of a violence that runs much deeper, infecting the entire criminal justice system. And so I’ve come here to the network of tunnels beneath America’s largest single jail: Cook County. BEN BREIT: We move a thousand people per day to their court hearings and back through this tunnel system. It connects the entire compound. So, we’re below Cook County Jail right now. COMMON: Wait. You said sometimes it’s thousands of people— BEN BREIT: Per day. COMMON: Per day? BEN BREIT: Per day, yeah. COMMON: Coming through these tunnels? BEN BREIT: Coming through these tunnels. So, what we’re walking into now is morning intake. Everyone you see around you, they’re not inmates yet. They’ve all been arrested last night in the city of Chicago. So the next stop for these guys is bond court. That’s the moment of truth, where could be walking at the door, could be here for two, three, four years with a bond that they simply can’t afford to pay. COMMON: You can be here just because you can’t pay the bond. BEN BREIT: Absolutely. COMMON: For that many—that amount of years. BEN BREIT: We have a couple hundred people in our jail right now who could walk out if they had $500. People are here because they’re poor. And it’s a perpetual cycle.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s a clip from America Divided with hip-hop artist Common. So, Rick Rowley, can you talk about this?
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, these are really exciting, kind of volatile times that we’re living. I mean, we are seeing dangers and also possibilities that I haven’t seen in my lifetime here. There’s—you know, as Solly was saying, there’s levels of inequality that we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age and the eve of the Great Depression. There are populist movements on the left and right that are emerging around it. There’s an electoral season that is more polarized and insurgent than any one I can remember. And so, you know, this series is really trying to take head-on the kind of the issues around race, class, and gender that are at the heart of the American experience, and have been for the last 200 years.
And Chicago has really become the epicenter of a growing national debate around race, policing and the criminal justice system. So Common returned to Chicago in the immediate aftermath of the release of the Laquan McDonald video, the police video of the killing of Laquan McDonald, and began an investigation of that killing, that led into a look at the entire criminal justice system. So we talked to everyone from Garry McCarthy, the former police superintendent, to the sheriff of Cook County and the jail, to the state’s attorney. And every person at every level of the criminal justice system in Chicago agrees, no matter what their position is, no matter what their politics are, that the system is completely broken, that it’s not keeping people safer, that it is—
AMY GOODMAN: That these people would get out of jail—they’re held for years because they don’t have $500 bond.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah. Cook County was the most intense, I think, shoot that we had with Common. I mean, traveling through those hundred-year-old tunnels beneath an acre-wide compound—
AMY GOODMAN: Made me think of Gorée Island.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Right? I mean, the slave trade, when you have a thousand people that are going through each day.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah. And on top of that, aside from being the largest single site jail in America—I mean, Los Angeles County is a bigger jail system, but has multiple jails. This, in one sort of compound, is the largest jail. It also, as a result, is the largest—the largest mental health facility in the country, because all the mental health clinics have been shut down, and so we are imprisoning people instead of dealing with those problems. Basically, social problems that we can’t come up with the collective political will to handle, we throw the criminal justice system at, and the jail is the warehouse for those people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to turn to another clip from America Divided. Actress Rosario Dawson traveled to Flint, Michigan, to investigate the man-made disaster behind the city’s water crisis. She speaks with Tammy Loren, whose family was affected.
TAMMY LOREN: We have completely different kids. They went from straight-A students to failing. Jeremiah, he’s been to school 44 days this year, because he’s so sick. Elijah has been fighting a bacterial infection from the water for two years. These days, he can’t even get out of bed. Sorry I’m getting all teary. ROSARIO DAWSON: No, it’s OK. TAMMY LOREN: You know, it’s devastating knowing we’re going through this, as well, but to have to see our kids go through it? It’s heartbreaking. If a neighbor poisoned and killed his wife, he’d be in prison. ROSARIO DAWSON: Yeah. TAMMY LOREN: And we have an entire city that’s been poisoned.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Rosario Dawson in America Divided, a clip from America Divided, talking to someone in Flint, Michigan, about the water crisis. So, Solly Granatstein, can you talk about that?
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Yeah. You know, the Flint water crisis is certainly one of the most heartbreaking sagas, you know, in recent memory. And, you know, Rosario Dawson went there to investigate what had happened. And I would say the two themes that came out, one was that this was a community that was battered and had—and really nobody had any idea what was going on. And it was down to the actual citizens of the community, citizen scientists, launching their own investigation in the face of an official denial that anything was wrong, that really turned this story into sort of a national—a national story and a catastrophe that we all know about.
And then, you know, as was shown in that clip, no one knows exactly how much damage was done. And no one will know for years how much damage was done by the lead in the water, because lead poisoning is invisible, and it’s something that only can come out, you know, years hence. And it affects—it affects—when children are exposed to it, it can affect the rest of their lives in terms of their psychology, in terms of their ability to control impulses and their functioning in society. So it’s really—
AMY GOODMAN: And as the clip said, I mean, if a man poisoned his kid—
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —he would go to jail—
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —for a very long time.
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: This is the poisoning of an entire American city—
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Yeah. And it—
AMY GOODMAN: —an African-American city.
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Absolutely, and had everything to do with the austerity policies of a succession of state governments, but especially the government of Rick Snyder, the Republican governor.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip of actor and activist Peter Sarsgaard, who explored the addiction crisis in rural Ohio. Here he speaks to women held in a prison in Ohio.
ADDICT 1: I’m 22. I don’t have my GED. I didn’t graduate from high school. I’ve lost everything and everybody that I loved. I don’t have anything. ADDICT 2: I learned just by my boyfriend. It just started out recreational. Before I knew it, I was a full-blown addict. ADDICT 3: My husband has lifelong health issues, and then he couldn’t get his painkillers, so he went and got heroin. I’m probably on the verge of losing two of my children, and I’m in here and can’t do a damn thing about it. ADDICT 2: I have four kids. I hadn’t seen them in six months, and their dad finally brought them to see me last week here. And my 10-year-old daughter looked at me and said, "I thought you were dead in a ditch." My youngest children just don’t understand. For them, everything is just scary. So that’s rough. And that’s something that not only I have to deal with, but they have to live with. I’ve done that to them.
AMY GOODMAN: Part of the America Divided series. Lucian Read, you followed Peter Sarsgaard into this prison.
LUCIAN READ: Yes. So, the sort of the wider story is about the opioid epidemic in the country, and we chose to focus on Dayton, Ohio, sort of a Heartland American city that’s really been just ravaged by this addiction crisis. It’s, from time to time, listed as the city in America with the highest rates of overdose deaths. And so, you know, we approached Peter. Peter was very interested in the story. He’s got sort of addiction issues in his own past, for himself and in his family, and was very engaged and really wanted to understand this crisis. And so, we took him through, you know, sort of the series of steps of the crisis, in terms of where it came from and the people it affects in Dayton.
And in the scene we just watched, we went to the Montgomery County Jail, which has been just kind of overwhelmed by the number of addicts who have been sort of caught in the system and brought in there, many of them repeatedly, and increasingly women, young women, you know, so that we—the sheriff of Montgomery County, who’s actually a very conservative law enforcement officer, was like, "You know, you really need to see this to understand that this is not—that, you know, we can’t arrest our way out of this. You need to hear the stories of the women in here who have been caught up in this because of economic dislocation, who have been caught up in it because of, you know, sort of being led into this crisis by their addiction, by their family members, by loved ones, by husbands, by boyfriends." You know, it’s very consistent across their stories. And to really sort of see that, you know, you have this idea of addicts, you know, sort of the criminality and the sort of shame and all that, and that really, you know, in this place, in the prison, where people are sort of—have been taken out of that—out of that life and kind of have a moment of clarity to really go in there and be able to let Peter tell their—hear their stories. And it was—I mean, it was, you know, incredibly, incredibly moving, incredibly powerful.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Grey’s Anatomy star and former teacher Jesse Williams goes back to the classroom in America Divided. He visited the Gulf Coast town of St. Petersburg in Pinellas County, Florida, to study the battle to fix inequality in education. In this clip, he speaks with school board member Mary Brown, who repeatedly tried to sound the alarm about a loss of funding for children of color.
MARY BROWN: Each year, of course, you look at the budget and see where you can cut costs. JESSE WILLIAMS: Right. MARY BROWN: The school board felt, well, we have a budget cut that we have to make, and we’ve got to cut out busing some children. JESSE WILLIAMS: So we are talking about a vote on whether we end busing. MARY BROWN: The vote was that we would go back to neighborhood schools. JESSE WILLIAMS: And now, you call the neighborhood schools— MARY BROWN: They’re segregated schools. JESSE WILLIAMS: It’s segregated schools. MARY BROWN: Yeah, that’s the bottom line. They’re segregated schools. The parents thought that they would get everything they needed. Some of the people in the black community thought, oh, the money has to come with the children. JESSE WILLIAMS: Yeah. MARY BROWN: And the money should go with the children. JESSE WILLIAMS: Yeah. MARY BROWN: But the money didn’t quite go with the children. JESSE WILLIAMS: Why do you think the money never came, never went to where it was promised to go? MARY BROWN: Because it went to other schools where they felt the need was greater. JESSE WILLIAMS: Why might they think the need is greater? What are some differences between South County and those other schools? MARY BROWN: Well, North County has more white children. South County has more minority children. JESSE WILLIAMS: OK. MARY BROWN: And therefore, you can—you can take that and think of it in any way you want to. Funds didn’t come like they were supposed to come. JESSE WILLIAMS: Right. MARY BROWN: I just see a whole decade of children losing.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Jesse Williams speaking to someone in the—
RICK ROWLEY: Mary Brown.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, that’s right, Mary Brown. Rick, can you talk about that?
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah, just very quickly, we—our attention was drawn to the Pinellas County, Florida, because of a great series of reports in the Tampa Bay Times about a cluster of schools where the educational standards had collapsed in the course of seven years. They were in the poor black neighborhood of Pinellas County, five schools in a five-square-mile radius that had gone from A and B schools in the Florida system to F schools in seven years. And quickly, it became apparent, when Jesse went down there and started meeting with activists and organizers and school board, teachers, that it all began—the problems began in 2007, when the school board voted to resegregate the school system. They ended the busing program, and the school system collapsed. And this is a problem that actually is happening across the country. Desegregation pushes that began during the civil rights era peaked in the '80s, and now they've been eroded, as Brown v. Board has been eroded.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’ve done this series for Epix network. Where can people see it?
SOLLY GRANATSTEIN: Well, the easiest way to see the whole series is to go to Epix.com, E-P-I-X.com-slash-freetrial. It’s a premium cable channel like HBO and Showtime; you have to subscribe. But, actually, you can stream the whole thing online, and actually, right now, you can do it for free.
AMY GOODMAN: This is incredible and explosive, and to be here in the midst of the election season raising all of these issues. We’re going to continue the conversation, and we’ll post it online at democracynow.org. Solly Granatstein, Rick Rowley and Lucian Read, an astounding series you have done. I was just at the big opening for the one on housing in New York. You’ll be, Rick, today at NYU at 6:00 as you show another part of the series. It’s called America Divided.“There is only one kind of freedom and that’s individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.” – Ron Paul.
Indicatively, I feel the same way about spectrum, it should be managed in a free market competitive ecosystem rather than the tight and biased control of the government.
As per the diamond-water paradox of value the contradiction is that water is far more useful and critical for survival but still commands much lesser price than diamonds in the market. Adam Smith presented this paradox and tried to establish that there is little relationship between price and utility: diamond has limited use or utility, still commands a high price. Understanding this further as per Subjective theory of value, the value of a good or a service is not determined by the inherent quality or the labor utilized to create it, it is dependent on the intent of individual who is willing to purchase it to achieve his goals through that product or service. Now this was a step forward from the Adam Smith theory.
The Subjective theory of value, became the basis of more accepted Marginal Utility theory. As per the theory of marginal utility, the price of a good or a service is not dependent on its labor value or usefulness as a whole. It is dependent on the marginal utility. To explain the diamond-water paradox as per marginal utility, it is not about the usefulness of water or diamond, but usefulness of each additional unit of water and diamond. Since water is in such high supply, each additional unit of water is worth less as the supply of water increases. And since diamonds are in low supply, each additional unit of diamond is worth more than each additional unit of water since the supply is abundant.
If we look at the scenario for internet in India, consumers are paying around Rs 100 for a 1GB pack for 2G internet, and around Rs 250 for a 1GB pack for 3G internet. The broad level consumer complaint is that there is no annual pack for Rs 1,200 for 12GB pack for 2G internet, or Rs 3,000 for a 12GB pack for 3G internet. Rather, a 2 month pack for 3G internet, which should be a multiple of 2 on a one month pack (Rs 250 x 2=500 for 2GB for 60 days) is actually available at Rs 600 (Idea), which is a multiple of 2.5. This means that telecom companies want consumers to use monthly packs and not move to yearly plans at the same cost. Most internet plans are offered for one month, and now mostly for 28 days (Idea offers 300MB 3G at Rs 103 for just 21 days). The plan cost for most telecom operators is almost the same. This may be a case where the market has hit some kind of equilibrium or this may be a case of telecom companies may have a cartel for pricing (an assertion looking at pricing, no real proof available).
Idea plans:
Airtel plans:
Vodafone plans:
There may be a technical reason for not offering annual or even 2 month packs for the same price multiple (on a monthly plan) for telecom operators (I am not aware of it). But in general trade, a bulk purchase should come at a lower price. For example, the satellite TV packs are cheaper for an year than for a month. The Idea 3G pack for 1GB for month, is for Rs 250 (all calculations rounded off) and for 2GB for 60 days is Rs 600. The cost per MB in the first plan is 24.5 paisa and in second plan is 29.3 paisa. Incidentally, as per unconfirmed reports, participating companies were paying Airtel Re 1 for an MB for part of being Airtel Zero plan (source: http://goo.gl/bg26gF, http://goo.gl/MlMLKs). Therefore, for a higher period plan, Idea is charging higher price per MB for a longer term bulk buy plan. The same is the case with all operators. The point to note is that without any marginal cost, there is higher per unit pricing on a larger unit plan for a larger period.
But if you want to buy more GBs in the same 28 day or one month period, the cost per MB is actually reduced. Take an example of Idea cellular’s base plan 3G pack for 1 GB per for a month – where the cost per MB is 24.5 paisa – if you want 2 GB in same period, it is for Rs 455 (instead of Rs 600 for a 2 month 2GB plan). In the Rs 455 plan, the per MB cost is 22.2 paisa – which is lower than 24.5 paisa (for the 1 GB 30 days plan). How is it that the telecom operators are able to provide more units of internet (MB/GB) at a lower price in same period and at a higher price in longer period? The reason is a very limited marginal cost for extra units of internet, and internet being close to an essential commodity for users today.
In a limited marginal cost ecosystem (with commodity being essential or high demand), to maximize profits you would want the demand and consumption to reside in a lesser time period.
But how are operators able to do this? Ideally the competitive pricing and free market ecosystem should be able to handle it. There may be price fixing and it appears to be a cartel (an assertion looking at pricing, no real proof available). The pricing and plans are fixed and there is limited competitive disruption. A telecom operator may argue that these are very low unsustainable prices. But these prices also discourage users to switch operators since everyone’s pricing is the same. These prices also indicate operators’ understanding that marginal utility of internet units over long period is higher and lower in the same or lesser period. But in reality that is not true. This seems like a fixed ecosystem, where consumer has limited choices, and consumer is discouraged to get into a longer period plan. This shows the power of operators with TRAI and the government either hand in glove with this, or allowing this to happen and not paying attention.
Should telecom operators make profits? Definitely, but in a free market competitive ecosystems where competitive companies win and consumer wins with best pricing and services. See the example of mobile phone manufacturers, a free market ecosystem has given rise to winners like Micromax and Xiaomi and consumers are enjoying great phones at lower cost. Taxi services like Uber have forced other service providers to shape up and offer better services at better pricing.
The telecom operators claim that they are paying billions of dollars to government and they need to recover that money. Is this right? Yes it is. The operators have all the rights to make profits. The government made $17 billion in 2010 spectrum auctions, and since then billions of dollars have been made in spectrum auctions every year (see all the money made here – http://goo.gl/ZPaFPG). This is a very important point and many will argue against it, but in modern day capitalism, “THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT MAKE MONEY”. The government is not there to make money, if they want to make healthy profits, the business environment is going to get hurt for both businesses and consumers. Why should the government want to make money from these deals? Remember the early days of FM radio when government took hefty license fees, making FM radio business unviable for all businesses.
When government makes these hefty profits, who pays? First the telecom companies and then the consumer. And to make hefty profits, government throttles the bandwidth and spectrum making it a scarce commodity. Remember the diamond-water paradox solution, if you make water scarce, it will have higher marginal utility. By throttling spectrum, to earn more money, government makes internet scarce for the operators, who in turn make it scarce for the users. Government also allows limited businesses the opportunity to become internet service providers by putting base prices (in multibillion dollars), which is to make more money. It makes the market non-competitive and it is no longer the free market ecosystem.
What has all this got to do with Net Neutrality? The Net Neutrality debate started in the year 2007 when Comcast started throttling use of P2P networking applications as there was large data transfer. When the complaint was filed with the FCC, Comcast defended the interference with consumers P2P programs as necessary to manage scarce network capacity!
“Scarce network capacity” is the logic for throttling! The government and the operators want to make this resource scarce and want to increase its marginal utility. One can understand the motives of the operators or ISPs, but should the government not control the ISPs and create a free market ecosystem? Instead the government is busy making billions of dollars selling out “free market ecosystem” to a few ISPs.
As per FCC, there are essentially three broad rules to protect net neutrality: No blocking, No throttling, No paid prioritization or no faster lanes. But does an Internet.org or Airtel Zero kind of plan, where some websites are offered free to surf from ISP, against FCC guidelines? Technically no!
In a paid package, there should be no faster lanes, but in a free package, there are no rules since it is free. Therefore, the Internet.org and Airtel Zero plans, ideally, should have no issues and should be allowed.
Again, the problem is scarce bandwidth. As per some experts, the operators with limited bandwidth will service the model which gives them more money. For example, if the unconfirmed reports are to be believed that participating companies in a zero plan pays an ISP Re 1 per MB as against 25 paisa, this is what the ISP or operator earns from the user today. The ISP or operator is bound to push more bandwidth in the free plans since they make more money out there. They will do this by pushing the current pricing by 4x or more – making a Rs 250 plan for 1GB/month to a Rs 1000 plan so that the consumer is forced to use the free plan. In the free plans, there will be clear biases and net neutrality will be compromised.
In a scenario where free plans exist and current plans prices do not change, net neutrality is not compromised. As per experts, due to limitation of bandwidth, that is impossible and operators are already geared up to push the model in the favor of free, where the playground will be driven by carriage fees. In that scenario, all websites have to pay money to the ISPs or operators |
tramp, keep on a-tramping,
Nothing doing here for you;
If I catch you 'round again,
You will wear the ball and chain.
Keep on tramping, that's the best thing you can do.
He walked up and down the street,
'Till the shoes fell off his feet.
In a house he spied a lady cooking stew,
And he said, "How do you do,
May I chop some wood for you?"
What the lady told him made him feel so blue.
CHORUS
'Cross the street a sign he read,
"Work for Jesus," so it said,
And he said, "Here is my chance, I'll surely try,"
And he kneeled upon the floor,
'Till his knees got rather sore,
But at eating-time he heard the preacher cry-
CHORUS
Down the street he met a cop,
And the copper made him stop,
And he asked him, "When did you blow into town?
Come with me up to the judge."
But the judge he said, "Oh fudge,
Bums that have no money needn't come around."
CHORUS
Finally came that happy day
When his life did pass away,
He was sure he'd go to heaven when he died,
When he reached the pearly gate,
Santa Peter, mean old skate,
Slammed the gate right in his face and loudly cried:
INDEX
WE COME
(Air: "Toreador Song")
Workers, the World!
The Masters call in vain.
Though ground down pitiless,
We rise again;
And to the call of millions crying from the depths,
We shout our message to man--
And from the hearts of all the land
Comes loud and clear
The answering call,
"We Come."
Workers, be brave;
Through nights of toil and pain,
Oppression and slavery,
Priest, gun and chain,
Law and the bribings of a cruel, despotic class,
We march and sing our refrain--
Singing hopes of a million slaves:
"Workers, unite
Unite."
Workers, be strong;
They offer bribes in vain,
Promise and trick us,
Keep us enchained;
But to humanity's call we answering come,
Chanting our far flung refrain--
And from the hearts of all the land
Comes loud and clear
The answer to us,
Workers, unite,
"We Come."
Workers, the World!
Though Masters call in vain,
Grind us down pitiless,
We'll rise again.
And to the call of millions crying from the depths
We fling our challenge for right--
And from the hearts of all the land
Comes loud and clear
The answering call,
"We Come!"
INDEX
THE PREACHER AND THE SLAVE
By Joe Hill
(Tune: "Sweet Bye and Bye")
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
CHORUS
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
And the starvation army they play,
And they sing and they clap and they pray.
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum:
Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
And they holler, they jump and they shout.
"Give your money to Jesus," they say,
"He will cure all diseases today."
If you fight hard for children and wife--
Try to get something good in this life-
You're a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.
Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight:
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:
LAST CHORUS
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
INDEX
THEY ARE ALL FIGHTERS
By Richard Brazier
(Tune: "San Antonio")
There is a bunch of honest workingmen;
They're known throughout the land.
They've seen the horrors of the bull-pen,
From Maine to the Rio Grande.
They've faced starvation, hunger, privation;
Upon them the soldiers were hurled.
Their organization is known to the nation
As the Industrial Workers of the World.
Then hail to this fighting band!
Good luck to their union grand!
CHORUS
They're all fighters from the word go,
And to the master
They'll bring disaster.
And if you'll join them
They'll let you know
Just the reason the boss must go.
They've faced the Pinkertons and Gatling guns
In defense of their natural rights;
They proved themselves to be labor's sons
In all of the workers' fights;
They have been hounded by power unbounded
Of capitalists throughout the land,
But all are astounded, our foes are confounded
For we still remain a union grand.
Then hail to this fighting band!
Good luck to their union grand!
You live on coffee and on doughnuts;
The Boss lives on porterhouse steak.
You work ten hours a day and live in huts;
The Boss lives in the palace you make.
You face starvation, hunger, privation,
But the Boss is always well fed.
Though of low station, you've built this nation--
Built it upon your dead.
Then when will you ever get wise;
When will you open your eyes?
INDEX
THERE IS POWER IN A UNION
By Joe Hill
(Tune: "There Is Power in the Blood")
Would you have freedom from wage slavery,
Then join in the grand Industrial band;
Would you from mis'ry and hunger be free,
Then come! Do your share, like a man.
CHORUS
There is pow'r, there is pow'r
In a band of workingmen,
When they stand hand in hand,
That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r
That must rule in every land-
One Industrial Union Grand.
Would you have mansions of gold in the sky,
And live in a shack, way in the back?
Would you have wings up in heaven to fly,
And starve here with rags on your back?
If you've had "nuff" of "the blood of the lamb,"
Then join in the grand Industrial band;
If, for a change, you would have eggs and ham,
Then come, do your share, like a man.
If you like sluggers to beat off your head,
Then don't organize, all unions despise,
If you want nothing before you are dead,
Shake hands with your boss and look wise.
Come, all ye workers, from every land,
Come, join in the grand Industrial band,
Then we our share of this earth shall demand.
Come on! Do your share, like a man.
INDEX
"Why should one man's belly be empty when ten men
can produce enough to feed a hundred?"
TA-RA-RA-BOMM[sic]DE-AY
By Joe Hill
I had a job once threshing wheat, worked sixteen hours
with hands and feet.
And when the moon was shining bright, they kept me
working all the night.
One moonlight night, I hate to tell, I "accidentally" slipped
and fell.
My pitchfork went right in between some cog wheels of
that thresh-machine.
CHORUS
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
It made a noise that way,
And wheels and bolts and hay,
Went flying every way.
That stingy rube said, "Well!
A thousand gone to hell."
But I did sleep that night,
I needed it all right.
Next day that stingy rube did say, "I'll bring my eggs to
town today;
You grease my wagon up, you mutt, and don't forget to
screw the nut."
I greased his wagon all right, but I plumb forgot to
screw the nut,
And when he started on that trip, the wheel slipped off
and broke his hip.
SECOND CHORUS
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
It made a noise that way,
That rube was sure a sight,
And mad enough to fight;
His whiskers and his legs
Were full of scrambled eggs:
I told him, "That's too bad-
I'm feeling very sad."
And then that farmer said, "You turk! I bet you are an
I-Won't Work."
He paid me off right there, By Gum! So I went home
and told my chum.
Next day when threshing did commence, my chum was
Johnny on the fence;
And 'pon my word, that awkward kid, he dropped his
pitchfork, like I did.
THIRD CHORUS
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
It made a noise that way,
And part of that machine
Hit Reuben on the bean.
He cried, "Oh me, oh my;
I nearly lost my eye."
My partner said, "You're right-
It's bedtime now, good night."
But still that rube was pretty wise, these things did open
up his eyes.
He said, "There must be something wrong; I think I work
my men too long."
He cut the hours and raised the pay, gave ham and eggs
for every day,
Now gets his men from union hall, and has no "accidents"
at all.
FOURTH CHORUS
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
That rube is feeling gay;
He learned his lesson quick,
Just through a simple trick.
For fixing rotten jobs
And fixing greedy slobs,
This is the only way,
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
INDEX
Education is ammunition. Organization the weapon.
Aim true and keep your powder dry.
HOLD THE FORT
(English Transport Workers' Strike Song)
We meet today in Freedom's cause,
And raise our voices high;
We'll join our hands in union strong,
To battle or to die.
CHORUS
Hold the fort for we are coming-
Union men, be strong.
Side by side we battle onward,
Victory will come.
Look, my Comrades, see the union
Banners waving high.
Reinforcements now appearing,
Victory is nigh.
See our numbers still increasing;
Hear the bugle blow.
By our union we shall triumph
Over every foe.
Fierce and long the battle rages,
But we will not fear.
Help will come whene'er it's needed,
Cheer, my Comrades, cheer.
INDEX
THE NINETY AND NINE
By Rose Elizabeth Smith
(Tune: "Ninety and Nine")
There are ninety and nine that work and die,
In hunger and want and cold,
That one may revel in luxury,
And be lapped in the silken fold.
And ninety and nine in their hovels bare,
And one in a palace of riches rare.
From the sweat of their brow the desert blooms
And the forest before them falls;
Their labor has builded noble homes,
And cities with lofty halls;
And the one owns cities and houses and lands
And the ninety and nine have empty hands.
But the night so dreary and dark and long,
At last shall the morning bring;
And over the land the victor's song
Of the ninety and nine shall ring,
And echo afar, from zone to zone,
"Rejoice! for Labor shall have its own."
INDEX
THE ROAD TO EMANCIPATION
By Lone Wolf
( Tune: "Tipperary" )
Now, workingmen, you know you live a life of misery,
So join the union of your class, determined to be free.
Don't let the master gouge your lives for many years to
come,
But organize upon the job and put him on the bum.
CHORUS
It's the road to Emancipation, it's the right way to go;
For the toilers to run the nation and the world, both high
and low.
Kick in, and do your duty; for it's up to you and me--
It's the One Big Union of the Workers that will bring
prosperity.
Don't be a meek and lowly slave like lots of those you
meet;
Don't be a servile scissor bill and lick the bosses' feet.
Don't let them starve you off the earth, don't fear their
prison cell,
Make your laws in the union hall--the rest can go to hell.
Now, workingmen, the masters they have no more jobs to
give;
You must form the taking habit if you ever wish to live.
Postponing meals is suicide on the installment plan,
So organize to get the goods, and take them like a man.
INDEX
MR. BLOCK
By Joe Hill
(Air: "It Looks To Me Like a Big Time Tonight")
Please give me your attention, I'll introduce to you
A man that is a credit to "Our Red, White and Blue";
His head is made of lumber, and solid as a rock;
He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.
And Block he thinks he may
Be President some day.
CHORUS
Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,
You take the cake,
You make me ache.
Tie on a rock to your block and then jump in the lake,
Kindly do that for Liberty's sake.
Yes, Mr. Block is lucky; he found a job, by gee!
The sharks got seven dollars, for job and fare and fee.
They shipped him to a desert and dumped him with his
truck,
But when he tried to find his job, he sure was out of luck.
He shouted, "That's too raw,
I'll fix them with the law."
Block hiked back to the city, but wasn't doing well.
He said, "I'll join the union--the great A.F. of L."
He got a job next morning, got fired in the night,
He said, "I'll see Sam Gompers and he'll fix that foreman
right."
Sam Gompers said, "You see,
You've got our sympathy."
Election day he shouted, "A Socialist for Mayor!"
The "comrade" got elected, he happy was for fair,
But after the election he got an awful shock,
A great big socialistic Bull did rap him on the block.
And Comrade Block did sob,
"I helped him to his job."
The money kings in Cuba blew up the gunboat Maine,
But Block got awful angry and blamed it all on Spain.
He went right in the battle and there he lost his leg,
And now he's peddling shoestrings and is walking on a peg.
He shouts, "Remember Maine,
Hurrah! To hell with Spain!"
Poor Block he died one evening, I'm very glad to state,
He climbed the golden ladder up to the pearly gate.
He said, "Oh, Mr. Peter, one word I'd like to tell,
I'd like to meet the Astorbilts and John D. Rockefell."
Old Pete said, "Is that so?
You'll meet them down below."
INDEX
STAND UP! YE WORKERS
By Ethel Comer
(Air: "Stand Up for Jesus")
Stand up! Stand up! Ye workers;
Stand up in all your might.
Unite beneath our banner,
For Liberty and right.
From victory unto victory
This army sure will go,
To win the world for labor
And vanquish every foe.
Stand up! Stand up! Ye workers;
Stand up in every land.
Unite, and fight for freedom,
In ONE BIG UNION grand.
Put on the workers' armor,
Which is the card of Red,
Then all the greedy tyrants
Will have to earn their bread.
Arouse! Arouse! Ye toilers,
The strife will not be long.
This day the noise of battle,
The next the victor's song.
All ye that slave for wages,
Stand up and break your chain:
Unite in ONE BIG UNION--
you've got a world to gain.
INDEX
CHRISTIANS AT WAR
By John [ ]Kendrick
(Tune: "Onward, Christian Soldiers")
Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty's way is plain:
Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain.
Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,
All your acts are sanctified by the lamb on high;
If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.
Onward, Christian soldiers, rip and tear and smite!
Let the gentle Jesus, bless your dynamite.
Splinter skulls with shrapnel, fertilize the sod;
Folks who do not speak your tongue, deserve the curse of
God.
Smash the doors of every home, pretty maidens seize;
Use your might and sacred right to treat them as you
please.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Eat and drink your fill;
Rob with bloody fingers, Christ O. K.'s the bill.
Steal the farmer's savings, take their grain and meat;
Even though the children starve, the Saviour's bums must
eat.
Burn the peasant's cottages, orphans leave bereft;
In Jehovah's holy name, wreak ruin right and left.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Drench the land with gore;
Mercy is a weakness all the gods abhor.
Bayonet the babies, jab the mothers, too;
Hoist the cross of Calvary to hallow all you do.
File your bullets' noses flat, poison every well;
God decrees your enemies must all go plumb to hell.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Blighting all you meet,
Trampling human freedom under pious feet.
Praise the Lord whose dollar sign dupes his favored race!
Make the foreign trash respect your bullion brand of
grace.
Trust in mock salvation, serve as pirates' tools;
History will say of you: "That pack of G-- d--- fools."
INDEX
WORKERS Of THE WORLD
( Air: "Lillibulero" )
By Connell
Stand up, ye toilers, why crouch ye like cravens?
Why clutch an existence of insult and want?
Why stand to be plucked by an army of ravens,
Or hoodwink'd forever by twaddle and cant?
Think of the wrongs ye bear,
Think on the rags ye wear,
Think on the insults endur'd from your birth;
Toiling in snow and rain,
Rearing up heaps of grain,
All for the tyrants who grind you to earth.
Your brains are as keen as the brains of your masters,
In swiftness and strength ye surpass them by far;
Ye've brave hearts to teach you to laugh at disasters,
Ye vastly outnumber your tyrants in war.
Why, then, like cowards stand,
Using not brain or hand,
Thankful like dogs when they throw you a bone?
What right have they to take
Things that ye toil to make?
Know ye not, workers, that all is your own?
Rise in your might, brothers, bear it no longer;
Assemble in masses throughout the whole land;
Show these incapables who are the stronger
When workers and idlers confronted shall stand.
Thro' Castle, Court and Hall,
Over their acres all,
Onwards we'll press like waves of the sea,
Claiming the wealth we've made,
Ending the spoiler's trade;
Labor shall triumph and mankind be free.
INDEX
"War is Hell" for the workers. Let us make the Class
War a nightmare for the masters.
"The poor--is any country his? What are to me your
glories and your industries--they are not mine."
SOLIDARITY FOREVER
By Ralph H. Chaplin
( Tune: "John Brown's Body" )
When the Union's inspiration through the worker's blood
shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun,
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength
of one?
But the Union makes us strong.
CHORUS
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the Union makes us strong.
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy para-
site
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with
his might?
Is there anything left for us but to organize and fight?
For the Union makes us strong.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where
they trade,
Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of
railroad laid.
Now we stand, outcast and starving,'mid the wonders we
have made;
But the Union makes us strong.
All the world that's owned by idle drones, is ours and ours
alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skywards,
stone by stone.
It is ours, and not to slave in, but to master and to own,
While the Union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to
earn.
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can
turn.
We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom,
when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded
gold;
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand
fold.
We can bring to birth the new world from the ashes of
the old,
For the Union makes us strong.
INDEX
THE WHITE SLAVE
By Joe Hill
( Air: "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland" )
One little girl, fair as a pearl,
Worked every day in a laundry;
All that she made for food she paid,
So she slept on a park bench so soundly;
An old procuress spied here[sic] there,
She came and whispered in her ear:
CHORUS
Come with me now, my girly,
Don't sleep out in the cold;
Your face and tresses curly
Will bring you fame and gold,
Automobiles to ride in, diamonds and silk to wear,
You'll be a star bright, down in the red light,
You'll make your fortune there.
Same little girl, no more a pearl,
Walks all alone 'long the river,
Five years have flown, her health is gone,
She would look at the water and shiver,
Whene'er she'd stop to rest and sleep,
She'd hear a voice call from the deep:
CHORUS
Girls in this way, fall every day,
And have been falling for ages,
Who is to blame? You know his name,
It's the boss that pays starvation wages.
A homeless girl can always hear
Temptations calling everywhere.
CHORUS
INDEX
OVERALLS AND SNUFF
(Tune: "Wearing of the Green")
One day as I was walking along the railroad track,
I met a man in Wheatland with his blankets on his back,
He was an old-time hop picker, I'd seen his face before,
I knew he was a wobbly, by the button that he wore.
By the button that he wore, by the button that he wore,
I knew he was a wobbly, by the button that he wore.
He took his blankets off his back and sat down on the rail
And told us some sad stories 'bout the workers down in jail.
He said the way they treat them there, he never saw the
like,
For they're putting men in prison just for going out on
strike,
Just for going out on strike, just for going out on strike,
They're putting men in prison, just for going out on strike.
They have sentenced Ford and Suhr, and they've got them
in the pen,
If they catch a wobbly in their burg, they vag him there
and then.
There is one thing I can tell you, and it makes the bosses
sore,
As fast as they can pinch us, w e can always get some
more.
We can always get some more, we can always get some
more,
As fast as they can pinch us, we can always get some
more. Oh, Horst and Durst are mad as hell, they don't know
what to do.
And the rest of those hop barons are all feeling mighty
blue.
Oh, we've tied up all their hop fields, and the scabs refuse
to come,
And we're going to keep on striking till we put them on
the bum.
Till we put them on the bum, till we put them on the bum,
We're going to keep on striking till we put them on the
bum.
Now we've got to stick together, boys, and strive with all
our might,
We must free Ford and Suhr, boys, we're got to win this
fight.
From these scissor bill hop barons we are taking no more
bluff,
We'll pick no more damned hops for them, for overalls and
snuff,
For our overalls and snuff, for our overalls and snuff,
We'll pick no more damned hops for them, for overalls
and snuff.
INDEX
DON'T TAKE MY PAPA AWAY FROM ME
Words and Music by Joe Hill
(Written just before his execution)
A little girl with her father stayed, in a cabin across the
sea,
Her mother dear in the cold grave lay; with her father
she's always be--
But then one day the great war broke out and the father
was told to go;
The little girl pleaded--her father she needed.
She begged, cried and pleaded so:
CHORUS.
Don't take my papa away from me, don't leave me there
all alone.
He has cared for me so tenderly ever since mother was
gone.
Nobody ever like him can be, no one can so with me play.
Don't take my papa away from me; please don't take
papa away.
Her tender pleadings were all in vain, and her father
went to the war.
He'll never kiss her good night again, for he fell'mid the
cannon's roar.
Greater a soldier was never born, but his brave heart was
pierced one day;
And as he was dying, he heard some one crying,
A girl's voice from far away:
THE HOPE OF THE AGES
By E. Nesbit
(Tune: "Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue")
If you dam up the river of progress--
At your peril and cost let It be;
That river must seawards despite you--
'Twill break down your dams and be free;
And we heed not the pitiful barriers
That you in its way have downcast;
For your efforts but add to the torrent,
Whose flood must overwhelm you at last.
CHORUS.
For our banner is rais'd and unfurled;
At your head our defiance is hurled;
Our cry is the cry of the ages--
Our hope is the hope of the world.
We laugh in the face of the forces
That strengthen the flood they oppose;
For the harder oppression the fiercer
The current will be when it flows.
We shall win, and the tyrant's battalions
Will scatter like chaff in the fight,
From which the true Soldiers of Freedom
Shall gather new courage and might.
Whether leading the van of the fighters,
In bitterest stress of the strife;
Or patiently bearing the burden
Of changelessly commonplace life,
One hope we have ever before us,
Our aim to attain and fulfill,
One watchword we cherish to mark us,
One kindred and brotherhood still.
What matter if failure on failure
Crowd closely upon us and press?
When a hundred have bravely been beaten
The hundred and first wins success.
Our watchword is "Freedom"; new soldiers
Flock each day where her flag is unfurled,
Our cry is the cry of the ages,
Our hope is the hope of the world.
INDEX
STUNG RIGHT
By Joe Hill
(Air: "Sunlight, Sunlight")
When I was hiking 'round the town to find a job one day,
I saw a sign "A thousand men are wanted right away,"
To take a trip around the world in Uncle Sammy's fleet,
I signed my name a dozen times upon a great big sheet.
CHORUS.
Stung right, stung right, S-T-U-N-G,
Stung right, stung right, E. Z. Mark, that's me;
When my term is over, and again I'm free,
There'll be no more trips around the world for me.
The man he said, "The U. S. fleet, that is no place for
slaves,
The only thing you have to do is stand and watch the
waves."
But in the morning, five o'clock, they woke me from my
snooze,
To scrub the deck and polish brass and shine the captain's
shoes.
One day a dude in uniform to me commenced to shout,
I simply plugged him in the jaw and knocked him down
and out;
They slammed me right in irons then and said, "You are
a case."
On bread and water then I lived for twenty-seven days.
One day the captain said, "Today I'll show you something
nice,
All hands line up, we'll go ashore and have some exercise."
He made us run for seven miles as fast as we could run,
And with a packing on our back that weighed a half a ton.
Some time ago when Uncle Sam he had a war with Spain,
And many of the boys in blue were in the battle slain,
Not all w be killed by bullets, though; no, not by any
means,
The biggest part that died were killed by Armour's Pork
and Beans.
INDEX
THE OPTIMISTIC LABORITES
By John F. Kendrick
(Tune: "The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls")
We'll sing the praise of future days,
The happy times to be,
When every man shall guard the plan
That every man be free.
We have no ties beyond the skies,
Our loves and hopes are here;
No holy fool can make us drool
The dismal hymns of fear.
With ready hand we take our stand
To hope and work and fight;
And while we live, our strength we'll give
For liberty and right.
We make all wealth, conserve all health,
By cunning craft and trade;
We bring all joys, for we're the boys
Of hammer, brush and spade.
Then live the part that warms the heart,
And wakens manhood's pride:
All Nature's laws confirm the cause
For which our comrades died.
Some day we'll own the fields we've sown,
When hunger's rule is past;
No child shall slave to feed a knave,
When man is free at last.
INDEX
THE "BLANKET STIFF"
He built the road,
With others of his class he built the road,
Now o'er it, many a weary mile, he packs his load,
Chasing a job, spurred on by hunger's goad,
He walks and walks and walks and walks
And wonders why in Hell he built the road.
CASEY JONES--THE UNION SCAB
By Joe Hill
The Workers on the S. P. Line to strike sent out a call;
But Casey Jones, the engineer, he wouldn't strike at all;
His boiler it was leaking, and its drivers on the bum,
And his engine and its bearings, they were all out of plumb.
CHORUS.
Casey Jones kept his junk pile running;
Casey Jones was working double time;
Casey Jones got a wooden medal,
For being good and faithful on the S. P. line.
The Workers said to Casey: "Won't you help us win this
strike?"
But Casey said: "Let me alone, you'd better take a hike."
Then some one put a bunch of railroad ties across the
track,
And Casey hit the river with an awful crack.
Casey Jones hit the river bottom;
Casey Jones broke his blooming spine,
Casey Jones was an Angeleno,
He took a trip to heaven on the S. P. line.
When Casey Jones got up to heaven to the Pearly Gate,
He said "I'm Casey Jones, the guy that pulled the S. P.
freight."
"You're just the man," said Peter; "our musicians went
on strike;
You can get a job a-scabbing any time you like."
Casey Jones got a job in heaven;
Casey Jones was doing mighty fine;
Casey Jones went scabbing on the angels,
Just like he did to workers on the S. P. line.
The angels got together, and they said it wasn't fair,
For Casey Jones to go around a-scabbing everywhere.
The Angels' Union No. 23, they sure were there,
And they promptly fired Casey down the Golden Stair.
Casey Jones went to Hell a-flying.
"Casey Jones," the Devil said, "Oh fine;
Casey Jones, get busy shoveling sulphur;
That's what you get for scabbing on the S. P. line."
INDEX
IT IS THE UNION
By Richard Brazier
(Tune: "We Have a Navy")
Sing a song in praise of toiling masses,
Sing a song about our sons of toil;
Sing of wrongs done to the working classes,
Wrongs that make our hearts boil.
We have always borne the blows and lashes-
No more we'll patient stand,
But on every hand, throughout this splendid land,
We sons of toil will make our stand.
Then in our glory will we tower,
What will be the secret of our power?
CHORUS.
It is the Union, the Industrial Union--
Our banner is unfurled.
We will unite in all our splendid might
In the Industrial Workers of the World.
We have a union, a fighting union,
And our masters know that, too.
It will keep them in their place
When they know they have to face
Our union of workingmen that's true.
For countless years and ages we've been enslaved
Beneath the capitalistic rule;
We, the strong, cringing to those men depraved.
In whose hands we have ever been a tool.
But the day of liberty is dawning--
Freedom now draws nigh.
We must unite to win the fight--
Wage slavery then will die.
Then in our glory will we tower;
Great will be the workers' power.
INDEX
An eight-hour day for all employed workers would put
thousands of the unemployed to work.
WE WILL SING ONE SONG
By Joe Hill
(Air: "My Old Kentucky Home")
We will sing one song of the meek and humble slave,
The horn-handed son of the toil,
He's toiling hard from the cradle to the grave,
But his master reaps the profits from his toil.
Then we'll sing one song of the greedy master class,
They're vagrants in broadcloth, indeed,
They live by robbing the ever-toiling mass,
Human blood they spill to satisfy their greed.
CHORUS.
Organize! Oh, toilers, come organize your might;
Then we'll sing one song of the workers' commonwealth.
Full of beauty, full of love and health.
We will sing one song of the politician sly,
He's talking of changing the laws;
Election day all the drinks and smokes he'll buy,
While he's living from the sweat of your brow.
Then we'll sing one song of the girl below the line,
She's scorned and despised everywhere,
While in their mansions the "keepers" wine and dine
From the profits that immoral traffic bear.
We will sing one song of the preacher, fat and sleek,
He tells you of homes in the sky.
He says, "Be generous, be lowly, and be meek,
If you don't you'll sure get roasted when you die."
Then we'll sing one song of the poor and ragged tramp,
He carries his home on his back;
Too old to work, he's not wanted 'round the camp,
So he wanders without aim along the track.
We will sing one song of the children in the mills,
They're taken from playgrounds and schools,
In tender years made to go the pace that kills,
In the sweatshops,'mong the looms and the spools.
Then we'll sing one song of the One Big Union Grand,
The hope of the toiler and slave,
It's coming fast; it is sweeping sea and land,
To the terror of the grafter and the knave.
INDEX
THE REBEL GIRL
Words and Music by Joe Hill
(Copyrighted, 1916)
There are women of many descriptions
In this queer world, as everyone knows,
Some are living in beautiful mansions,
And are wearing the finest of clothes.
There are blue blooded queens and princesses,
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl;
But the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl.
CHORUS.
That's the Rebel Girl, that's the Rebel Girl!
To the working class she's a precious pearl.
She brings courage, pride and joy
To the fighting Rebel Boy.
We've had girls before, but we need some more
In the Industrial Workers of the World.
For it's great to fight for freedom
With a Rebel Girl.
Yes, her hands may be hardened from labor,
And her dress may not be very fine;
But a heart in her bosom is beating
That is true to her class and her kind.
And the grafters in terror are trembling
When her spite and defiance she'll hurl;
For the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl.
INDEX
WE'RE READY
(Air: "Soldier's Song")
Courage and honor to him who's jailed;
Our hearts shall cheer him and cry "All Hail!"
Our hands shall help to win the fight--
We're ready to fight, we're ready to die
For Liberty.
INDEX
Words and Music of "The Rebel Girl" may be obtained
in popular sheet from by applying to I. W. W. Publishing
Bureau. Price, 25 cents.
WAGE WORKERS, COME JOIN THE UNION
(Tune: "Battle Hymn of the Republic")
We have seen the reaper toiling in the heat of summer sun,
We have seen his children needy when the harvesting was
done,
We have seen a mighty armor dying, helpless, one by one,
While their flag went marching on.
CHORUS.
Wage workers, come join the union!
Wage workers, come join the union!
Wage workers, come join the union!
Industrial Workers of the World.
O, the army of the wretched, how they swarm the city
street--
We have seen |
Gareth Southgate’s England squad because of a knee injury but is expected to be available for the trip to Anfield.
Mourinho will be without Marouane Fellaini because of a serious knee problem. The midfielder had been impressive form, scoring four times in six appearances for United, but strained medial ligaments in Belgium’s 4-3 victory over Bosnia-Herzegovina on Saturday. Fellaini is unlikely return until next month and as Paul Pogba has a serious hamstring problem, Mourinho has Nemanja Matic and Ander Herrera as his sole frontline midfielders available to face Liverpool.DNA is setting the record straight on ancient Canaanites.
For the first time, scientists have deciphered the complete genetic instruction manuals of Canaanites. By comparing five Canaanite genomes with those of other ancient and modern populations, the researchers identified the Canaanites’ ancestors and discovered their descendants, modern Lebanese people.
The results, reported online July 27 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, give new insight into the origins and fate of a people whose story has largely been told through the secondhand accounts of its contemporaries.
The Canaanites emerged in the Levant, a region east of the Mediterranean Sea, 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. This cultural group, which established extensive trade networks and colonies across the Mediterranean region, left behind few written records, perhaps because they wrote on papyrus rather than clay. So mostMansfieldism Reconsidered
Jon Roland
In a letter to James Madison, February 17, 1826, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
... In the selection of our Law Professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles. You will recollect that before the Revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students, and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth. but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students' hornbook, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be Whigs, because they no longer know what Whigism or republicanism means....
What was Jefferson referring to by the term “Mansfieldism”? It was a term the meaning of which was known by Madison, and presumably others of their circle, but only brief references have survived to shed light on what they meant, and therefore on historical investigation of the original understandings of the Constitution.
Some scholars might seize on the reference by Jefferson to Lord Mansfield in his 1824 letter to John Cartwright, in which he writes:
I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law.... Lord Mansfield, with a little qualification, in Evans' case, in 1767, says that "the essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common law."
But Mansfieldism as a doctrine is usually discussed in opposition to the views of Lord Camden, which might be called Camdenism. Their main area of disagreement was over the role of the trial jury, with Mansfield taking the position that the jury was to consider only the facts in a case, and not the law, and Camden holding that the jury must, in reaching a general verdict, review the legal decisions of the bench, as well as decide the facts in a case. As discussed by William E. Nelson,
... juries rather than judges spoke the last word on law enforcement in nearly all, if not all, of the eighteenth-century American colonies.... eighteenth-century juries, unlike juries today, usually possessed the power to determine both law and fact.... In the early 1770s [John] Adams observed in his diary: "It was never yet disputed, or doubted, that a general Verdict, given under the Direction of the Court in Point of Law, was a legal Determination of the Issue." Adams argued that even a verdict contrary to the court's directions should stand, for it was "not only... [every juror's] right but his Duty in that Case to find the Verdict according to his own best Understanding, Judgment and Conscience, tho in Direct opposition to the Direction of the court." In 1781-82 Thomas Jefferson painted an equally broad picture of the power of juries over the law in his Notes on Virginia. "It is usual for the jurors to decide the fact, and to refer the law arising on it to the decision of the judges," Jefferson wrote. "But this division of the subject lies with their discretion only. And if the question relate to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact." As late as 1793 John Jay, sitting as chief justice of the United States, informed a civil jury that while the court usually determined the law and the jury found the facts, the jury nevertheless had "a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." "[B]oth objects," Jay concluded, "are lawfully, within your power of decision."
Whigs and Tories, Camdenians and Mansfieldians
The writings of Edward Coke, which Jefferson preferred to the writings of William Blackstone, needed to be adapted to the needs of the colonies and to the new United States, with additional notes or comments, and cites to more recent cases. But no legal scholar undertook to do that, and Coke’s writings, in what was then already becoming an antique English, did not lend themselves as well to such an adaptation. Tucker’s Blackstone filled that role, beginning in 1803, and continued to serve until displaced, in turn, by the treatises of James Kent in 1826, Joseph Story in 1833, and Thomas M. Cooley in several works 1868-91. However, all these writers except Tucker, tended to follow the tory views of the Hamiltonians rather than the whig views of the Jeffersonians. They tended to favor Mansfieldism, and to accept a stronger form of stare decisis, as binding precedent rather than persuasive, and were more disposed to acquiesce in creeping departures from original understanding.
Most of the controversy over the role of the jury in criminal cases arose from cases of treason, sedition, and libel, which were based on criminal statutes, rather than from trials for common law crimes like murder or robbery. In his treatise on libel, Joseph Towers writes:
English juries have been in possession, time immemorial, of the right of giving a general verdict, of determining both the law and the fact, in every criminal case brought before them.
The First Amendment right to petition arose from the conflict between citizens peacefully assembling to seek redress for grievances and the British government, which tended to view such assemblies as sedition and to prosecute them for a crime, or to prosecute them for libel for criticizing officials, in speaking or publishing, on the grounds that such criticism incited sedition.
A widely-read work that defended the Camdenian position, criticized the government, and proposed reforms, was the Letters of Junius, by an anonymous author, 1767-72, which were collected and published in the United States in 1791 as a single volume. The preface, a 'Dedication to the English Nation,' exhorts readers "never to suffer an invasion of YOUR political constitution, however minute the instance may appear, to pass by, without a determined, persevering resistance. One precedent creates another.— They soon accumulate and constitute law."
Mansfieldism did have its defenders. John Bowles published a treatise supporting the Mansfieldian position in 1791 that was rejected in America with the adoption of the Bill of Rights that year.
The language of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...” can be best understood as intended to prohibit, among other things, criminal libel laws.
To understand what the Jeffersonians seem to have been concerned about in 1826 regarding judicial due process and the role of the jury we need to examine the history of the written legal pleading, and the practice of requiring written legal pleadings and briefs to be submitted in advance of a trial, and of the bench hearing arguments on them, and deciding them, outside the hearing of the jury. That was not the practice in either England or America in the 18 th century when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were adopted. Written legal pleadings and briefs were mainly for appeals, and little used in most trials, especially criminal trials. Most argument on key issues of law was conducted orally in the presence of the jury. This was the standard of practice that comprised part of what the Founders meant when the used the terms “jury trial” and “due process”.
By 1826 in the United States it seems that much if not most legal argument had been removed from the hearing of the jury, and evidence suggests that this was at least a critical element of the practice that Jefferson was complaining about, to someone he could expect would agree with him, even if he did not expand on their concerns as fully as we might prefer.
Argue Law before Jury
My thesis in this article is that legal argument in the presence of the jury is an essential element of due process as it was originally understood when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified; that in rendering a general verdict, such as guilty or not guilty, even though the jury may not be specifically reviewing each legal decision of the bench, the jury is necessarily sustaining or rejecting the decisions when they reach their general verdict; that the decisions on law are an essential element of a general verdict; and that the jury cannot have sufficient information to competently render such a verdict without hearing the argument and making a general review of the decisions of the bench.
The implication of this is that most of the criminal jury trials for the last 180 years, in not arguing all issues of law in the presence of the jury, have violated the due process rights of the defendants, in what should be regarded as reversible error. The duty of those sworn to defend the Constitution, as originally understood, is to correct this error, and restore the due process of arguing all issues of law in the presence of the jury.
There are further implications of this. Jurors must receive copies of all pleadings, have access to an adequate law library, and have instructions on how to use it. Furthermore, instruction in law, equivalent to at least the first year of law school, including instruction on how to use a law library, should be made part of the public school curriculum, so that the public from whom the jury is drawn will be prepared to serve as jurors, and will need little further instruction after they are chosen.
Now it should be understood that arguments on law are not arguments on the admissibility of evidence, unless there is a statute prescribing what evidence is admissible or not admissible. Motions in limine to exclude prejudicial evidence from the hearing of the jury were not unheard of in 18th century legal practice, but such motions excluding evidence or argument by the defense would have been then considered an abuse of due process in America, and they are a common abuse in courts today.
The main constitutional problem in criminal legal practice today is that people are being convicted of crimes as the result of legal decisions and jury instructions by the bench, perhaps based on what are regarded as binding precedent, that the offense charged is authorized by a statute, and properly applied to the facts in the case, or that the statute is authorized by the constitution for the jurisdiction, when a jury, if it could hear argument that the logical chain of authority is broken, or that the precedent was wrongly decided, or that the charge is not properly applied to the facts in the case, would acquit.
The distinction between “fact” and “law” is carried from English law, which was based on a constitution in which whatever the king and his ministers said was law, with a Parliament which functioned as an ongoing constitutional convention that could amend the constitution from one act to the next. However, the adoption of a written Constitution by the United States represents a fundamental change in that distinction. Under the U.S. Constitution, all issues of law are also issues of fact: It is a fact issue whether the law was properly adopted, and the logical chain of authority, or lack thereof, for any official act, is also a fact, and a fact the decision on which is too important to be left to corruptible public officials.
Trial by Jury
We must keep in mind why the Founders established the right to trial by jury in the Constitution. It wasn’t to involve the public in the judicial process, or because jurors know the law better, or because jury verdicts would be more acceptable to the parties in cases. It was because judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and other public officials, can’t be trusted. Even if not initially corrupted when they take office, they hold their offices for long enough that they can become corrupted, whether by bribery, intimidation, ambition, or the undue influence of sponsors or cronies. They often become biased by their official duties, prone to become arrogant, impatient, careless, or jaded and dismissive of the ways the specific facts in each case can affect what is the just disposition of that case. A jury of citizens selected at random, excluding only those prejudiced by their previous involvement with the parties and facts in the case, comes with a fresh perspective, and if protected from tampering, are more likely to render verdicts that accord with the public sense of what is lawful and just, in the long term.
To understand the jury system, people also need to understand why our ancestors adopted the number twelve as the number for a trial jury, or the number needed to decide in a grand jury, or that a trial jury be unanimous. A unanimous verdict of twelve derives directly from the principle that a jury decides not just whether the accused committed the act, but whether the act was unlawful.
The jury arose from the English system of common law, which included common law crimes. Without a statute defining what is and is not an offense, the jury, like the bench, had to decide whether the act alleged was a violation, based on custom and precedent. The emergence of criminal statutes made it easier, when the statute was well-written, to reach a verdict, but since a statute is necessarily written in general terms, its applicability to the facts in a case remained a matter for the jury.
A unanimous verdict of twelve makes it more probable than not that there will be at least one juror who does not think the law makes the alleged act an offense if there is not at least a 94% level of support in the community for acts of that kind being offenses. Although the Founders did not adopt a supermajority rule for the adoption of criminal statutes, they arguably should have done so, to match the requirement for a unanimous verdict of a jury of twelve. The criminal sanctions of deprivation or life, limb, or liberty were considered too serious to be defined by statutes adopted by simple majorities, even if the Constitution allowed it.
Trial Reports
To find historical evidence for this thesis, we need only examine surviving trial reports.
In the 1735 report of the trial of John Peter Zenger, the jury decided that truth was a defense against libel. The charge was based on an English statute, tried in the colony of New York, defended by Andrew Hamilton, with a New York jury. The report is a transcript of oral argument made in the presence of the defendant, the jury, and the public. Although Hamilton did not challenge the constitutionality of the statute, he did challenge its applicability to cases of this kind, essentially the definition of the term “libel”, which today would be treated as legal argument, to be excluded from the hearing of the jury.
In the 1770 report, The Trial of John Almon, Bookseller,... For selling Junius's Letter, we see what we would today easily identify as a political trial, an attack on the publisher, presumably to pressure him into revealing the name of the author. That didn’t work, and the publisher became a hero in the cause of a free press, but the transcript of the trial reveals that argument on issues of law was made in the presence of the jury, even if the bench, Lord Mansfield, tried to manipulate the outcome in favor of the prosecution in his statements to the jury, the foreman of which was a lawyer, whose career depended on pleasing the judge.
In 1777, John Horne Tooke, a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, also known as the Constitutional Society, the Constitution Society or Federalist Society of its day and country, published Address on Libels, Case of John Horne, as a criticism of indictment by information, rather than by grand jury. This case may have contributed to requirement for grand juries in U.S. Bill of Rights, but again, it shows argument on questions of law in the presence of the jury.
The Constitutional Society called a convention of its members and supporters to adopt proposals for republican reforms. The British government responded by trying its leaders, particularly its Secretary, Thomas Hardy, for treason, for “encompassing the death of the king”. Evidently it was afraid the American Revolution might be imported to Britain. The 1794 report of the trial provides insight into how a pro-prosecution bench would constrain the jury and manipulate them to get a conviction. This case provides both a manifesto for whig reformers and a how-to manual for tyrants.
In1786 there was an interesting trial on a quo warranto before a special jury composed of prominent citizens, all or most of whom were read in the law. While it was not an ordinary jury, and would raise due process issues in the United States, it presents an interesting way of solving the problem of arguing complex legal issues before a jury, by selecting legally trained persons as jurors.
American patriot Thomas Paine got prosecuted in England in 1792 for the publication that year of his book, Rights of Man, and a jury found him guilty. His revenge was to publish his report of the trial, which from the viewpoint of his prosecutors might have been seen as more of a libel than the original work was.
The Hardy trial was followed in 1800 by The Two Trials of John Fries for Treason, which exhibits the further Mansfieldization of the role of the jury in Britain, even though by this time Mansfield was dead.
We can see in this progression of trials the increasing narrowing of the role of the jury as the establishment sought to suppress its critics and reformers. Eventually, the reformers’ causes would win, but not before a legacy of bad precedents was laid down that oppresses people to this day, not only in Britain, but by a peculiar kind of seepage, eventually to the United States and other nations.
Charges to Juries
In 1725 James Astry published a short treatise, A General Charge to All Grand Juries, and Other Juries, which was intended to serve as a model. It provides a base for comparison to later charges that reflect the emergence of Mansfieldism.
There was a rather prejudicial 1791 charge to the grand jury in a case against persons characterized as “levellers”, who the establishment of that era in England treated the way the establishment would treat “communists” a couple of centuries later, even though they were only demanding a right to vote for citizens without a property qualification, and voting districts, or boroughs, with more nearly equal population. It reveals the beginnings of the trend toward the capture of grand juries by professional prosecutors.
Law Manuals
Some early manuals provide insight into the practice of law in 18 th century England that indicate the role of the jury and legal argument in their presence. One such manual is The English Lawyer, showing the Nature and Forms of Original Writs, Processes, and Mandates, by William Bohun. Another is The Present Practice of the Court of Common Pleas, by Joseph Harrison. A third is The Attorney's Practice in the Court of Common Pleas, by Robert Richardson. One has to infer the role of the jury in hearing and deciding legal issues indirectly, but the careful reader can discern what was the practice of the time.
Commentaries
Several early commentaries on the role of the jury are instructive.
In Rhode Island in 1787 there was a legal tender case that may have inspired the prohibition in the U.S. Constitution of states making anything but gold or silver legal tender for the payment of debt. However, the case did not go to a jury, because the bench ruled the statute unconstitutional and the court lacking in jurisdiction, which resulted in legislative action against the bench. The report of that case, written by James M. Varnum, provides an eloquent legal argument on the issues in the case that also sheds light on the role of the jury in the American tradition of the era.
In 1803 an anonymous author wrote a short treatise, Observations on the Trial by Jury. This was advice to the Pennsylvania Legislature on the administration of the state judiciary which touched on the role of the jury.
In 1815 there was published in Britain a review of the progress of Mansfieldization in that country also entitled Observations on the Trial by Jury.
Later U.S. Cases
In Games v. Dunn, 39 U.S. 322 (1840), the Supreme Court held that when judge and jury disagree on a question of law, the decision of the judge prevails. Previously, the decision of the jury had often prevailed. This was the key break in the chain of precedents that sustained the right to have a jury review questions of law and override the bench. However, it does show that up to that time at least, legal argument was often, if not always, made to juries.
In the landmark case of Sparf & Hansen v. United States, 156 U.S. 51, 64 (1895), it was held not to be a reversible error not to instruct the jury of their power to judge the law in bringing a general verdict. The majority opinion essentially accepted the argument that it was general knowledge and as such did not need a specific instruction, but this and later precedents have since been taken by judges as a license to forbid counsel from informing the jury of its power and duty to judge the law, to the point of holding persons in contempt who attempt to do so, or seeking to disbar lawyers that try to do it.
Fully Informed Jury Movement
There is already a movement and an organization devoted to informing jurors of their power and duty to review the law in a trial. However, its present leadership has adopted the mistaken doctrine that the duty of the jury is to render a verdict based on conscience and a natural sense of justice. That is incorrect. Jurors are judicial officers, just as much as the bench is, even if only for the duration of a trial. The Constitution provides that “... all judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution;” It is unconstitutional to have jurors take an oath to “follow the law as given by the judge” or words to that effect. Jurors should take the same oath the bench does, to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States [and of this State]”, or words to the same effect. Their duty is to the governing constitution, not to the presiding officer of the court, who is called “judge”, but shares the duties of judge with the jury when there is one. The duty of the jury is to do what a good judge is supposed to do, to decide the issues of fact, and to review the legal decisions of the bench in reaching their general verdict, deciding whether those decisions are authorized by the governing constitution and statutes, and returning a verdict of not guilty if they have a reasonable doubt about that.
Contrary to movement leaders, conscience and a natural sense of justice is not enough. To fulfill their duty to defend the constitution from government usurpation, they must hear the legal arguments, read copies of the pleadings, and have the use of a law library. They can’t be expected to know the law well enough to perform their duty without hearing the legal arguments. We can’t expect that of the bench or the lawyers in the case. Every trial is an educational process for everyone concerned. Almost every case contains some elements new to someone involved in it. Most jurors might lack legal training, but that is a deficiency of our education system, and they can learn, just as the other participants in the trial do. The process of educating them provides a valuable check on law becoming an esoteric art not understood by even its most experienced practitioners. If reasonable persons who serve on a jury can’t learn to understand the law well enough to render a verdict consistent with the constitution, then how can we expect a reasonable person to obey the law under which he might be tried?
Many legal practitioners, especially prosecutors and judges who are former prosecutors, will object that arguing issues of law in the presence of the jury, and inviting them to review the legal decisions of the bench, will make trials too long and expensive, will “confuse the jury”, and result in more hung juries or acquittals. During the transition away from the Mansfieldian order, that is likely to be true. Correcting errors is usually painful, especially if the errors have gone uncorrected too long. But society will adjust. Education will improve when there is a demand for it. Public interest and debate will increase, so that people will educate themselves. Lawyers and judges will adjust their presentations to make them more accessible to laypersons. The law itself will become more accessible, and this will benefit practitioners as much as laity.
It probably won’t have that much of an effect on most ordinary cases. The cases on which it will have an impact are precisely those that need to be impacted, the political cases, where undue influences are at play to fix the outcome. Those are the cases that produce unsatisfactory and unjust results, that undermine public confidence in law and the judicial system, and that build festering resentments that can lead to civil disorder.
The Present Divide
We find ourselves in an unstable state of tension between a Mansfieldian judicial establishment that attempts to manipulate trial and grand juries for their own purposes, and juries that have the power, and arguably the duty, to overturn that regime and review the law in a case, who fail to do so only because most of the population today from whom juries are drawn are ignorant or easily manipulated. But in the Age of the Internet the establishment cannot depend on that ignorance or passivity to endure much longer. Many educated persons are already aware of the power and duty of juries to review the legal issues in a case in reaching a general verdict. Increasingly, persons are being questioned in voir dire about their knowledge of the power and duty of jurors to review the law, and excluded from panels. But it is only a matter of time before it becomes nearly impossible to empanel a jury without either excluding all but a few of the most ignorant, or else getting people on the jury who refuse to convict unless or until all issues of law are argued in their presence.
Instead of trying to cling to the present Mansfieldian order for as long as possible until the breakdown occurs, I propose an orderly transition to the Camdenian order understood and intended by the Founders. The process can begin with a constructive debate on these issues in legal fora and law review journals, which this article is intended to initiate. As support grows for reform, legal counsel can proceed to file notices of intent to argue issues of law in the presence of the jury, in friendly courts, until the bench yields and the practice is sustained on appeal, establishing a precedent. Then it will be a matter of enlarging the precedent until the Camdenian order prevails.
____________Egyptian blogger and journalist Abdulmonem Mahmood has left Egypt, saying he fears for his life.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 40 local and international journalists have been arrested or detained since the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi on July 3. And at least eight journalists have been killed since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The CPJ also accuses Egypt of conducting a “campaign of harassment on local and international journalists seeking to cover the ongoing political crisis in the country” –
“Through a series of arrests, prosecutions, assaults and censorship, the Egyptian government has made one thing crystal clear to journalists: Deviate from the official narrative at your own risk,” said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney. “The authorities must stop this attempt at quashing independent and critical reporting. They can start by freeing all journalists in prison or under arrest.”
On Twitter, Mahmood writes [ar]:
غادرت مصر من فترة والآن لحقت بي أسرتي..نعم هربت خشية أنا أقتل غدرا ويحرق جثماني أو اقتل ف سيارة الترحيلات ثم يقول ع زملاء نضال أني إرهابي — monem منعم (@moneimpress) September 12, 2013
I have left Egypt some time ago and now my family has joined me. Yes, I fled fearing for my life, that I would be killed by treachery, have my body burned or get killed in the transfer car [after my arrest], and then my colleagues would call me a terrorist
He adds:
اعمل أنا وزوجتي صحفيين تعرضنا بعد #الانقلاب لتهديدات لم نشهد مثلها في عهد مبارك.. للعلم أنا دخلت السجن ٣ مرات ف عهد مبارك :( — monem منعم (@moneimpress) September 12, 2013
My wife and I work as journalists. After the coup, we were subjected to threats we have not experienced in Mubarak's era. For your information, I have been jailed three times during Mubarak's rule.
And Mahmood concludes:
الصحافة الان في مصر ليست متاحة سوي لمندوبي الشئون المعنوية ورؤساء تحرير تابعي المخابرات.. مهنة الصحافة أصبحت من أخطر المهن بعد الانقلاب — monem منعم (@moneimpress) September 12, 2013
Journalism now in Egypt is only available for the correspondents [of the army] and the editors in chief, who are [in the pockets of] the secret service. Journalism as a profession has become one of the most dangerous jobs after the coup
He does not say where he is or what he is doing now.
Here's a Global Voices story from 2007 of one of the times Mahmood was previously arrested.The clock on the wall in the cafeteria at Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, New Hampshire, is mounted behind a wire cage that protects its face from the likeliest weapons (French fries, foam balls) deployed in the uprisings of adolescents (food fights, dodgeball). Or maybe that was to prepare it for politics. Two weeks ago, the day after the Iowa caucuses and one week before the New Hampshire primary, a makeshift stage had been built at the far end of the cafeteria, catercornered from the caged clock. Its backdrop was an American flag; a campaign poster, an “H” with an arrow running through it; and three rows of Granite State citizens, a political Greek chorus positioned behind the lectern, awaiting the candidate. Minutes passed. The slender black hand of the clock ticked and twitched, like an old man tapping and jerking his cane. Hillary Rodham Clinton was running late. “I feel great being back in New Hampshire after winning in Iowa!” she said when she finally arrived, walking onto the stage with Gabrielle Giffords, the former U.S. congresswoman from Arizona who was shot in the head while meeting with voters in 2011, and Giffords’s husband, the astronaut Mark Kelly. Clinton had won in Iowa, but just barely. Her only remaining rival, Bernie Sanders, was expected to win New Hampshire, and by a wide margin. She didn’t look like she was feeling great. And after the New Hampshire results came in—Sanders went on to win, in a rout—she’d have cause to feel worse. During their months vying for the right to carry the Democratic Party standard, the former Secretary of State and the senator from Vermont have been on the same stage often, if not always at the same time. Sanders had spoken in this very school in December. “Winnacunnet High School Feels the Bern,” ran the headline of a lead story in the Winnachronicle, the school newspaper. Two crackerjack student staff writers had reported, “The senator ended his speech by saying, ‘Brothers and sisters, welcome to the political revolution.’ ” For Clinton’s visit, the cafeteria was packed with stalwart Clinton supporters, mostly women, mostly white, mostly within a decade of Clinton’s age. Members of the press had been escorted through the kitchen, and then corralled into a pen at the rear of the cafeteria, separated from the rest of the room by steel police barriers. Those who stood shouldered cameras; those who sat cradled laptops. Instruction sheets had been taped to the chairs: WIFI Network: WHS Public Password: warriors Three television reporters sat in a row: ABC, CBS, CNN. “We’re the slow-news team,” one of them told me. A hipster photographer had perched his super-skinny tripod atop a blue plastic chair, setting its camera to peer over the crowd. He’d found a good spot, but his unobstructed view didn’t last for long. The instant Clinton began speaking, dozens of arms reached high into the air, all across the room, wielding smartphones. It was like watching a flock of ostriches awaken, the arms their necks, the phones their heads, the red recording buttons their wide, blinking eyes. Clinton and Sanders had been waging a remarkably polite battle. “I’m proud of the campaign we’re running on the Democratic side,” Clinton told the crowd. “It’s in stark contrast to the insults you see on the other side.” Less than ten miles away, Marco Rubio had just finished speaking at the town hall in Exeter, a brick Federal-style building made famous by Abraham Lincoln, who spoke there in 1860. A statue of Justice stood on the cupola, high above an asphalt lot where satellite-dish-equipped television trucks were parked, one from Liberty Uplink, another from the Freedom Broadcast Group. On the front steps were stacks of yard signs: “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media.” Rubio had made a strong third-place showing in the G.O.P. race in Iowa, not far behind Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Before Chris Christie deflated him in a debate over the weekend, he seemed to be surging, the establishment’s last best hope, not too weak, not too mean, not too wild, not too bland, the G.O.P.’s Goldilocks. The hall in Exeter had filled early with an enthusiastic crowd, more men than women: blue Red Sox caps, black knitted Bruins hats. Police officers stationed at the doors had turned away disappointed latecomers. Inside, where the walls are painted Colonial green, blue-and-white campaign banners had been draped across the balconies: “New Hampshire Is Marco Rubio Country.” Rubio has an appealing Mickey Mousiness. Also, he can be funny, especially if you haven’t seen his shtick more than a few times. (A stump speech at a campaign stop is a lot like standup comedy. It would turn out that Rubio had learned his lines only too well.) While he was listing all the things he’d do on his first day in office—swear to uphold the Constitution, defend the Second Amendment, and repeal “every single one of Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional executive orders”—the crowd began chanting, “Mar-co, Mar-co, Mar-co.” “As long as you don’t say ‘Polo,’ ” Rubio said. He smiled. “I hated that game.” He made as if he were returning to his Oval Office to-do list. “When I’m President, we’re banning that game!” Rubio is funny mainly in order to call out his seriousness. He offered another of his one-liners: “Bernie Sanders is actually a nice guy, and he’d be a really good candidate for President—of Sweden.” Then he gathered himself up, turning grave: “Hillary Clinton is no laughing matter.” Rubio says that Clinton is not qualified to be President. The scene in Exeter, uplinked by Liberty and broadcast by Freedom, was captured by a media army composed of artillery (five large video cameras mounted on a stage at the rear of the hall, and a dozen more perched on each of the hall’s balconies) and infantry (reporters propping computers in their laps). But with every third person in the crowd tapping at a phone, sending words and pictures out to the world, it was hard to tell the civilians from the military. Who are the people, and who are the press? “I wasn’t tweeting,” a young long-haired woman in a blue wool coat told me. “I was Snapchatting.” Even before Rubio finished delivering his stump speech, an A.P. photographer plunked down on the floor, opened his laptop, and began cropping a shot. “I can’t talk now,” he said, excusing himself. “I’m filing right now.”
In the right now, when what happened in New Hampshire already feels as old as the Parthenon, it’s hard to care about the long ago, but there haven’t always been parties, and there haven’t always been primaries, and this may be the first Presidential-primary season with free Wi-Fi pretty much everywhere. A lot of people, not least the candidates themselves, have been talking about political revolution and, more modestly, about party realignment. None of the candidates, not even the party favorites, are campaigning on behalf of their party; most are campaigning to crash it. Outsiders are in. Insiders are out. “We’ve always taken on the establishment,” Rubio says. “Of course we’re an underdog,” Sanders says. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, Cruz’s campaign called voters and sent out an e-mail blast suggesting that Carson was about to quit the race, and so Trump was saying that Cruz had stolen the election. Rush Limbaugh took Trump’s protest as the latest, best evidence that “Trump is not your typical Republican-establishment candidate.” The people who turn up at Sanders and Trump rallies are wed, across the aisle, in bonds of populist unrest. They’re revolting against party élites, and especially against the all-in-the-family candidates anointed by the Democratic and the Republican leadership: Clinton and Bush, the wife and brother of past party leaders. (More attention has been paid to the unravelling of the G |
shoot up the charts and the band or artist to break out in a major way...if people can identify what they were listening to, which isn't always the case.
We have all experienced the frustration of trying to find a specific song from a few remembered (or misremembered) lines, and after being annoyed by this still-unsolved problem, one man decided to take matters into his own hands and do his best to help anybody with this issue discover what could be their new favorite song.
“It all started back in 2005 with two particular episodes of Scrubs and The West Wing airing the same week,” explained TuneFind Matt Garlinghouse. “Both featured a song I really liked, and I didn’t know either of them,” he recalls. Of course, a quick search online didn’t return what he was looking for, so he set about finding a solution, and that website eventually turned into what has now become TuneFind.
The website breaks the vast expanse that is today’s TV landscape into shows and episodes, and from there, music lovers and those looking for answers can find what they were watching and quickly see what songs soundtracked the drama or the comedy unfolding on screen.
The company sources much of its data from music supervisors, many of whom are the ones who actually choose the music in the first place. Song lists also come from the artists themselves, soundtrack tracklistings, and the like. Whatever blank spaces are left unfilled can be answered by TuneFind users who submit song titles and artist names, and then the rest of the community votes that data up or down, depending on how correct it turns out to be.
While it might sound like a burden for busy music supervisors to have to share all the information in regards to what they chose, it can actually wind up being helpful. Many of these people get inundated with messages asking them what a particular track was, or they have to do research to see if something they feel they've discovered has actually already been used in another show. If all of that information is online in one place, they can simply point any inquirer to or visit TuneFind on their own and be done with it.
TuneFind itself, or the basic idea behind it, is nothing new or especially brilliant, but in the years it has existed, the data available has become much more accurate, and that is what is impressive about the site. Early versions of the startup required too much manual labor or could only touch on a few popular programs. The goal with the revamped TuneFind is to feature every show and highlight every song used. The company is now able to survive thanks to the millions of views the site enjoys every month, which help the startup gather relevant and valuable data which can be sold back to Hollywood and the music industry.
Things are currently going well for TuneFind, which is on its way to becoming the go-to place online to discover what song might have been missed during a program. At the moment, superfans of particular shows still head to message boards, wikis and social media to discuss the music, as that is a difficult habit to shake. In time, as more people become familiar with the name TuneFind and the data becomes increasingly better and is updated faster, the company’s visibility will improve and there won’t be any reason to head elsewhere.At Haaretz, Doron Rosenblum writes Israel’s commando complex:
The failure of the flotilla operation is less troubling than the national "jonesing" that has followed it: the frenetic flitting between the poles of reflexive victimhood − Oy oy oy they resisted, they had knives, swords and other weapons, the activists who were killed were "big-bodied" − and of inert heroism (praise for the restraint and sensitivity that resulted in only nine and not 600 deaths; the desperate attempt to cling to the vestiges of the myths of military prowess and the increased stifling of criticism with the slogan "Quiet, we’re saluting"). All of these, together with a great sense of missed opportunity: the illusion that a "successful" operation − difficult to define and to imagine in any event − would have relieved, even temporarily, a certain existential angst. All these responses were more intense this week, although in fact they are constant. They are the responses of addicts who are repeatedly denied their fix: the perfect IDF "operation," or the decisive war, which will stifle any question and complaints (and any need for statesmanship). Some point to a sea change in the Palestinian, and even the Hamas, leadership, saying that they have finally discovered the advantages of propaganda and statesmanship over violence and terror. Instead of encouraging and wholeheartedly adopting this approach, Israel, which hasn’t changed its thought patterns for decades, is "caught by surprise" and even dismayed. (Recently an intelligence official actually called the absence of Palestinian terror a "propaganda problem"). In the absence of statesmanship, all Israel can offer is another clumsy operation in which it comes off looking like some relic from the 1970s and ‘80s with a commando knife between its teeth. Even worse: It looks like Avigdor Lieberman, Eli Yishai, Moshe Ya’alon and all the rest. Israel has always complained, condescendingly, that the neighbors it is forced to deal with are Arabs rather than "Norwegians and Swedes." Now, when it is dealing with Europeans and the entire world, Israel can see how it itself is perceived − and to blush furiously. If it still can.
The faces of the dead always serve a purpose in political conflict. That's true when it's the beturbaned visage of the latest dead No. 3 of al Qaeda spread across the pages of media on six continents. Or when it's the faceless dead civilians wiped out by the most recent drone attack in northwest Pakistan. No pictures of them, please.
Take note how the first is never considered propaganda. But when someone somewhere does choose to present images of dead civilians in a conflict, the cries of propaganda are rife. "You're playing on people's emotions." Or "That doesn't tell the whole story." Or, "They weren't really civilians." These rationalizations rarely apply when the civilians are civilians on "our side."
For instance, the right wing in the United States said this about the photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the naked, napalmed 9-year-old girl photographed running down a Vietnamese road in 1972. Propaganda, they claimed. Aiding and abetting the enemy. The photo won a Pulitzer despite Richard Nixon's claim that it was probably "fixed." Did it tell the whole story of that conflict? No. But it was no lie.
The following pictures don't come close to telling the whole story of the events of May 31 in international waters off Gaza. Nor of the complex larger story of decades of conflict of Israel/Palestine. They can't. They are simply images of nine civilians shot dead on the deck of the Mavi Marmara. Some people will no doubt consider publishing them an act of hateful propaganda. In truth, keeping them faceless is what actually serves that purpose.
Çetin Topçuoglu, 54. Necdet Yildirim, 32. Furkan Dogan, 19.
Ibrahim Bilgen, 61. Fahri Yaldiz, 43. Cengiz Akyüz, 41.
Cevdet Kiliçlar, 38. Cengiz Songür, 47. Ali Haydar Bengi, 39.Voters approved the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment in November, and this year’s General Assembly session has seen a multitude of medical marijuana related bills – 17 of which have recently been approved by both the Senate and the House. In order for these bills to pass and make changes to the constitutional amendment that voters approved, they must have received at least two thirds of the vote in both chambers – and most of the bills have been aimed at preparing regulations that will be important as the state rolls out their new program.
One of the bills that was signed into law started as an extremely unpopular bill that would have banned smoking medical cannabis – but now it only bans smoking cannabis by those under the age of 21, as well as anywhere tobacco smoking is banned, in the presence of minors under the age of 14 years old, or in the presence of pregnant women or anyone else where the “smoke might cause the second person to be under the influence”. So while it no longer outright bans the smoking of medical cannabis it does place a lot of restrictions around it.
Another bill gives the Marijuana Commission and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division the authority to regulate specific “shapes and colors” in which edibles can be made as well as advertising and artwork, in an effort to ensure that it doesn’t appeal to children and that they are packaged in child-resistant packaging. A second bill addressing edibles – which is still awaiting the governor’s signature – makes 10mg of THC the maximum for a “single dose” edible, which is in line with the current limit for edibles on the recreational cannabis market in Colorado.
Other bills that were passed by legislature and recently signed into law include one that requires that that all tax revenue first goes to pay back the state for the start-up costs of the program (and allocates all additional funds to the state’s general fund) and removes a requirement that the funds be used for vocational and technical education training. There is also a bill that puts the oversight of the Marijuana Commission under the Department of Finance and Administration, and the enforcement of regulations to the Alcohol Beverage Control Division.
The remaining bills that were either signed into law or await signature deal primarily with the structure of licensing – including one that determines that background checks for license applicants will be conducted by the Arkansas State Police and the FBI, one that specifies that all marijuana licenses will expire on June 30th each year, one that allows the Marijuana Commission to decide if a felony disqualifies someone from obtaining a license, and one that gives the state the right to collect fines when businesses don’t comply with state laws. These don’t make many big changes, but rather give the new program more structure than it had at first – and hopefully any other bills that pass will change as little as possible of what the voters originally approved.Azerbaijan police on Saturday brutally dispersed an unauthorised rally in central Baku, beating up and arresting scores of people, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
Several dozen protesters briefly gathered in Baku’s central Sahil square to protest against the police using excessive force against peaceful protests.
But police halted the rally within 10 minutes, beating up and arresting dozens of people.
“We gathered to condemn illegal use of force against peaceful protesters,” one of the organisers, Radio Liberty journalist and pro-democracy activist Khadija Ismayilova, told AFP by phone.
Ismayilova was among those arrested.
Any display of public discontent or political dissent in the energy-rich ex-Soviet country draws a tough response from the regime of strongman President Ilham Aliyev.
On Thursday police used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse thousands of people protesting against the local authorities in the central town of Ismayilli.
Aliyev’s government has long been accused of stifling free speech, jailing opponents and crushing dissent.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]Just listen
iStock/AntonioGuillem
When a friend or family member is struggling, our natural instinct is to take action and give them what we consider “helpful” advice for handling the situation. But in the case of how to help someone with depression, hold off on the guidance and just listen. “Listening with compassion allows your friend to express the wrenching physical and emotional aspects of depression,” says Deborah Serani, PsyD, award-winning author of Living with Depression and a professor of psychology at Adelphi University. “Things to say include, ‘I want to know what you’re going through,’ ‘What can I do to help you feel better?’ and ‘I’m here for you, to talk to and support you.'” Allowing people to open up on their own terms helps them feel validated. Here are some “helpful” comments to avoid.An organization oriented around free speech filed suit against a community college Wednesday after the school arrested students for handing out pocket-sized Constitutions.
Nonprofit organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed for a temporary injunction against Kellogg Community College after the school arrested two members of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) for distributing small Constitutions on campus, according to a press release obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Drew Hutchinson, Manager of Student Life at the school, told Kellogg students Brandon Withers and Michelle Gregorie that students from rural areas have “grown up to be ultra polite” and “might not feel like they have the choice to ignore” the students.
“That’s who I’m trying to protect,” said Hutchinson.
WATCH:
In the complaint, YAL and ADF allege that Kellogg’s Solicitation Policy “grants KCC officials unbridled discretion to restrict the content and viewpoint of student speech if it does not ‘support the mission of Kellogg Community College (KCC) or the mission of a recognized college entity or activity.'”
“It is shocking and upsetting to see officials from public colleges refer to our country’s founding document as a threatening solicitation,” said Cliff Maloney Jr., president of YAL. “The blatant disregard for free speech on public campuses is precisely why the words and rights of the U.S. Constitution should be spread far and wide.”
“College personnel spoke with the individuals and politely asked them to complete basic paperwork and continue their activities inside the KCC Student Center, a high-traffic area located approximately 100 feet from where the individuals were standing,”said Eric Greene, Kellogg’s director for public information and marketing, in a statement emailed to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The individuals repeatedly refused KCC’s requests to register or move to a different location and were arrested that afternoon on trespassing charges.”
Greene noted that Kellogg teaches courses on the U.S. Constitution, hands out free Constitution copies on Constitution Day, and “takes seriously” any accusation concerning infringement of a student’s freedom of expression.
“Under the terms of the Solicitation Policy, the College does not take into consideration the content of speech or solicitation when granting individuals or organizations access, but it does govern the time, place and manner of such activities in accordance with longstanding state and federal laws.”
Travis Barham, legal counsel for ADF, remarked to TheDCNF that under Kellogg’s policy, students can only speak at one designated location on campus.
“The only permit that a student needs to speak on campus is the First Amendment,” said the counsel.
This post has been updated to include comment from ADF.
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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.
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.The fact that this book is already at his second edition after a first publication in 2004 says something about its value. In one of his definition of Agile, Jim Highsmith says, “Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability”. I will say that his book balances nicely high level thinking and a pragmatic approach. The book provides a framework for running agile projects and gives also insight in some more neglected related topics like managing projects portfolios or measuring the success of Agile projects.
The author starts by defining what Agility is and emphasizes that Agile is about “delivering value over meeting constraints”. The book describes the Agile Project Management (APM) framework, discussing its values and presenting the phases (Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close). The core values of the APM are:
* Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints
* Leading the Team over Managing Tasks
* Adapting to Change over Conforming to Plans.
All these aspects are covered with both a high level vision (after all values are values), but also by describing daily project activities: Key points that will help you understand the author message are put in evidence. Example: A coaching leader’s attitude is reflected in the question “How can I help you deliver results?” The micro-manager’s attitude is reflected in the question, “Why isn’t task 412 done yet?”
The final parts of the book deal with topics related to Agile project management: scaling, project portfolio management, measuring performance and fostering innovation. This is definitely a book that I will recommend to every people involved in project management, agile or not. I always think that learning Agile practices should be preceded by understanding Agile values. This book provides insightful material for values and practices.
Related web sites:
* Jim Highsmith Web site
* Agile Project Leadership Network
Reference: “Agile Project Management”, Second Edition, Jim Highsmith, Addison-Wesley, 392 pages
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.ukApocalypse XIV now unfolding (cf., our posts "The Wine of the Wrath of God" and "After Pope Benedict XVI, the 'Last' Roman Pontiff?"). The divine chastisement of world-wide conflagration (Lk. 17.29-30, cf., our post "Our Lady, Vatican II Disorientation, and the Annihilation of Many Nations") to annihilate the'super-power' and cities and nations drunk with the wine of its immodesty, impurity, fornication, homosexuality, and blasphemies (Apoc. 14.8) is imminent - the close of our end-times period (distinct from the consummation of the world, Mt. 28.20).
(Heb. 9.22).
The Blood of the [Divine] Lamb can be availed of in the traditional Rite of the Sacrament of Penance (cf., our post "On Concealing Sins in Confession") and of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist (the Traditional Latin Mass). Go to our traditional Catholic Mass Centers (links on the left-side bar of this site). Flee to the mountains... (Mt. 24.16).
See also the Messages and Appeals (on the upper right-side bar) of the Apocalyptic Woman in her title of Our Lady of Fatima.
(Apoc. 7.14)For as long as I can remember, I’ve puzzled about why people become communists. I have no doubt about why someone would stop being one. After all, we have a century of evidence of the murder, famine, and general destruction caused by the idea. Ignoring all this takes a special kind of willful blindness to reality.
Even the theory of communism itself is a complete mess. There is really no such thing as common ownership of goods that are obviously scarce in the real world. There must be some solution to the problem of scarcity beyond just wishing reality away. Perhaps ownership and trade? Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.
But how communism would work in practice is not something they want to talk about. They just imagined that some magical Hegelian shift would take place in the course of history that would work it all out.
So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?
The Red Century
The New York Times has been exploring that issue in a series of remarkable reflections that they have labelled Red Century. I can’t get enough, even the ones that are written by people who are—how shall I say?—suspiciously sympathetic to communism as a cause.
The most recent installment is written by Vivian Gornick. She reflects on how her childhood world was dominated by communists.
The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers…. When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism). While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice…. The Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith.
Sounds fascinating, if bonkers (Marxism is hardly a “civilizing worldview”). It sounds less like an intellectual salon of ideas and more like a religious delusion. Those too can be well intentioned. The key here is a dogmatic ideology, which serves as a kind of substitute for religion. It has a vision of hell (workers and peasants exploited by private-capital wielding capitalist elite), a vision of heaven (a world of universal and equal prosperity and peace), and a means of getting from one to the other (revolution from below, as led by the vanguard of the proletariat).
Once you accept such an ideology, anything intellectual becomes possible. Nothing can shake you from it. Okay, that’s not entirely true. One thing can shake you of it: when the leader of the cult repudiates the thing you believe in most strongly.
Khrushchev's Heresy
She was 20 years old in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet Communist Party about the crimes of Stalin. Apparently the unrelenting reports of famine, persecution, and mass death, from the early years of Bolshevik rule – and even the revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact – would have demoralized them earlier. But no:
The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.
Amazing.
The Early Reds
And speaking of this small 1919 sect, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies: Reds (1981). I could watch it another 20 times. It explores the lives of the American communists of the turn of the 20th century, their loves, longings, and aspirations. The focus is on fiery but deluded Jack Reed, but it includes portraits of a passionate Louise Bryant, the gentile Max Eastman, an edgy Eugene O’Neill, and the ever inspiring Emma Goldman.
These people weren’t the Progressives of the mainstream that history credits with having so much influence over policy in those days. These were the real deal: the Communists that were the source of national frenzy during the Red Scare of the 1920s.
The movie portrays them not as monsters but idealists. They were all very talented, artistic, mostly privileged in upbringing, and what drew them to communism was not bloodlust for genocide but some very high ideals.
They felt a passion for justice. They wanted to end war. They opposed exploitation. They longed for universal freedom and maximum civil liberty. They despised the entrenched hierarchies of the old order and hoped for a new society in which everyone had an equal chance.
All of that sounds reasonable until you get to the details. The communists had a curious understanding of each of these concepts. Freedom meant freedom from material want. Justice meant a planned distribution of goods. The end of war meant a new form of war against the capitalists who they believed created war. The hierarchies they wanted to be abolished were not just state-privileged nobles but also the meritocratic elites of industrial capitalism.
Why be a communist rather than just a solid liberal of the old school? In the way the movie portrays it, the problem was not so much in their goals but in their mistaken means. They hated the state as it existed but imagined that a new “dictatorship of the proletariat” could become a transition mechanism to usher in their classless society. That led them to cheer on the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages, and work for the same thing to happen in the United States.
The Dream Dies
Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful. Goldman sees the betrayal immediately. Reed becomes an apologist for genocide. Bryant forgets pretending to be political and believing in free love, marries Reed, and tends to his medical needs before his death. O’Neill just becomes a full-time cynic (and drunk). It took Max Eastman longer to lose the faith but he eventually became an anti-socialist and wrote for FEE.
The initial demoralization of the early American communists came in the 1920s. They came to realize that all the warning against this wicked ideology – having been written about for many centuries prior, even back to the ancient world – were true.
Eastman, for example, realized that he was seeking to liberate people by taking from them the three things people love most in life: their families, their religion, and their property. Instead of creating a new heaven on earth, they had become apologists for a killing machine.
Stunned and embarrassed, they moved on with life.
But the history didn’t end there. There were still more recruits being added to the ranks, generations of them. The same thing happened after 1989. Some people lost the faith, others decided that socialism needs yet another chance to strut its stuff.
It’s still going on today.
As for the Communist Party in America, most left-Progressives of the Antifa school regard the Party as an embarrassing sellout, wholly own by the capitalist elite. And when we see their spokesmen appear on television every four years, they sound not unlike pundits we see on TV every night.
It would be nice if any article written about communism were purely retrospective. That, sadly, is not the case. There seem to be new brands of Marxian thought codified every few years, and still more versions of its Hegelian roots that take on ever more complex ideological iterations (the alt-right is an example).
Why do people become communists? Because human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of illusions, and we are capable of working long and hard to turn them into nightmares. Once we’ve invested the time and energy into something, however destructive, it can take a very long time to wake us up. It’s hard to think of a grander example of the sunk-cost fallacy.
Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.We all know that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. We also know that we shouldn't pop pimples or stay up late reading articles on the internet. And yet. The power of the human will is only so strong. We nearly always judge books just a little bit by what they look like, which can be a problem if those books have totally misleading covers.
A beautiful book cover draws you in. It hints at what's to come, and it's a lovely piece of art in its own right. Nearly every book nerd can think of a time that a truly gorgeous book cover stopped them cold in a book store. You just have to pick that book up and see what it's all about. And hopefully, the cover has set the tone for the whole story, without giving too much away.
And then... there are the less fortunate book covers. Or rather, the hilariously bad book covers and the wildly misleading book covers, which always beg the question, "Has this designer ever read and/or even heard of this book?" When it's a bad cover on a straight-to-kindle bodice-ripper, we can kind of forgive them. But when it's a way off-the-mark cover on a well-known classic... well, take a look:
1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Ah yes, Frankenstein. The famous of tale of a young gender-ambiguous knight, and their quest to... scale Mount Everest? Look, I'm not saying that every copy of Frankenstein needs the same flat-top monster with neck-bolts on the cover... but in what way does the image of a concerned knight represent the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster made of re-animated corpses?
Click here to buy.
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Occasionally, you can tell what the publishers are trying to communicate, even with a bad book cover. In this case, the message is "I am a Twilight book." Which would be a fine message for a Twilight book, but it just doesn't quite work for Wuthering Heights. And yes, the cover does advertise itself as "Bella & Edward's Favourite Book." Just in case the color scheme didn't clue you in to their marketing strategy.
Click here to buy.
3. The Shining by Stephen King
This is a Brazilian edition of Stephen King's The Shining. Maybe the translator took some artistic liberties with the story, to make it a little less of a fantasy-horror, and a little more of a fashion magazine from the '80s? Either way, the best part of this cover is definitely the fact that the woman's face appears a second time in that little box. Is it just me, or do her eyes follow you wherever you go?
Click here to buy.
4. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf is a love story and complex social comedy, with a dark undercurrent questioning the limited role of women in society and the nature of the human experience. It is not, as this cover suggests, a novel about a model who witnesses a murder and/or a spy who goes undercover at a cosmetics company.
Click here to buy.
5. 1984 by George Orwell
...I guess that technically this one isn't that misleading. But it does sort of imply that 1984 is full of sexy spies rather than thinly veiled critiques of totalitarian governments.
Click here to buy.
6. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
I just... why? The Scarlet Pimpernel is about one man who defies the French revolutionaries to save innocents from the guillotine. It's set during the French Revolution. It's not about a business man who learns to love by adopting a badly photo-shopped kitten. Not even a little bit.
Click here to buy.
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
No. NO. There are a lot of misleading covers of Lolita, making it look like a sexy romance instead of the creepy portrait of a pedophile. The book itself is pretty clearly about a sexually abused 12-year-old girl and the man who preys on her, not about a sultry teenaged temptress. Shut it down.
Click here to buy.
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I'm pretty sure I owned this copy as a kid, and the cover always mystified me. Why are there a bunch of jelly beans floating over the surface of a CGI ocean? Why does a sci-fi comedy have its title in faux-Papyrus font? What are they trying to tell us? Is this a cry for help? Somebody please find this designer and help them.
Click here to buy.
9. The Giver by Lois Lowry
Remember that part of The Giver where they go through a time warp into an alternate dimension? No? Neither do I. I mean, yes The Giver is about a post-apocalyptic future where people can transfer memories to one another. But it's significantly less trippy and magical than this cover implies (seriously, why the elephant?).
Click here to buy.
10. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Yeah, ok. I can almost get behind this one, but that's not even a screw. That's a nut. As in "nuts and bolts." And it's being tenderly held by two wrenches. Obviously the book itself is not about turning screws. It's about ghosts and being a governess to creepy children. But if you're going to go with an overly literal cover, at least use an actual screw.
Click here to buy.
11. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Really? Really? This is a book about a young woman's mental breakdown and subsequent treatment. Sure, there are some lighter moments, but the main plot centers on mental illness, attempted suicide, and the oppressive sexism of the 1950s. This looks like the cover of a book about a beautiful actress-turned-suburban-housewife, who gets tired of her lot in life and starts murdering everyone on the PTA (I would totally read that book, it's just... a different energy than The Bell Jar).
Click here to buy.
12. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Did I miss the part of Pride and Prejudice where Lizzie rides into Rome nude?...that doesn't happen in Pride and Prejudice, right? It's more of a comedy of manners/love story type of thing, yes? I mean, sure, that's a nice painting of a nude woman on a horse, it's just not... really... relevant...
Click here to buy.
13. Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
So... is Tarzan trying to seduce that small monkey, or...?
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14. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
I get that this Danish edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is going for a re-imagining of what an electric sheep looks like. And that's fine. But did they have to make it quite so sexy? It's really, really not that sexy in the book.
Click here to buy.
15. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables is about a plucky red-headed orphan (a lot of the plot centers on her hair color). She goes to school and gets into scrapes. I'm not sure how "plucky red-headed orphan" become "sultry blonde co-ed," but it seems like they kind of missed the message here.
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16. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum
My favorite part of the Oz books is definitely when the fighter planes descend on Mars. Except, contrary to what this cover implies, that never happens in any of the Oz books. They seem to have grasped the idea that Oz is a world unlike our own, but rather than "whimsical world of magic," they went for "gritty space warfare." Not quite right.
Click here to buy.
Images: mybookbath/instagramWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government has slashed its estimate for the long-term operating costs of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets by more than 20 percent to under $1 trillion, according to a senior defense official, a move that could boost international support for the program.
The U.S. Marine Corps version of Lockheed Martin's F35 Joint Strike Fighter, F-35B test aircraft BF-2 flies with external weapons for the first time over the Atlantic test range at Patuxent River Naval Air Systems Command in Maryland in a February 22, 2012 file photo. REUTERS/Lockheed Martin/Handout
The Pentagon has been under pressure for over a year to revise its estimate of maintaining a fleet of more than 2,000 F-35s over 55 years, with industry and military officials arguing that many of the assumptions were outdated and off base.
The new estimate of $857 billion could help ensure the new plane turns out to be as affordable as advertised and comes days after South Korea determined that only a bid by Boeing Co for its F-15 Silent Eagle came in below a $7.4 billion price ceiling for its plan to buy 60 new fighter aircraft.
Lockheed’s F-35 and the Eurofighter Typhoon remain in the running, but Boeing’s pricing marked a step toward winning the contract, according to sources close to the process. A final decision is expected in mid-September.
It was not immediately clear what impact the lower F-35 operating estimate would have on the South Korean tender, but U.S. officials said Seoul could decide to restart the competition and ask for new bids.
The Pentagon’s revision reflects data about the plane’s performance based on over 7,000 hours of test flights and revised assumptions about how it will be used and maintained, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The estimate was provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee by the Pentagon’s F-35 program chief, Air Force Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, the official said. A revision had been flagged in June when the Pentagon’s acquisition chief said he had expected a review to result in lower operating and maintenance costs.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the costliest weapons program in U.S. history. The Pentagon estimates it will cost $392 billion to develop and build 2,443 of the new jets for use by the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
Lockheed is developing three models of the radar-evading warplane for the United States and eight countries that are helping fund its development: Britain, Australia, Canada, Norway, Turkey, Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The revision of the estimate was first reported by Bloomberg news.
REDUCING COSTS
The cost per flying hour of the F-35B model, which can land like a helicopter, is likely be 16.6 percent lower than the earlier Pentagon projections, Lieutenant General Robert Schmidle, deputy Marine Corps |
wanted to be doing.
And now you are one of the co-founders of Strymon. Why do you feel like this is the ideal fit for you?
At Strymon I get to wear two hats and create the DSP code and also do the sound design, so instead of having those two things separated into two departments (sound design and engineering), they really are one and the same thing, so there’s nothing lost in translation. To know exactly what sound you’re going for as your write the code, and to know what you’re hearing when you listen to the sound and how to address it in the code is ideal. At Strymon we’ve got a small group. The guys that I’m working with here are guys that I’ve known, that I have great respect for, a creative group of guys. There’s a lot of collaboration.
So I assume you’ve done the sound design for every Strymon pedal from the beginning?
Yes, well with the exception of OB.1, where Gregg did the analog design, because OB.1 is a fully analog pedal. I provided input here and there on the sound, but Gregg did the analog design for that product. But other than OB.1, for all the other products that have come out since we started the Strymon line, 100% of all the sound processing and sound design has been done by me.
Can you describe your approach to sound design?
The way I look at what we’re doing is, we’re designing effects where fundamentally the goals and the process in a broad sense aren’t different than those of any other effect maker designing in any other medium. If you’re an analog designer, you start with an idea, you have a circuit, you build it, you have components, you have some knowledge base and history to draw from, and you make adjustments and listen for things and decide when it is to your liking or what direction it needs to go in. We’re doing things in a similar way, except that the medium is DSP, which does allow us greater flexibility and possibilities, ultimately.
How do you research and what is your process like?
We have tools to draw from and experience to guide us in certain ways, but it’s definitely not a robotic process like, “well this is how we do it, we just put these signals in here…” It’s different for each sound. For something with a physical or electrical counterpart, like a spring reverb or a power tube tremolo, there are more measurements and equations that are part of the process, but we’re not trying to capture an exact copy of a specific existing piece of equipment.
So once we have described the process mathematically, the next step is to craft the sound. For a tube tremolo, different oscillator topologies might distort the LFO waveform in a good way. Or the amplitude of the LFO can be varied while different tube biases are experimented with, just as an amp designer would do. So a fair amount of the process is artistic as well. Crafting the sound.
I think the cool part about DSP is that it’s so open, that there are so many things you can do, and it’s easy to experiment and try things that wouldn’t have been easy to do before. For many effects, like on the BigSky reverb, some of those reverbs have long abandoned the reality of any physical space. It’s about creating resonances and pitches and feedback and ambient soundscapes that don’t have any physical counterpart. That can be the most fun because it’s really just an exercise in creativity and freedom.
Can you talk about any particular challenges or successes you’ve experienced with any of the Strymon pedals?
Well, early on in the technology of the Strymon line we developed what we call the dBucket technology, which is digital bucket brigade delay technology. In an analog bucket brigade delay, they use chips that are called bucket brigade chips because basically there’s a transfer of charge through a transistor and capacitor, many many times, like old-time firemen with each man passing water from his bucket into the next guy’s bucket, so this analog signal is transferred through each transistor and capacitor stage, and that takes time, and the signal is delayed.
Each bucket stage adds time, and the rate at which signal is passed from bucket to bucket is controlled by a clock. If you speed up the clock, everything goes faster and there’s a shorter delay, or slow down the clock and you get a longer delay. It’s fundamentally different than a digital delay where traditionally you’re running at a fixed clock rate, and you sample things in and store them in memory, and if you want a longer delay time, you just use more memory, or in the bucket analogy, you just add more buckets, but it’s always the same rate, and there’s no loss from bucket to bucket in a digital delay.
A big part of the character of an analog delay is the fact that it’s running on this variable clock system where the number of buckets stay the same, but it’s just how fast you’re running through the buckets. So to get long delays, you actually have to slow down the clock enough that you start to hear artifacts, and there are two different kinds of artifacts. One is actually the clock itself, if it is slowed down into the audio frequency range you’ll actually hear the whine of the clock, but more than that the other type of artifact is if the clock speeds get slow enough, it starts to alias.
Can you explain aliasing?
Aliasing is where in a clocked system, which actually applies to an analog delay because it is a clocked system, the maximum frequency that can be represented accurately is one half of the clock frequency. If you go higher than that, what comes out of the system is actually a frequency that’s wrong. It’s kind of like when you watch an old film and you see the spokes of a wagon wheel and they look like they’re going backward, because the spokes are moving too fast for the frame rate. That’s aliasing in film.
So in an analog delay if you’ve got a slow clock speed, let’s say 10kHz, any input signal above 5kHz is going to alias, and it sounds like “bzzzzzzz,” a buzz coming down from those frequencies. So in order to combat that in analog delays usually they employ a lot of filtering to remove those high frequencies so that content that would be reported erroneously is filtered out. So that’s why analog delays are traditionally dark sounding. It’s not something to do with the chip, it has to do with the filtering they put in there to reduce those artifacts.
On top of that, to continue with the bucket analogy, you spill some of the water each time you transfer from bucket to bucket, and that’s due to the physical properties of the transistors and monolithic capacitors that are doing those trasnfers. How much you spill is dependent on how much water is in the bucket, and how fast you are transferring from bucket to bucket, so it’s a complex process in some ways. That’s something I know about because I have a background in integrated circuits and stuff.
That ‘water spilling’ creates the grungy and noisy aspect of analog delays. So we thought, let’s do a delay in DSP that’s actually running internally at a variable clock, and include a bucket brigade line where the loss between transfers actually occurs as it does in the chips. And we figured that out, and it does work, and what it allows you to do is to control that loss. You can make it a perfect transfer, or you can make it a not so good transfer from bucket to bucket. You can get a different range of experiences. It’s still a variable clock process using a fixed number buckets, but because it’s in DSP we can control the quality of the bucket brigade chip, the amount of filtering, the companding parameters, and the various levels of artifacts. So that was really a big thing for us, once we got going, we were like, this is really cool.
What do you think led you to finding that you had a real passion for sound design?
My whole life I’ve played guitar and I’ve always loved it and I’ve always been obsessively tuned in to the response between your fingers and what comes out of the speaker, and what the effect is doing, and all that kind of stuff. And never in the 38 years since I started playing guitar have I ever taken two months off, like “I’m not gonna play.” I probably play guitar three hours a day just for work. I guess it’s always been in my DNA.
When I was 13 or 14 and just learning to play, I was taking lessons from my neighbor and he had been letting me borrow this crappy acoustic, and one day I went over to his house and he had this Silvertone electric guitar and a Silvertone amp that had a reverb. He handed the guitar to me and said “why don’t you play this and see what you think.” It was the first time I’d ever held an electric guitar. And I played a note and there was some reverb on, and it was one of the few moments of my life that I still remember so clearly, because it was so electric, and I was like, DAMN! It was probably a seed for why I’m doing this now, because… That was COOL! It’s been a constant thing throughout my life since then, regardless of all the other variables.Ted Cruz has been picking up a lot of endorsements from evangelical leaders across the country in recent weeks. ( Reuters photo )
I live in New Hampshire, where we're known for three things: beautiful vacation sites, maple syrup and the quadrennial first-in-the-nation presidential primary. If a resident of New Hampshire hasn't been invited—numerous times—to dinners or cookouts to meet presidential candidates, it means he's stayed indoors and disabled his telephone.
As a result, we get to know the candidates up close and we discuss our impressions with people at work and at church. The Republican Party has fielded several highly qualified candidates this time, but for me, there's one that stands out from all the rest, and that's Ted Cruz.
Among the last words of King David are these: "He who rules over man justly, who rules in the fear of God" (2 Sam. 23:3).
I'm for Cruz, first, is because he is just and fair. He's a brilliant scholar of the Constitution. Until amended, the Constitution is the law of the land. Without the rule of law, we are at the mercy of the powerful who control others not by our laws but by their whims. The power structures work to keep us down and an out-of-control president far too often bypasses Congress as he pens yet another executive order.
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Some have slandered Cruz saying he is hard-hearted toward the poor and the immigrants. What they conveniently refuse to tell us is that the welfare system as it currently exists hurts the poor by keeping them in a vicious cycle of poverty and dependency. A hand-up, not a hand-out, is the compassionate response to poverty.
As a son of an immigrant, Cruz knows first-hand that we are a nation of immigrants. What he demands is immigration that is legal, the letting of people into our country in ways that help both them and our country. Flooding the nation with illegal immigrants is neither just nor fair to us and to them.
Second, I'm for Cruz because he will, as David exhorted, rule in the fear of God. While our country's Constitution rules out our having an official state-sanctioned denomination, our official documents honor God. Our motto, cited in our National Anthem and found on our money is "In God We Trust."
While most candidates give lip service to God, Ted Cruz goes out of his way to point people to God. Son of an evangelical pastor, Cruz has regularly asked us to pray for the nation and pray that God's will be known and obeyed as we make our laws and live our lives. While he knows the importance of the presidency, he tells his audiences that, absent the people and the leaders submitting to God, the presidency can do only so much. Such humility is refreshing.
There is no such thing as a morally neutral position. Even the Supreme Court identified humanism as a religion (the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins). Opposing recent attacks on and legislation against Christian moral teaching, a Cruz presidency will uphold what God says on moral issues.
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Finally, I'm for Cruz because he's polite.
The Bible tells us that of the three things that abide, the greatest is love (1 Cor. 13:13). Lest we confuse biblical love with mere sentiment, Paul tells us what love is: "Love suffers long and is kind; love envies not; love flaunts not itself and is not puffed up, does not behave itself improperly, seeks not its own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil" (1 Cor. 13:4-5).
While we hear Ted Cruz assert his views and sometimes contrast them with those of other candidates, we never find him to be rude. Compared to one candidate—one, to my amazement, favored by some biblical Christians—we do not hear Ted Cruz call other people "stupid" or "losers."
Most people outside of Iowa and New Hampshire have not seen the candidates outside of televised debates or packaged television ads. But as a citizen of New Hampshire, I have seen most of them several times in small groups, at house parties or at the local veterans hall. In such settings, I've seen the genuine love Ted has for people. He banters with them, he takes to heart their concerns and, even when confronted with a heckler, he never wavers from patience, kindness and care.
America is at a crossroads. It is almost too late to turn our country around. Whom we elect for president this November will make a huge difference for us and our loved ones.
We cannot do better than a strong, brilliant, highly capable man who is also a genuinely decent individual who is just and will rule in the fear of God.
That's why I'm for Ted Cruz.
Mark Pearson pastors Trinity Church in Kingston, New Hampshire, and is chief executive officer of New Creation Healing Center, a Christian facility combining medicine, massage, counseling and prayer ministry, also in Kingston. He is the author of five books and a frequent contributor to Charisma magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Great Resources to help you excel in 2019! #1 John Eckhardt's "Prayers That..." 6-Book Bundle. Prayer helps you overcome anything life throws at you. Get a FREE Bonus with this bundle. #2 Learn to walk in the fullness of your purpose and destiny by living each day with Holy Spirit. Buy a set of Life in the Spirit, get a second set FREE.
See an error in this article? Send us a correctionIllegal immigrants convicted of various crimes committed more than 100 murders in four years after they were released from prison and not deported by the Obama administration, according to a new report.
The Miami Herald cites a Senate Judiciary Committee document dating back to 2015, which discusses the recidivism rate among people living in the United States illegally.
The letter states that at least 121 homicides between 2010 and 2014 "could have been avoided" if the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deported convicted immigrants rather than release them.
"This disturbing fact follows ICE's admission that, of the 36,007 criminal aliens it released from ICE custody in Fiscal Year 2013, 1,000 have been re-convicted of additional crimes in the short time since their release," the June 12, 2015 letter reads.
President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on illegal immigration. He also instituted a temporary immigration ban from seven countries with a terror presence and halted America's refugee program from certain countries, although those directives have since become inactive as the court system rules on them.
The Herald reports that the majority of the illegal immigrant convicts in question came from countries that generally do not take back people who are deportable. Coupled with a Supreme Court ruling from 15 years ago that says the U.S. cannot imprison a deportable foreign national for more than six months, illegal immigrant convicts are often allowed to stay in the U.S.
The Trump administration has promised to strip federal grant money to cities and other municipalities that do not enforce federal immigration law, known as sanctuary cities.
"Should places in this country that ignore the laws of this country when it comes to immigration receive federal money into their communities? And the answer to me is no," White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said last month.Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Requests Women’s Suffrage group has officially been dissolved.
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Yes, RadioTimes.com can reveal that Jessica Hynes’ suffragette sitcom will not be back for a third series.
“After two great series, sadly there won’t be any more Up The Women on BBC2 as the channel looks to bring new comedy shows through,” said a BBC spokesman. “Huge thanks to the incredibly talented Jessica Hynes, and all involved in the making of the show.”
Hynes played gung-ho leader Margaret in the comedy while Rebecca Front took on the role of stubborn Helen, a woman who is actually opposed to women getting the vote.
The comedy also starred Vicki Pepperdine, Adrian Scarborough and Judy Parfitt.
Parfitt, a star of the 1974 suffragette drama Shoulder to Shoulder, played the mother of Helen in the comedy, a mischievous aristocrat called Myrtle.
Morwenna Banks and Barunka O’Shaughnessy wrote the comedy alongside Hynes who spoke of the series having “a deliberately retro-sitcom feel”.
Up the Women transferred to BBC2 from BBC4 after the first series with the second tranche airing at the beginning of this year.
It has the distinction of being the last sitcom filmed before a live television audience at BBC’s Television Centre building in Shepherd’s Bush.
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Jessica Hynes on Up The WomenThe Toronto Maple Leafs announced today the roster for the hockey club’s development camp, which will take place from July 4-9 in Toronto and Niagara Falls, Ontario. A total of 41 players have been invited, including 24 forwards, 12 defencemen and five goalies, and 23 Toronto draft picks from four different draft classes. This year’s development camp roster includes:
DEVELOPMENT CAMP SCHEDULE
Monday, July 4 (MasterCard Centre, Toronto)
-Media availability: 10:45 a.m.
Tuesday, July 5 (Gale Centre Arena, Niagara Falls)
-Group 1 Practice: 10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.
-Group 2 Practice: 12:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Wednesday, July 6 (Gale Centre Arena, Niagara Falls)
-Group 1 Practice: 10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.
-Group 2 Practice: 12:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Thursday, July 7 (Gale Centre Arena, Niagara Falls)
-Group 1 Practice: 10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.
-Group 2 Practice: 12:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Friday, July 8 (Gale Centre Arena, Niagara Falls)
-Full Scrimmage: 10:00 a.m.
Saturday, July 9 (MasterCard Centre, Toronto)
-Full Scrimmage: 10:30 a.m.At NerdWallet, we adhere to strict standards of editorial integrity to help you make decisions with confidence. Many or all of the products featured here are from our partners. Here’s how we make money
As elections approach, NerdWallet took a closer look at which states have the most politically engaged voters. Across the United States, only 71.2 percent of citizens were registered to vote in 2012, and only 61.8 percent of citizens voted. Some places take their civic duty seriously, though, and sent 75 percent of citizens to the polls.
We gauged political engagement by state like this:
1. Are residents prepared to vote? We included the percentage of citizens who were registered to vote in the 2012 election.
2. Do residents actually vote? We included the percentage of citizens who voted in the 2012 election.
Most Politically Engaged
1. District of Columbia
Our nation’s capital came in at No. 1. Over 80 percent of the population was registered to vote, and D.C. has the highest voter turnout rate of any state or district. Almost 76 percent of citizens living in D.C. voted.
2. Mississippi
Mississippi had the highest percentage of registered voters of any state. Over 84 percent of citizens in Mississippi were registered to vote, though 10 percent of registered citizens didn’t make it to the polls, leaving a voter rate of 74.5 percent.
3. Minnesota
In the Land of 10,000 Lakes, 6 percent of registered voters didn’t cast ballots. 79 percent of citizens were registered to vote, and 73.2 percent of citizens voted in 2012.
4. Wisconsin
Wisconsin should be celebrated for its civic engagement, as well as its dairy products. 78.1 percent of citizens were registered to vote, and 73.6 percent cast ballots in 2012, leaving 5 percent of the citizen population who registered, but did not vote.
5. Massachusetts
The Bay State is known for its role in the American Revolution and ensuing American politics. Over 78 percent of citizens were registered to vote, and over 70 percent of citizens voted.
6. North Carolina
10 percent of North Carolina citizens who were registered to vote didn’t make it to the polls in 2012. 78.9 percent of citizens were registered to vote, and 68.9 percent voted in 2012.
7. Iowa
Home to the Iowa Caucus, the first major electoral event of the presidential nominations, Iowa keeps its citizens engaged. Over 78 percent of Iowa’s residents were registered to vote, and more than 69 percent voted in the 2012 election.
8. Maine
77.1 percent of citizens in the Pine Tree State were registered to vote in 2012, and 68.6 percent made it to the polls.
9. New Hampshire
New Hampshire’s motto is “Live Free or Die,” and residents take their civic duty seriously. 75.9 percent of citizens were registered to vote, and 69.4 percent of citizens voted in the 2012 election.
10. Michigan
77.8 percent of citizens living in the Mitten were registered to vote in 2012, and 66.8 percent of citizens voted.
Rank State Percent registered (Citizen) Percent voted (Citizen) Overall score 1 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 83.4 75.9 98.4 2 MISSISSIPPI 84.2 74.5 97.5 3 MINNESOTA 79 73.2 84.9 4 WISCONSIN 78.1 73.6 83.9 5 MASSACHUSETTS 78.7 70.8 80.1 6 NORTH CAROLINA 78.9 68.9 77.1 7 IOWA 78.2 69.4 76.6 8 MAINE 77.1 68.6 73 9 NEW HAMPSHIRE 75.9 69.4 72 10 MICHIGAN 77.8 66.8 71.2 11 COLORADO 74.4 70.4 70.8 12 LOUISIANA 77.1 66.3 68.9 13 OREGON 74.3 67.6 65.7 14 VIRGINIA 74.6 66.9 65 15 MISSOURI 76.7 63.9 63.8 16 DELAWARE 73.3 67.3 63.2 17 MONTANA 73.3 65.7 60.3 18 WASHINGTON 73.1 65.6 59.7 19 NORTH DAKOTA 74.5 63.9 59.5 20 SOUTH CAROLINA 73.3 64.7 58.5 21 KANSAS 74.4 63.3 58.2 22 MARYLAND 72.1 65.1 56.9 23 VERMONT 73.4 63.3 56.2 24 RHODE ISLAND 73.5 62.5 55 25 SOUTH DAKOTA 74.8 61 54.9 26 ALABAMA 73.5 61.9 53.9 27 NEW JERSEY 73 61.9 53 28 ILLINOIS 72.7 61.5 51.6 29 OHIO 71.1 63.1 51.3 30 IDAHO 70 63.9 50.6 31 PENNSYLVANIA 71.9 61.6 50.2 32 CONNECTICUT 70.4 62.7 49.2 33 GEORGIA 70.7 61.9 48.4 34 KENTUCKY 72.1 59.3 46.5 35 ALASKA 72.8 58.4 46.3 36 NEBRASKA 69.5 61.6 45.5 37 NEW MEXICO 68.6 61.6 43.7 38 FLORIDA 68.3 60.8 41.7 39 INDIANA 69.2 59.3 40.8 40 NEW YORK 67.9 58.7 37.2 41 TENNESSEE 68.6 55.7 33.2 42 CALIFORNIA 65.6 57.5 30.5 43 NEVADA 65 57.9 30 44 WYOMING 63.9 58.9 29.6 45 ARIZONA 65.2 55.9 26.9 46 TEXAS 66.9 53.8 26.5 47 UTAH 63.5 57 25.5 48 ARKANSAS 65.3 53.3 22.4 49 OKLAHOMA 66.1 52.4 22.4 50 WEST VIRGINIA 68.1 47.8 18.2 51 HAWAII 58.9 51.6 6.8
Data obtained from the U.S. CensusAfter the French Revolution, opposition to clergy became identified with revolutionaries and, as in communist countries, the political left. Veneration of clergy, as by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, was a marker of the right.
But only in the 1970s did the Republican Party became more identified with religiosity than the Democrats. In recent years, conservative magazines and talk radio have increased their cheerleading for religion, while two magazines with religious roots, First Things and Commentary, have become more conservative in their politics.
In 2008, feeling the absence of irreligious voices on the right, Mr. Khan, who also blogs about science for Discover magazine’s Web site, started SecularRight.org. Today, the site usually gets 500 to 1,000 hits a day, Mr. Khan said, although there are spikes as high as 10,000.
For many, the conjunction of conservatism and atheism is embodied by the novelist Ayn Rand, whose thought blended free-market absolutism and human-worshiping atheism. She is influential — her cultic following included the young Alan Greenspan — but she is contemned by many intellectuals and is no patron saint to the bloggers at Secular Right.
The five bloggers are like the dramatis personae of a drawing-room comedy about irascible conservatives — written by Alan Bennett but set at the Heritage Foundation.
Photo
There’s the urban pragmatist (Ms. Mac Donald, who clerked for the liberal federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt but now writes conservative essays about homelessness and policing), the data-driven scientist (Mr. Khan), and the libertarian enthusiast for tort reform (Walter Olson, also founder of the blog Overlawyered).
And because conservatives are Anglophiles, there are two Englishmen: John Derbyshire, the popular mathematics writer and opponent of liberal immigration policy, and Andrew Stuttaford.
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Of the group, Ms. Mac Donald is the one best known for atheism. She has written scathingly of the Christian instinct to give God credit for our good fortune while absolving him of our misfortunes.
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“God’s mercy was supposedly manifest when children were saved” from the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, Ms. Mac Donald wrote in The American Conservative in 2007. “But why did the prayers for 5-year-old Samantha Runnion go unheeded when she was taken from her Southern California home in 2002 and later sexually assaulted and asphyxiated?
“If you ask a believer, you will be told that the human mind cannot fathom God’s ways. It would seem as if God benefits from double standards of a kind that would make even affirmative action look just.”
Few liberals would use “affirmative action” as a byword for injustice — but very few conservatives would refer to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin as members of “the knee-jerk venom squad,” as Ms. Mac Donald did a week ago on her blog.
Mr. Derbyshire retains affection for his Anglican schooling — “I sing hymns in my car,” he said — and Ms. Mac Donald respects many religious people she knows. But she suspects that they can embrace religion only because it has been so altered by secular values.
“We live with a religion that has been tamed, told to mind its manners and told to speak when asked to speak,” she said in an interview this week. “I won’t dwell on those outmoded religious activities that one is not supposed to remind religious advocates about, such as the burning of heretics and books, pitchforking the wrong type of Christian and opposition to liberal political reform.”
For Ms. Mac Donald, some politicians — those beneficiaries of liberal political reform — can be as bad as the radio talkers.
“I am puzzled,” Ms. Mac Donald said, “by the logic of a John Ashcroft saying that while the wonderful people of the Justice Department contributed to keeping America safe, that really the ultimate gratitude is due to God.
“If that is true, why did God leave us vulnerable on 9/11?”The origins of Humble Bundle are themselves so humble that it renders wordplay obsolete. Ask John Graham, co-founder and COO of Humble Bundle, his proudest achievement with the company and he won't cite his role in building it up from a room in his parents' house, the frequently staggering sales figures, nor its central role in the rise of indie games.
Instead he says, "If I get hit by a bus on my commute to work tomorrow, I would be thinking about how we've raised $26million for charity. It feels special to be celebrating the awesomeness of humanity."
Humble seems to be written into his DNA.
Perhaps that's down to Humble Bundle's origins in an elementary school library. Graham attended school with Jeffrey and David Rosen (he describes them as "twin brother geniuses"), the latter of which cut his teeth in game development in second grade when he made a choose-your-own-adventure war game using Mac programming tool HyperCard. "It was so intense," says Graham, "even with those black and white graphics. Everybody started playing it. Once the librarians realised what the heck he had made they banned it from the library."
Probably hated by librarians everywhere.
Far from discouraged, David Rosen went on to start his own development company, Wolfire Games, in 2003 and spent high school building homebrew game engines. By the time the Rosen brothers graduated from college in 2008, they were looking to assemble a team to make Wolfire a full-time development studio.
"I loved the idea of being part of a game company and trying to get traction, starting from almost nothing," says Graham.
Like any indie they were always searching for new ways to promote their games, and it was here that Graham felt he might excel. "I found I was paying more attention to the marketing and promotion side of things, and I noticed that limited time game sales tended to do very well. And we wondered, little indies that we were, if we could try and put together our own promotion."
While David Rosen focused on developing (the still-unreleased) Overgrowth, Graham and Jeff Rosen went about their first promotional experiment. They teamed up with Natural Selection 2 developer Unknown Worlds to offer players a limited period where they would receive a significant discount if they pre-ordered both games. They hoped it would catch the attention of online communities.
Word spread, and both developers saw record sales days. "We saw weird things happening, like sales off our own websites were actually increasing," says Graham. "We weren't cannibalising our own sales avenues, we were just adding value everywhere." It was a sure sign that the bundle was encouraging people to buy the games who might not otherwise have been interested.
Graham paid keen attention to other sales experiments in the digital marketplace. When Ron Carmel held a pay-what-you-want anniversary sale for World of Goo, Graham was thrilled to see it take huge sums of money. It was from here that the idea for Humble Bundle was born.
"We started wondering, could we do the bundle thing we had just done, alongside the pay-what-you-want that Ron had just done."
Although the primary intention was to promote Wolfire's own games, along with the other included indie titles, Graham knew from the start that the success of the Humble Bundle depended on putting the consumer first. "We'd seen forces in the gaming industry treat the customer like a criminal," he says, "and we wanted people to feel as awesome as possible while they were interacting with this promotion."
"“We'd seen forces in the gaming industry treat the customer like a criminal, and we wanted people to feel as awesome as possible while they were interacting with this promotion.”
Say goodbye to your free time.
This meant incorporating features that are now Humble Bundle hallmarks; the promotion supported Mac, Windows, and Linux communities; there was no DRM; customers could decide to give a portion of their chosen price to charity. "The whole thing was an honour system," says Graham. "It was about trust in the consumer."
The first Humble Indie Bundle included World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Penumbra: Overture, and Wolfire's own Lugaru HD. Graham and Jeff Rosen would man customer support themselves, working from their respective parents' houses where they were living to save on rent. "We were hoping that maybe we could get $100,000 in sales or something," says Graham.
The Humble Indie Bundle went on sale May 4, 2010. In ten days it made $1.27million.
"Jeff and I were slightly delirious doing all the customer support," says Graham. "We swore we'd leave no customer behind."
It was only when the dust settled that they could take stock of what they'd achieved. "The first question was, 'is this real?'" says Graham. "We had to check the bank account to make sure. Then it was, 'oh my god, yeah, it's real.'"
Rather than dwell on their success, Graham and Rosen wanted to know if lightning could strike twice. Buoyed by sudden market recognition, they organised Humble Indie Bundle 2, which was headlined by Jonathan Blow's Braid. It went on sale in December 2010, and broke $500,000 in its first day, going on to raise $1.8million.
"At that point we thought this thing might be repeatable, let's try and turn it into its own business," says Graham. Humble Bundle was spun off from Wolfire Games, and in April 2011 secured investment from Sequoia Capital. This allowed them to expand the team and put together promotions far more frequently. The last thing Graham wanted was to slow down.
The Humble Bundle team is now 35 strong, and, alongside the main Bundles, it also features promotions for mobiles games, music, and eBooks. Collectively, the Bundles have brought in over $50million.
"We've grown up a bit from the days of Jeff and myself doing everything from our childhood bedrooms in our parents' houses," says Graham, as humble as ever.
The sales and exposure enjoyed by parties included in a Bundle meant that a huge number of indie developers now wanted in. Humble Bundle became something of a banner for the indie movement, putting Graham in the difficult position of curator. On one hand it would be financially savvy to include games that already had a profile. On the other, he had the power to bring lesser-known games to a huge audience.
"I think a good curator always looks for things that are going to have broad appeal," he says carefully. "But then they also provide opportunities for people to discover things that they might not encounter on their own."
The aim is to include one game in every major Bundle that's a must-buy. Which game that is will vary according to opinion. "That's the advantage of a bundle of games," he says. "They're all lifting each other up by broadening the appeal."
Bithell loves a good bundle.
This is why Bundles have seated indie poster boys like Hotline Miami and Mark of the Ninja next to slightly lesser known titles: it's beneficial for all involved.
Mike Bithell's already hugely popular Thomas Was Alone featured in Humble Indie Bundle 8. "I think what Humble Bundle does really comes down is making sure everyone has a chance to buy my game at the price they want to pay," says Bithell. "It's a brilliant way of catching all those people who would never buy Thomas Was |
AZVw — Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 13, 2015
#MillionStudentMarch leader Keely Mullen has DELETED her Twitter account? Such revolutionary courage, comrades! — Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 13, 2015
Read SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day. Don’t let your kids become SJWs. Make your kids read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.
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CommentsAs a condition for reopening the government and possibly averting a debt default, House Republicans want to hand Congressional staff a massive pay cut by eliminating their health insurance subsidies. So this seems like a good time to ask: Could Hill workers afford a massive pay cut?
Hardly. MSNBC's Ned Resnikoff points out that inflation adjusted pay has been mostly stagnant in Hill offices for years, with most staffers earning somewhere in the range of $30,00o to $60,000. According to a 2010 report by the Sunlight Foundation, which produced the chart below, only chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and schedulers have seen their salary go up notably since 1990.
There are two big concerns here: class and competency. As Resnikoff noted on Twitter, the less Congress pays it staff, the harder it will be to work there for anybody who isn't independently wealthy. It's bad enough that getting a job on the Hill unofficially requires a stint as an unpaid intern. Just imagine if toiling there meant paying for your own health plan out of pocket.
Which brings us to the second issue: brain drain. Congress already has a revolving door problem, and without some kind of drastic change in the law, always will. But making pay and benefits even stingier is only going to encourage more staffers to find cushy jobs at trade associations and lobby shops. And by cushy, I really mean jobs that pay them something close to what they're worth.The Bengaluru Police today seized Rs 2.5 crore from a private car during regular security checks at the west gate of Vidhana Soudha (Karnataka secretariat).
The car does not have a valid Vidhana Soudha pass and it came at the west gate at around 2.45 pm today.
H M Siddhartha, owner-cum-driver of the white Volkswagen sedan, was detained for questioning after unusual amount of money was found inside his vehicle. Siddhartha claimed that the money belonged to him, the police said.
The seized amount was kept inside in a laptop bag. A lawyer's gown and few papers related to the state high court were also kept on the back seat of the car.
Vidhana Soudha DCP Yogesh is reportedly questioning the car driver to get more details.
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Bihar: JDU MLC's house robbed in Gaya, cash and jewellery worth lakh missing[1/22/2013 5:06:41 PM] Erzz: at least this isn't too harsh for a blind run :V[1/22/2013 5:07:59 PM] Pillowcase: which game are you playing[1/22/2013 5:08:05 PM] Erzz: altair[1/22/2013 5:08:08 PM] Pillowcase: oh god[1/22/2013 5:08:14 PM] Pillowcase: you will die horriblyYour sentiment seems to be shared.Anyway, let's go gather some more teammates and stuff.... but first we need to find the rival. This looks similar enough to gen 3, so hopefully it won't be too difficult.This is a promising sight for the previous idea.This popped up when I crossed over to this route. No idea what it means.It hasn't prevented my progress, at least. Which is good; a side quest would have taken me hours to complete.Now we get to see the rival's face. He looks sort of like Gold, doesn't he? That's what I'll call him.Gold, of course, chose the grass starter. I haven't run into any Pokemon yet so we're on equal footing.He lands a critical right off the bat...But Vinny retaliates with one of his own. I have to heal now in case he crits again.... Why do I have a sun stone? Was that what the message before was? That I'd just inadvertently stepped on a sun stone?Ignoring that, I heal and quickly dispatch the leafy thing. Looking closer it sort of looks like a Mr Mime playing with Victreebell's leaf. I can't really see any resemblance between my Pokemon and any old ones, though.Another random message. I still have no idea what this one is about.I make it back to the lab without incident, noting for the first time its half-and-half roof in halloween colours.PokeBalls get!Running shoes get! After convincing my mom that I do, in fact, know how to put on shoes, I set out to expand my team.The first thing I encounter is a tanuki trying to balance a leaf on its head.It's hard to think of something for such a cute little monster, but I go for the obvious thing. (Leaf Blade)I thought she might be a grass type, but apparently not (yet).This message pops up again as I go onto the next catching area. With the running shoes, I now understand it. Apparently my character has asthma, and the volcanic ash is so heavy in this area that running becomes too tasking to safely handle. It's a very sad tale condensed into two lines of text.Regardless, I force her to press on, and we run into a Starly. The familiar face is a relief.His nickname is obvious, as well. Ezio means Eagle.Maybe someone who knows the Japanese nature/characteristic names can derive some information about it. I am not one of those people.Moving on, my next encounter is a Ralts. He sensed the protagonist's discomfort with the ash and felt sorry, coming out to do what he could to help. For his concern he was rewarded a jelly fist to the face, followed by a ball sucking him up. This hack is full of sadness.An obscure name. I'll leave you to guess.I'm not sure if Ralts are as rare in this hack as in vanilla.I'll report back on that as I grind my new captures up. Vinny will be leaving us shortly, anyway.Catch ya later!Getty Members Only The Republicans in Congress Are Surrendering to Obama Why I won’t support the latest last-minute $1.1 trillion spending bill.
Ted Cruz is a U.S. senator from Texas.
It’s Christmastime in Washington, D.C., and that can mean only one thing: Congress is once again playing Santa Claus. The names at the top of its list are the Washington Cartel: The big businesses and lobbyists who get in bed with career politicians to do nothing but grow government. And left off the list: the American taxpayer.
Thanks to last year’s landslide elections, Republicans now control more seats in Congress, more governorships and more state legislative seats across the country than at any time since the 1920s. We retired Harry Reid and took control of the Senate. And yet today marks a milestone and an ignominious one. Before long, Republican leaders in the Senate and House intend to join hands with a majority of Congressional Democrats to pass a bill that funds President Barack Obama’s disastrous agenda well into 2016.
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So how did the Republican leadership in Congress embrace its mandate for change? Let me count the ways:
First, shortly after taking the reins of power in the Senate, the GOP-led Congress fully funded President Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional amnesty.
Then, the GOP-led Congress institutionalized and expanded Obamacare policies by permanently surrendering on the so-called “doc fix.” To accomplish this feat GOP leadership broke with the long-established bipartisan practice of paying for the doc fix and added half a trillion dollars to our nation’s debt over two decades.
Then, GOP leadership confirmed Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee for attorney general, who told us all ahead of time that she intended to ignore the plain text of the law.
Next, Senate GOP leadership facilitated the approval of Obama’s disastrous Iranian nuclear deal. They did so via a convoluted, backwards disapproval process that was designed to fail, and then did nothing to prevent the deal’s implementation or stop more than $100 billion from going to Iran and its terror proxies.
Then the GOP-led Congress forfeited what was left of its budget discipline and passed former Speaker John Boehner’s Golden Parachute budget deal. This deal added $80 billion in federal spending and debt above the 2011 budget caps, the one conservative budget victory in the Obama era.
In December, the GOP-led Congress ushered through an irresponsible multibillion-dollar highway funding bill that reauthorized the expired, cronyist Export-Import Bank, and put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in corporate welfare.
The GOP-led Congress this month also passed yet another massive education overhaul with unanimous Democratic support. The overhaul perpetuated top-down mandates that do little to reduce the large and ever-growing role of the federal government in education.
And while I am encouraged that the GOP-led Congress finally took a significant step toward repealing Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood in this month’s budget reconciliation bill, GOP leadership included it in a bill that commanded no leverage with Obama. They placed it in a bill the president will instantly veto, instead of including these priorities in Friday’s government funding bill, one that must be signed into law if the president wants to keep the federal government open.
To understand the priorities of Republican leadership, contrast these actions with the last-minute stocking stuffers that did make their way into this must-pass bill to fund the government:
● Quadrupling of H-2B visas for low-skilled workers, which will only drag down wages, kill American jobs, and hurt working men and women
● An open door to fund the president’s Green Climate Fund that will effectively rubber stamp the job-killing Paris climate accords
● Relief from Obamacare taxes for well-connected labor unions and the healthcare industry, while millions of Americans continue to suffer under Obamacare’s skyrocketing premiums, deductibles, and lower quality of care
● And a complete failure to prevent the resettling of refugees from nations where ISIL or Al-Qaeda controls large swaths of territory—this despite a veto-proof majority in the House of Representatives in favor of strengthening the screening process for refugees
Since taking control of the Senate, Republican leadership has joined hands with a majority of Democrats to thwart their own caucus’ efforts to stop the Obama agenda 24 times. During each of these 24 votes, this so-called Republican majority successfully passed legislation with a majority of Democrats in support and a majority of Republicans opposed. This is why I have said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is the most effective Democratic leader in modern times.
But don’t take my word for it. Take Sen. Chuck Schumer’s, the vice chair of the Senate Democratic conference. Today Sen. Schumer summed up what’s wrong with Washington when he told Politico, “Sen. McConnell wants to see the Senate work. But the good news for [Democrats] is, to make it work, he has to do basically our agenda.”
Though the Senate majority leader promised a return to “regular order” this year, we have seen minimal attempts to pass individual appropriations bills. These targeted bills would fund the government piece-by-piece and enable the people’s representatives to have a greater say in how their tax dollars are spent.
Instead, in a tactic that will go mostly unnoticed, this government funding deal was once again negotiated behind closed doors, and then, like several recent “must-pass” bills, will be rammed through the Senate in no time with limited debate and no floor amendments via a parliamentary mechanism called a “privileged message.” A privileged message is a tool that has been abused by Congressional leadership to circumvent committees of jurisdiction and bypass regular order of business to expedite legislation for immediate final passage.
Leadership is employing this tactic to pass a one-trillion-dollar-plus spending bill at the last minute in a matter of days without giving the American people a chance to debate whether it advances their ideals or their best interests. It’s all or nothing. Take it or leave it. They will countenance no debate on whether we should continue to fund Obamacare, or Planned Parenthood, or the disastrous Iranian nuclear deal. There’s one light switch to fund the government, and we can turn it either on or off.
Leadership will call this “legislating.” “Governing,” they say, their voices set an octave lower to convey an informed seriousness. And while they exit the U.S. Capitol, patting themselves on their backs, and make beelines for Washington cocktail parties where many a toast will be raised to their “effectiveness,” working Americans who will never step foot in a Georgetown salon will continue to struggle under this administration’s failed policies.
When I’m traveling this country, people often ask me why Washington isn’t listening. Over and over again, from coast to coast, they ask me how Washington can be so tone deaf to their volcanic frustration with the failed tax and spend policies that have absolutely crushed them. Well, I am listening to them, which is why I cannot and will not support this massive crony Christmas gift—a bill that effectively forfeits our massive Republican victories of 2014 and cements Obama’s priorities for nearly the full remainder of his term.Josh Reynolds - WR - Senior
Josh Reynolds’ prolific career as a wideout at Texas A&M didn’t start off as easy as it does for most. Originally recruited by Oregon State, Reynolds’ offer was pulled late in the process, leading him to enroll at Tyler Junior College in the hopes that some big name schools would notice him. Luckily for Texas A&M, they noticed.
Reynolds was one of the most explosive deep-threats Texas A&M had in its arsenal. Spending most of his career under rookie quarterbacks, Josh was able to show his ability to adjust to imperfect throws and haul in balls within his impressively wide catch radius; and while catching some of the balls he has are feats on their own, his ability to pick up yards after the catch is what made him A&M’s #1 WR in receiving yards for two out of his three seasons.
Expect Reynolds to complete his journey from Tyler Junior College to the pros in the 3rd or 4th round of the draft.
Trevor Knight - QB - RS Senior
Trevor Knight is another Aggie who took the long road to Texas A&M. The former Oklahoma starter and Bama beater’s transfer to Texas A&M helped to smooth out the mess left by the departure of both Kyler Murray and Kyle Allen at the quarterback position.
While Knight’s presence in 2016 was sorely needed by the team, his game performances likely didn’t give scouts enough to warrant using a draft pick on him this weekend.
Daeshon Hall - EDGE - Senior
Daeshon Hall is one of the guys Kevin Sumlin loves to mention whenever he talks about the strength and conditioning program at A&M. Hall started his career at A&M at close to 230 lbs, and he’s leaving it at 266 lbs.
Hall has been a solid contributor and is probably the 3rd best DE to play for A&M this decade. Unfortunately Hall doesn’t get enough credit for his terrific play since he’s lining up with Myles Garrett.
Expect Hall to go in the 3rd round.
Justin Evans - S - Senior
This should come as no surprise: Justin Evans is one hell of an athlete.
Seriously, he once did this:
Not only is he athletic, but Justin Evans is one of the hardest hitting safeties to play at Kyle Field. He’s got plenty of range and aggressively finds his way to ball carriers, though sometimes that aggression will cost his team 7 if he bites down on play-action too hard.
Evans is a rough but talented prospect. Expect him to go in the 3rd round.
Avery Gennesy - OT - RS Senior
Avery Gennesy was the lone returning starter on the OL last year, and while he showed some improvement in run blocking and pass protection, it’s not going to be enough to put him in the first two days of the draft. Gennesy is an athletic big man, but he’s lacking in the strength necessary to play meaningful snaps in the pros.
Expect Gennesy to go late 5th, early 6th.
Ricky Seals-Jones - WR - Junior
Ricky Seals-Jones is ending his career at A&M with a much bleaker outlook than you would have expected when the coveted 5 star signed with the program. In his first game at A&M Seals-Jones caught and ran in a 71 yard touchdown from Johnny Manziel, starting with the fireworks everyone expected. Unfortunately his day and his season were cut short by a knee injury that eventually led to surgery and a medical redshirt.
For every highlight Seals-Jones would put on film, there were 4 times as many duds. Seals-Jones was slow off the line, rarely showed any ability to separate from defenders, and too often would drop balls that were well within his catch-radius.
Seals-Jones has all the looks of a prototypical NFL receiver, and that’s probably enough to get him into camp with a team. It likely won’t happen until after the draft is over, however.
Speedy Noil - WR - Junior
Speedy Noil is an incredibly gifted athlete and has all of the physical tools to find himself a roster spot in the NFL, but his mental game may keep him from ever finding one.
In and out of legal trouble while at A&M, the best defender Noil ever faced was himself. Maybe a team will give him a shot given the amount of talent he’s put on display, but it won’t happen until after the draft.
Hardreck Walker - DL - Senior
Hardreck Walker really needed a good pro-day, but unfortunately he got sidelined with a hamstring injury during the early workouts. Expect him to go undrafted.
Jermaine Eluemunor - OG - RS Senior
The British born Jermaine Eluemunor has all of the assets you’d want in an NFL o-lineman. Strength, lateral agility, wide hips.... he has everything but experience. Eluemunor’s major issues are his footwork and hand technique.
Bottom line, Eluemunor could have a prolific career in the NFL if the right coach helps fill the experience gaps. Expect Eluemunor to get picked up in the 3rd round.
Myles Garrett - EDGE - Junior
Why is Myles Garrett last in this list? Because what is there to say about Myles Garrett that everyone with a hot taek hasn’t said already? Enjoy his pro-career for the next 15 years.With just hours remaining before the Federal Communications Commission votes on new net neutrality rules, one final piece of misinformation might hit home the hardest: The government, one story says, could take away all of the funding for your TV shows.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that under the new rules, the government could force major telecoms to cut off TV programming budgets to build better broadband infrastructure, if it believes programming to be an unwise investment. The report cites “some Washington lobbyists.”
“A small piece of the rules could give the government wider authority over television programming,” the Post’s Brian Fung writes.
But the government likely couldn’t reallocate funding from Law & Order to fund broadband development even if it wanted to—and the rules going to a vote Thursday wouldn’t affect that anyway. The law the Post refers to, Section 706, is a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The law that “could give the government wider authority over television programming” has already been in effect for almost two decades, and no upcoming legislation is set to change it.
“Basically, this piece is citing Section 706—a statute that is in place now and will be no matter what happens tomorrow,” says Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The specifics of [the Post story] seem far-fetched and weird.”
The TV story comes in a week when misinformation about the FCC’s new rules to reclassify the Internet as a public utility has reached a fever pitch. Commissioners will vote on the new rules Thursday, and lobbyists and lawmakers have resorted to last-ditch efforts to kill them—as they would prevent Internet service providers from artificially slowing or outright blocking traffic to competitors’ websites.
One lobbying group has been doling out cash to place attack ads on Twitter timelines under the name of a fake government agency, the Department of Internet, warning of an Internet “at the speed of government.” Never mind that the new regulations, known as the Title II reclassification, would force Internet service providers to speed up to meet baseline benchmarks and prevent them from slowing traffic to make more money, as they do now.
In recent weeks, another lobbying group, backed by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), created a fake porn parody. And a think tank fellow—one whose organization has received money from Comcast in the past—has repeatedly likened the FCC’s handling of Internet regulation to Vietnam.
All told, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have spent $44.2 million lobbying against the passage of the new rules, Politico reports.
Still, even supporters of the new rules are worried that reclassification under Title II isn’t the best solution. They simply believe it’s the fastest way to make sure Internet service providers can’t shut out competitors for their own financial gain. There are also problems, some supporters say, with the process of implementing the new rules at the FCC.
“Moving towards reclassifying is the only way to make sure actual net neutrality rules can be effective, but what we’re concerned about is overreach—a general conduct rule—so that no party can claim the right to enforce against what they deem ‘bad,’” says Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But the government will not force you to buy special equipment to use the Internet, as the porn parody states. And, no, the FCC will not cancel your favorite NBC shows because it believes Comcast should reinvest in infrastructure. NBC is left to do that all on its own.If you’ve been a long time fan of the Predators or you’re just now joining in, one thing you’ve probably noticed is the amount of personality this team oozes. If you’ve only been exposed to their on-ice or organized team antics I’m here to grace you with their social media highlights.
We’re half-way through the season which makes this the perfect time to recap what our favorite big cats have been up to since the off-season.
I give to you some of the social media personalities of our favorite Nashville hockey players.
The Reigning King
The Subbanator. ---------------- Premieres Jan 27 at #NHLAllStar. A @predsnhl Production. #HockeyGoesHollywood A photo posted by NHL (@nhl) on Jan 25, 2017 at 10:40am PST
P.K. dubbed himself “The Subbanator” and the NHL is rolling with it for their Hollywood themed All-Star Game Weekend.
While the rest of the team has a knack for going on social media black-outs (to the point of if they’re not in the line-up you question their whereabouts and well being) you can always count on Subban to liven up your news feeds.
Whether he’s hanging out with T.I....
About last night... #ATL A photo posted by P.K. Subban (@subbanator) on Jan 15, 2017 at 9:21am PST
Kickstarting the most hype the Titans have seen in years (sorry, but you know it’s true)...
There's a time and place to get silly.... ☝ ️☝ A video posted by P.K. Subban (@subbanator) on Oct 24, 2016 at 1:44pm PDT
Doing Halloween the way we all wished we could do Halloween...
Favourite holiday of the year #purplerain A photo posted by P.K. Subban (@subbanator) on Oct 30, 2016 at 1:39pm PDT
Or just saving the world one good cause at a time...
It takes courage to share your stories. I give my platform to support the brave who do! #BellLetsTalk #InspiredByTheBrave (link in bio) A photo posted by P.K. Subban (@subbanator) on Jan 25, 2017 at 11:22am PST
I’m proud to be featured in @mend_nashville ’s #UnsilencetheViolence campaign - out now!! #pkapproved A video posted by P.K. Subban (@subbanator) on Jan 14, 2017 at 12:38pm PST
P.K. Subban is the reigning king of Predator’s social media. The team was spunky before, but Subban has brought out the personality in some of the quieter Predators. Only time will tell if someone will dare to take his Insta-throne.
Thanks P.K. for giving us the social media life we didn’t know we were missing.
The Prince
Filip Forsberg is pure class...even when losing bets to Ryan Johansen...
Tough loss for team Sweden in the world juniors last night, but time to man up, a bet is a bet @ryanjohansen92 A video posted by Filip Forsberg (@forsbergfilip) on Jan 5, 2017 at 7:23am PST
Or taking strolls through EA Sports...
Big thank you to the @easportsnhl guys for the guided tour of the studio. A childhood dream to see how the EA games are made, awesome day! ⚽️ A photo posted by Filip Forsberg (@forsbergfilip) on Jan 16, 2017 at 5:24pm PST
Or winning over the nerd community at Halloween...
I am Groot and Ironman were a perfect fit last night ❤️ A photo posted by Filip Forsberg (@forsbergfilip) on Oct 24, 2016 at 1:07pm PDT
Thanks for classing up our feeds Fil.
The Artist Creative
No, really, the man’s bio is “James Neal - I am Creative”. He might be hateful-revenge goal scoring-Sith Lord-James Neal on ice, but in reality he just really loves his dogs.
The Joey
My boyyy A photo posted by Ryan Johansen (@ryanjohansen92) on Aug 16, 2016 at 3:24pm PDT
Me and my snowflake #ace A photo posted by Ryan Johansen (@ryanjohansen92) on Oct 23, 2016 at 6:00pm PDT
‘Nuff said.
Throwback Thursday
The young guns might have Instagram on lock, but there was a time when Twitter was a diamond in the rough that provided hockey social media gold.
Alright, to be fair it still is, but there was a time where Captain Mike Fisher didn’t belong to the Instagram world. He was a simple man in the Twitter-verse that liked to hunt, fish, and troll the hell out of his teammates.
Today we say goodbye to @richcluneshow's account. Gone far too soon #RIP pic.twitter.com/bDOP0sdeIB — Mike Fisher (@mikefisher1212) July 22, 2013
Yes, that is a memorial to commemorate the end of former teammate Rich Clune’s time on Twitter as @RichCluneShow. He’s still on Twitter, but apparently Cap’n Fisher was devastated anyways. Troll on Cap, troll on.
If you’re overwhelmed just know this has only been the tip of the iceberg. A toe into the pool of social media greatness provided by our favorite Nashville hockey team.
It only gets sillier from here.Looking for news you can trust?
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Every five years, the US government revisits its Dietary Guidelines—suggestions for how Americans should eat. The guidelines won’t legally require you to, say, eat an apple a day, but they do affect things like agricultural subsidies and public school lunches, so they’re fairly influential.
The National Cattleman’s Beef Association argued that the Advisory Committee “clearly does not have the background or expertise” to tackle issues of sustainability.
When the committee tasked with making scientific recommendations for the 2015 Dietary Guidelines released its report this year, it ruffled some feathers. For the first time it included concerns about the environmental issues linked to certain dietary patterns and agricultural practices—for example, how eating less meat and more plant-based foods is “more health promoting and is associated with a lesser environmental impact.” Or that assuring food security might rely on creating agricultural practices that “reduce environmental impacts and conserve resources.”
Some lobbyists and politicians, especially those who pad their pockets with cash from Big Food and Big Ag, weren’t too happy about these suggestions. As I’ve written in the past, the suggestion that plant-based diets might be healthier for people and the planet messes with the meat industry’s bottom line, so why would they back it? In letters sent to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack over the past few months, industry groups have tried to argue that sustainability issues do not fall within the scope of the Dietary Guidelines. One letter from the National Cattleman’s Beef Association argued that the advisory committee “clearly does not have the background or expertise to evaluate the complex relationship between food production and the dietary needs of a growing American and international population.”
The House Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, which accepted at least $1.4 million from the food industry in 2013 and 2014, apparently caved to these complaints. It recently stuck a rider in its 2016 Agricultural Appropriations bill that would A) explicitly prohibit the upcoming Dietary Guidelines from mentioning anything other than diet and nutrient intake, and B) force the guidelines to only rely on scientific evidence that has been rated “Grade 1: Strong” by the Department of Agriculture. Politico reported on Thursday that a similar Senate agriculture appropriations rider would force any advice in the Dietary Guidelines to be “solely nutritional and dietary in nature.”
In an unprecedented move, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has shot back with a letter of its own. Health and food systems should be more closely related in the government’s eyes, the committee argued. “Future food insecurity is predictable without attention to the safety, quality, cost, and sustainability of the food supply,” the letter stated, adding that “the US health and public health systems are burdened with preventable health problems.” In other words, to narrow the reach of the Dietary Guidelines is to ignore the connection between things like exercise and obesity, for instance, or agricultural pesticide use and disease. To read more of the DGAC’s arguments, see the full letter here.
Expect the finalized Dietary Guidelines late this year. In the meantime, it looks like the DGAC isn’t giving up the battle for a more holistic national framework for how people eat. They certainly have Food Politics author Marion Nestle on their side; as she summarizes on her blog:Disabled man who was forced to CRAWL off Delta plane, down a flight of stairs... and do the same on his flight back from Hawaii vacation wins a'substantial' payout
Disabled Baraka Kanaan was made to crawl off Delta Airlines plane - twice
Two separate incidents - to and from Nantucket - took place in 2012
Mr Kanaan forced to walk 'on hands and knees' as there was no equipment
Former professor was partially paralyzed in a car accident in 2000
A disabled former college professor has won a lawsuit against an airline that forced him to crawl off a plane and onto the tarmac on his hands and knees - twice
Mr Baraka Kanaan, who is partially paralysed, was travelling from his home on Maui, Hawaii, to Nantucket Island, Massachusetts with Delta Airlines in July 2012.
Upon arrival, Delta Airlines refused to accommodate Mr Kanaan’s disability, making him crawl down the aisle, down a flight of steps and across the tarmac - and then made him do the same thing on his flight back home.
Sued: Mr Kanaan claims he was told there was no equipment to help him on and off the plane on the tarmac at Nantucket Island airport in 2012
Simultaneously, Mr. Kanaan claims, he could see a lift available at an adjacent gate. Mr. Kanaan, while wearing his 'best suit,' was then forced to crawl 'hand-over-hand' down the aisle, down a flight of stairs and across the tarmac to his wheelchair - without any assistance from the crew -as other passengers watched. The incident, he claims, caused 'great physical and emotional suffering.' ‘I can feel literally my spine was like someone had a sledgehammer and they were pounding a ten-inch spike in my sacral, hammering away,' he told Hawaii News Now last year.
'My thoracic, I could hear pops and clicks.'
‘My initial feeling was absolute shock, kind of like Twilight Zone feeling.’ Before heading home to Hawaii, Mr. Kanaan called Delta to report the incident, and to make sure the equipment would be available for his return flight in an attempt to avoid another humiliating ordeal.
Settlement: Mr. Kanaan, a former college professor, seen here prior to the accident that left him paralyzed, is said to have won substantial compensation from Delta
When Mr. Kanaan got to the airport he was yet again told the chair and lift were unavailable.
A flight attendant then offered to put a piece of cardboard on the ground so Mr. Kanaan's clothes wouldn't get dirty as he crawled across the ground, he claims in the suit.
Once he returned home, Mr. Kanaan says Delta offered him 25,000'sky miles' and a $100 voucher. He refused the offer, however, in fear that any future flights might again have him crawling on his hands and knees.
For any airplane with a seating capacity of 31 or more passengers, the Air Carrier Access Act requires airlines and airports to 'provide boarding assistance to individuals with disabilities by using ramps, mechanical lifts, or other suitable devices where level-entry boarding by loading bridge or mobile lounge is not available.'The San Francisco 49ers made 15 roster moves on Tuesday, releasing 13 players and signing two veteran free agents. The team has signed as many as 15 UDFAs, but they have not formally announced them yet. The team starts their rookie minicamp on Thursday, and that likely means the UDFAs will formally sign their contracts when they arrive in Santa Clara.
In the meantime, here is what the 49ers 90-man roster currently looks like. They are at 73 players, which means they have room to sign as many as 17 undrafted free agents. We’ve seen reports of 15 UDFA additions thus far. The team could add a couple more after that, or we could still see some veteran free agent additions. Add in the Vance McDonald trade rumors, and there is still plenty of room for change.
QB (3): Brian Hoyer, Matt Barkley, C.J. Beathard
RB (7): Carlos Hyde, Joe Williams, Kapri Bibbs, Tim Hightower, DuJuan Harris, Mike Davis, Raheem Mostert
FB (1): Kyle Juszczyk
WR (10): Pierre Garçon, Marquise Goodwin, Jeremy Kerley, Aldrick Robinson, Rashad Ross, DeAndre Smelter, Trent Taylor, Bruce Ellington, Aaron Burbridge, DeAndre Carter
TE (5): Vance McDonald, George Kittle, Logan Paulsen, Garrett Celek, Blake Bell
OT (4): Joe Staley, Trenton Brown, Norman Price, John Theus
OG (4): Zane Beadles, Joshua Garnett, Garry Gilliam, Brandon Fusco
C (3): Jeremy Zuttah, Daniel Kilgore, Tim Barnes
DL (11): Arik Armstead, DeForest Buckner, Solomon Thomas, Aaron Lynch, Ronald Blair, Tank Carradine, Chris Jones, D.J. Jones, Pita Taumoepenu, Quinton Dial, Earl Mitchell
LB (8): Ray-Ray Armstrong, Navorro Bowman, Ahmad Brooks, Brock Coyle, Reuben Foster, Eli Harold, Malcolm Smith, Dekoda Watson
CB (7): Rashard Robinson, Ahkello Witherspoon, Keith Reaser, Will Redmond, K’Waun Williams, Dontae Johnson, Prince Charles Iworah
FS (3): Jimmie Ward, Don Jones, Adrian Colbert
SS (3): Eric Reid, Jaquiski Tartt, Vinnie Sunseri
K (2): Robbie Gould, Nick Rose
P (1): Bradley Pinion
LS (1): Kyle NelsonCTV Montreal
The city's plan to light up the Jacques-Cartier Bridge for Montreal's 375th anniversary is raising eyebrows again after a new CROP poll shows very few Quebecers approve of the $39.5 million plan.
“The poll says only 1 per cent want it spent on lighting up a bridge,” said psychiatrist James Farquhar, who used his own money to pay CROP to survey 1000 Quebecers about the bridge. The poll also shows only 8 per cent approve of the government spending $39.5 on lighting the bridge.
“The poll was done by an official survey company. Anybody can add a question for $500, so I added two questions to find out how people feel about the bridge project,” he said.
Farquhar, who works with Montreal’s local homeless population, said homelessness is a major problem in Montreal and $40 million would go a long way towards solving it.
The planning committee is defending the lighting project, saying the value for the city would outweigh the investment.
“We've been building that project for four years now,” said Gilbert Rozon, commissioner of the 375th anniversary planning group. “A part of that is going to be beautiful. A part of that will create employment and part of that will bring tourism to Montreal.”
Bridge lighting isn't new. Many bridges around the world, including Buffalo, N.Y.’s Peace Bridge, the Langevin Bridge in Calgary and the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, to name just a few, are also lit. Montreal's plan for Jacques-Cartier is so far the most expensive in the world.
Most of these other bridge lighting projects cost only a few million dollars. Some are paid through public fundraising.
The federal government will spend $30 million on the Jacques-Cartier project with the city footing the extra $9.5 million.
Farquhar said he'll be sending his poll results to the mayor and the federal government.Police said the 22-year-old man was shot Sunday evening and the victim drove himself to the BP gas station on Dry Fork Road where he told the clerk to call for help and that he had been shot.
Advertisement Deputies: Shooting initially reported as road rage not a random act Detectives say they have not ruled out if drugs were involved Share Shares Copy Link Copy
The shooting initially reported as a road rage incident on Interstate 74 in Harrison Sunday |
prompted intrigue and concern in the west as to Russia’s goals.
“The US-led coalition will continue to fly missions over Iraq and Syria as planned and in support of our international mission to degrade and destroy Isil,” the defence official said.
The apparent geography of the strikes raises doubts that US and Russian pilots would in fact risk a confrontation, however. The early reports from the anti-Assad activists in Hama and Homs suggest the strikes occurred further west than the US has ever bombed, deep into territory where the Assad regime still maintains a tenuous hold, and probably within range of its air defences. The US has tended not to strike territory where Isis and Assad actively vie for control.
David Cameron, currently in Jamaica, said his evaluation of Russia’s move would depend on the targets. “I have a clear view that if this is a part of international action against [Isis], that appalling terrorist death cult outfit, then that is all to the good,” said the British prime minister.
“If, on the other hand, this is action against the Free Syrian Army in support of Assad the dictator, then obviously that is a retrograde step but let us see exactly what has happened.”
Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, warned Russia that its military intervention could mean Moscow shares criminal responsibility for the regime’s use of barrel bombs against its own people.
He said Britain was still trying to confirm the targets of the airstrikes, but added: “Now the Russians are very openly and ostentatiously there propping up the regime, they are vulnerable to international pressure. They have a shared responsibility. They may arguably have a legal exposure to this barrel bombing activity. Barrel bombing is criminal. It breaches international humanitarian law.”
Hammond said the impact of the Russian strikes would depend on their targets. “These are the first Russian strikes and the targets will be symbolic. The targets won’t have been selected by accident,” he said shortly before a Russian-chaired session of the UN security council on the issue.
At the session, Lavrov announced that Moscow would circulate a draft resolution to provide a mandate for a multilateral coalition against Isis, “based on international law”.
Russia has made clear that no military action in Syria can be legal without the approval of the Syrian government. The US, UK and France reject the legitimacy of the regime, in view of its role in suspected war crimes, and argue that western airstrikes in Syria are legal under the UN charter because they are a response to Isis sourcing attacks from Syrian territory against an ally, Iraq.
“I would be astonished if anything came out of the meeting,” said Hammond. “I don’t think the security council will be willing to say anything that doesn’t involve a reference to Assad ultimately not being part of the new Syria, and I don’t see the Russians at this stage being able to accept that kind of language.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Image provided by Homs Media Centre of smoke rising after airstrikes in Talbiseh. Photograph: Associated Press
The strikes came after Putin received permission from parliament for Russian forces to act on foreign soil. The federation council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, held a swift, closed session on Wednesday morning in which it unanimously approved Putin’s request.
Putin said in New York that Russia would not carry out ground operations in Syria, and his chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, emphasised this again on Wednesday, saying the request to the federation council referred exclusively to airstrikes.
He did not give any figures of the number of planes likely to be involved or the number of Russian military specialists on the ground inside Syria to back up the operation. He also insisted western bombing raids in Syria were illegal.
Russia's Syria gambit could be a game changer – but only if it hastens transition Read more
“You all know well that in the territory of Syria and Iraq … a number of countries are carrying out bombing strikes, including the United States,” said Ivanov.
“These actions do not conform with international law. To be legal they should be supported either by a resolution of the UN security council, or be backed by a request from the country where the raids are taking place.”
Ivanov said Assad had asked Russia for military assistance, making Russia’s actions legitimate.
Putin had told the UN the world should come together to fight Isis in the same way as it joined forces to fight Hitler in the second world war, though differences between Russia and the west over the role and fate of Assad have always made it unlikely that a broad coalition will emerge.
Putin spent 90 minutes in a bilateral meeting with Obama after his speech to the UN general assembly, about half of which was spent discussing Syria. The main disagreement was on the future role of Assad.
While Putin has characterised the Syrian president as a heroic fighter against terrorism, Kerry reiterated again on Wednesday that “by definition” Isis could not be defeated while Assad remained in power.Songgu Kwon writes for Bleeding Cool:
Elf, a fantasy graphic novel
Elf is firmly rooted in the classic European high-fantasy genre of Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. Within its pages, you’ll find a blend of surreal humor, emphasis on authentic depictions of medieval combat, and even poignant tragedy. As one of my readers enthusiastically put it:
“If you’re into comics…
great artwork…
great storytelling…
and a good punchline…
If you’re into military history… old weapons, fighting stances…
If you ever considered owning a Monster Manual, Player’s Handbook, or DM guide….Songgu Kwon’s web comic is worth the read! If the campaign is successful, the comic will be available in book form, and you NEED IT! Check it out!”
Elf has also been described in one instance as “Tolkien meets Monty Python”. I would say this is a fair description. This comic is recommended for mature readers, less for the gory violence, harsh language, nudity, and sexual content that pepper its pages, but more for its mature and complex themes that some younger readers may not fully appreciate.
The goal of my kickstarter campaign is to produce a hard bound book of exceptional quality which will collect all of the stories in the series, along with a wealth of additional materials like concept and pin-up art, as well as an exclusive story which will not be featured anywhere else. The emphasis here is on making something that’s really well made and substantial.
Many of the readers that have supported my crowd funding campaign so far have been from the UK and Europe. I am extremely grateful for this, because it means that despite the steep overseas shipping charges, they have chosen to back me anyway.
I’ve always been fascinated with the myths and fables of Europe and I have greatly admired the works of European masters of comic art, such as Milo Manara and Moebius. This has obviously influenced my work and it’s been my impression that many European readers appreciate my comics for that. I will endeavor in the future to try to make more comics for the European market.
A fellow comic creator and friend, Daniel de Sosa of Oi!, who lives in London, recommended that I try to submit my project to Bleeding Cool. He’s currently helping me to promote my project by distributing flyers to various spots in the city. If I should meet my crowd-funding goal, I will, in honor of my friend and the readers of Bleeding Cool, cut a watermelon in half with one of my swords and post the video on my Kickstarter page. I will do this! :O
About me:
Ever since I was a little kid, I was strongly drawn to comic books. In 2nd grade, I played hooky from many a Tae Kwon Do lesson to take refuge in the local comic book shop to read comics!
When I was in 8th grade, my passion for mythology, heroic fables and drawing was given a new outlet when my friends introduced me to the world of tabletop fantasy role playing games.
I am a comic book artist/writer and freelance illustrator. I also teach character design at Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, California.
I published my first graphic novel, Blanche the Baby Killer #0, in 2001 after winning the Xeric Grant for indie comic artists. Blanche #0 was translated and reprinted in French by publisher Wetta Worldwide in 2007. I subsequently contributed comics to Heavy Metal Magazine as well as a number of independent comic anthologies.
In 2007 I took a hiatus from the world of print, when the opportunity arose to work as lead character designer for the popular Adult Swim animated show, Metalocalypse. The show ran from 2007 to 2012, during which time I designed and drew well over 1000 unique characters.
Later that year, I decided to return to my first love, the graphic novel, and started drawing Elf. Taking advantage of the Internet to post a page every week, what began as a series of one-page gags has slowly evolved into more expansive and complex story arcs. More than two years after inking the first page, I’ve decided Elf is ready to go to print.
The link to the Elf Kickstarter page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/330163472/elf
About Dan Wickline Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.
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None foundAnother anti-gun group gets caught with the proverbial hand in the cookie jar. This time Gabby Giffords has her prints all over it.
The total amount of illegal contributions received was $15,250. That is not a small chunk of change. Giffords’ PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, received three illegal donations it has been discovered. This is not coincidence or a mistake. One could be a mistake and two could be coincidence. Three times is conspiracy to defraud.
Publicintegrity.org reports:
Singer, actress and comedian Bette Midler took to Twitter on April 18 to promote Gabby Giffords’ new gun control effort. “GABBY GIFFORDS SPEAKS, AND SHE IS FURIOUS!!” Midler wrote as she touted a New York Times opinion column authored by the former Arizona Democratic congresswoman who survived a 2011 shooting and has since launched an advocacy group that aims to curb gun violence. Just weeks later, Midler upped the ante, donating $10,000 to Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, the super PAC arm of Giffords’ group. The gift came from Midler’s private family foundation, according to campaign finance records. Before the second quarter ended in June, another family foundation — the Rupa and Bharat B. Bhatt Foundation — contributed $5,000 to the group and the New England Congregational Church in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., gave $250. They were modest contributions considering the group raised $6.6 million in the first half of 2013 — more than any other super PAC. But they were also strictly prohibited by the Internal Revenue Service. Nonprofits organized under Sec. 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code are restricted from “directly or indirectly” intervening in political campaigns. And private foundations — such as the Midler and Bhatt foundations — are also prohibited from lobbying to influence legislation. … Tax experts told the Center for Public Integrity that foundation donations to Giffords’ super PAC could be “very problematic.” Nonprofits organized under Sec. 501(c)(3) “cannot spend one penny” on partisan campaign activity, said Cleta Mitchell, an attorney in the Washington, D.C., office of Foley and Lardner LLP. “You can’t give them money to do things that you can’t do,” she continued. Political committees, such as super PACs, are “essentially radioactive” for 501(c)(3) nonprofits, added Marcus Owens, a lawyer at D.C.-based Caplin & Drysdale who previously headed the IRS’s exempt organization division.
As for the money. It is of course being refunded.
Anytime a public figure gets caught they are taught to show remorse and act like it was a huge mistake. Bette Midler claims that the mistake from her end was an accouting error and sent a personal check in place of the foundation check.
Honest mistake? Sure thing Bette and Gabby.
These people do not function like you and I. They have the best accountants that money can buy. For it to happen three times, that we know of, there was a decision made to see if it would fly.
Anyone who has dealt with an aggressive accountant has probably heard something like this in their life… It’s OK. We will claim the deduction. The worst case scenario is that the IRS says “no.”
In this case they got caught and it’s human nature to play dumb and act like you didn’t know. They weren’t about to send $15,250 back to these three organizations and hope that they came through with personal checks.
To quote our friends at GunsSaveLife.com:
Yeah, they’re sorry alright. Sorry they got caught.
I could not state it any better myself.Steelers cornerback Antwon Blake could have said the heck with it, and nobody would have blamed him.
Blake spent the better part of two years experiencing the highs and lows of life in the NFL with the lows being much more substantial than the highs.
Blake went from being an undrafted free agent to leading the Jaguars in special teams tackles as a rookie to getting cut to being picked up by the Steelers for special teams purposes with little chance of seeing the field — all within 17 months.
Giving up was an option. But not for Blake and now it’s paying off.
Blake quietly moved into the starting lineup at cornerback, nudging aside Cortez Allen and his $26 million contract along with a pair of 2015 draft picks (Senquez Golson and Doran Grant) and a veteran (Brandon Boykin) acquired to help solidify a position that was in need of stability.
Blake has no intention of giving up his starting spot, especially considering how difficult it was for him to get to this point.
“I always look back at where I was because they say you can’t forget where you came from,” Blake said. “My past definitely motivated me to get to this point. I have always believed in myself and am a firm believer that hard work will be rewarded. That’s just the type of person I am. You never know where your opportunity may come, you never know who may be watching and who notices your grind.”
The Steelers noticed enough to make him a surprise opening-day starter ahead of Allen, and it appears it is Blake’s position to lose especially after rebounding from shaky performance against the Patriots to have his best against the 49ers.
Blake allowed six catches to 49ers receivers but for 54 yards. Blake stood out against the run where he was credited with 10 solo tackles.
It was the fifth-most solo tackles by a Steelers cornerback since 1994. Only Dewayne Washington (13 in 2001), Bryant McFadden in 2010 (12 in 2010) and Deon Figures (11 in 1994 and 1996) had more in a game.
Blake is second on the team in total tackles with 13 and unassisted tackles with 12. Only Adam Jones of the Bengals has more tackles in the NFL through two weeks (19) for cornerbacks.
“He can do everything you dream of doing on the football field,” renowned trainer Tom Shaw told TribLive Radio recently. “He is that guy. He is going to be a star. He has work ethic and dedication and those are two key com -ponents. And when you have speed and agility like the way he gets in and out of breaks and move and change direction … he is a freak of nature.”
The Steelers used Blake in a multitude of ways against the 49ers. He covered, he was used for run support and he was even asked to blitz. He added a special teams tackle as one of the gunners on the punt team.
“We knew he had the ability the entire time,” linebacker Jarvis Jones said. “He was just waiting for his opportunity.”
Blake got his first break late last year. With Ike Taylor and Allen injured, the Steelers turned to Blake to play corner in their sub packages.
Blake saw action from Week 9 on and allowed only one touchdown and finished with five pass defenses and an interception. He had a forced fumble and fumble recovery in the season finale against the Bengals, proving to Blake that he could play with the best in the league.
“It is one thing to feel like you can do something, but it is another thing to go out there and actually do it,” Blake said. “I felt that it helped my confidence. But it’s the NFL, so every week there is another great receiver waiting for you. We have Antonio Brown, and I feel that preps me for anybody I am going to see.”
Blake held Torrey Smith to 30 yards on Sunday and the Patriots’ Julian Edelman to 41 yards. To put that into perspective, Smith finished with 131 yards Sunday, and Edelman has 194 yards in two games.
Blake has done enough over the past two years to impress Brown.
“He is super quick and really fast, aggressive hands and a special player,” Brown said. “He has all the skill set to be a great player. All he needed to do is go out there and prove it.”The race to succeed Martin McGuinness as MP for the Mid Ulster constituency has been confirmed as a four-way fight.
The race to succeed Martin McGuinness as MP for the Mid Ulster constituency has been confirmed as a four-way fight.
Four to battle it for Martin McGuinness' seat
There were no late entries to the ballot for the by-election before nominations closed late yesterday.
The four contenders are Sinn Fein Assembly Member Francie Molloy, independent Nigel Lutton, the Social Democratic and Labour Party's Patsy McGlone and Eric Bullick of the cross-community Alliance Party.
Mr Molloy, the principal deputy speaker at the Stormont Assembly, will attempt to retain the solid Sinn Fein seat, first won by his party colleague Mr McGuinness in 1997.
He is defending a sizeable majority of more than 15,300.
Stormont Deputy First Minister Mr McGuinness said he was resigning his Westminster seat as part of his party's policy to end double-jobbing in politics.
The main unionist parties are not fielding candidates and have instead thrown their support behind so-called unionist-unity candidate Mr Lutton, who is set to be Mr Molloy's main rival.
Mr Lutton's father, Frederick, was a former RUC reservist who was shot dead by the IRA in 1979.
That murder could be a major issue in the campaign as, in 2007, Upper Bann Democratic Unionist MP David Simpson used parliamentary privilege to allege that Mr Molloy had been a live suspect in the killing.
The long-standing Sinn Fein politician has strongly denied the allegation, while Mr Lutton has insisted that his decision to stand was not because Mr Molloy was running.
The emergence of the unity candidate has had major ramifications for the Ulster Unionist Party. In the wake of the UUP's decision to back Mr Lutton, two of its high-profile Assembly Members - Basil McCrea and John McCallister - resigned in protest.
The by-election will take place on March 7.
Press AssociationCHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. consumers can add chicken to the list of foods that will cost more this year.
Two chickens are seen in a file photo. U.S. consumers can add chicken to the list of foods that will cost more this year. Prices on everything from soup to nuts have moved higher as food companies pass on to consumers sharply higher costs for grain, meat, and fuel. REUTERS/Aly Song
Prices on everything from soup to nuts have moved higher as food companies pass on to consumers sharply higher costs for grain, meat, and fuel.
Chief executives at the two largest U.S. chicken companies said on Thursday that chicken prices must go higher to offset the industry’s higher production costs.
A swift rise in the price of corn, a major feed stock, has been particularly troublesome.
Chicken companies have been unable to raise chicken prices fast enough to offset the higher feed costs, Richard Bond, chief executive at Tyson Foods Inc, said on Thursday.
“We have attained some (higher) pricing but not at the same pace as our inputs have increased, especially in chicken. The lag of higher priced corn is just now coming through the products that we are taking to market,” Bond said during his webcast presentation at the BMO Capital Markets agriculture and protein conference in New York City.
Tyson is the largest U.S. meat company and the second largest U.S. chicken producer. Feed costs for the company should be $600 million higher this fiscal year than the previous year, said Bond.
Corn prices have soared to a record $6.50 per bushel this year amid strong demand from exporters, livestock and chicken producers, and the makers of the biofuel ethanol.
SUPPLY REDUCED, CONTRACTS CHANGED
In order to raise chicken prices enough to offset these higher costs, Pilgrim’s Pride Corp, the largest U.S. chicken producer, has cut production 5 percent and shortened contract terms with customers.
“Prices of grain have escalated so quickly this last fall and into the first part of the year that we have been unable to efficiently pass those prices along as quickly as they have gone up,” Pilgrim’s Chief Executive Clint Rivers told the BMO conference.
To more quickly pass on the higher costs, Pilgrims just recently shortened contract terms with customers to 90 to 180 days from previous year-long terms.
While Pilgrim’s has reduced production 5 percent, Rivers said the industry, as a whole, needs to cut production 3 to 4 percent to generate the higher prices needed to cover costs.
Recently the industry has reduced by 2 to 3 percent the number of eggs and young chicks placed in the production cycle, but it will be early this summer before that reduced supply reaches grocery stores.
“In the summertime we usually have our strongest demand for chicken, so typically you would not expect to be seeing egg sets drop this time of year. So I think it is pretty significant,” said Rivers.
“We should begin to see some supply affected by this (drop in egg sets) in June,” he said.A total of 167 demonstrators have been injured while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, according to a medic on site, as cited by Indigenous Rising Media.
Police are reportedly targeting demonstrators’ heads and legs.
Seven people have been hospitalized for severe head injuries. Three of those injured are reportedly elders of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
"There's been no signs of violence on the side of the [water] protectors. We've seen some folks being injured...it really does feel like a warzone, and it doesn't feel like we're in America in 2016," a protester told Indigenous Rising Media, calling the situation "very scary."
The reported injuries come as North Dakota police continue to deploy tear gas, rubber bullets, mace, and water cannon against demonstrators protesting the pipeline at the Oceti Sakowin camp.
READ MORE: 400 DAPL protesters ‘trapped on bridge’ as police fire tear gas, water cannon (VIDEO)
The authorities have blockaded protesters on a bridge at Highway 1806 and forced them to endure tear gas, according to Kevin Gilbertt, who has been broadcasting the protests live on Facebook.
“The options are endure the tear gas or trample each other,” he said.
Gilbertt has reported that the demonstrators are peaceful and unarmed, but a statement from Morton County, North Dakota, where the protest is taking place, describes them as “very aggressive,” claiming that they have attempted to start multiple fires at the scene.
However, a witness told Gilbertt that the fires were actually started by police projectiles.
Paramedics from Standing Rock EMT continue to remain at the scene, according to the report.David Hasselhoff: I Was ‘The Ultimate Nick Fury’
Although Samuel L. Jackson has played S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and the record-breaking Avengers, his portrayal of the cigar-chomping Marvel Comics government agent isn’t definitive to everyone. Like, say, to David Hasselhoff — Baywatch legend, Knight Rider icon, and star of the upcoming Piranha 3DD — who donned Fury’s signature eye patch and scowl in his own 1998 telefilm, earned Stan Lee’s blessing, and claims that his is the “ultimate” Nick Fury.
“I didn’t see The Avengers yet,” Hasselhoff admitted to Movieline while discussing his appearance — as David Hasselhoff — in the R-rated sequel Piranha 3DD. “I love Sam Jackson, but you know… my Nick Fury was the organic Nick Fury that was written and discussed with Stan Lee before anyone got in there to change it. Nick Fury was written to be tongue-in-cheek, and he had a cigar in his mouth, he was a tough guy — he was cool.”
Hasselhoff says he had earned Lee’s praise for his turn as Fury, who comes out of retirement in the 1998 film Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. to battle HYDRA. So he was a little miffed to learn the character would be portrayed by someone else — even if that someone was Jackson.
“Stan Lee said, ‘You’re the ultimate Nick Fury,’” he remembered. “Avi Arad, when they bought it, said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be the Nick Fury forever,’ and they lied. [Pause] But that happens to me all the time. That’s when you realize life isn’t fair.”
Hasselhoff, meanwhile, has been trying to revive another of his past projects anew — not Baywatch (alas!), but Knight Rider — his popular '80s series co-starring a tricked-out, artificially intelligent car named KITT. Numerous attempts to revive the series in film and television form have been made in the years since Knight Rider went off the air (including, most recently, a 2008 TV series that lasted one season), but the latest iteration — a film adaptation, currently at the Weinstein Co. — is what Hasselhoff has his sights set on.
In fact, he told Movieline, it’s the Weinstein Co.’s Knight Rider film that helped entice Hasselhoff to take part in Piranha 3DD. “Bob Weinstein called me and said, ‘Come on, man — if you do this movie and it does really well, I’ll put you in Scary Movie,” Hasselhoff said, "'and then we own Knight Rider, maybe we can put you in the Knight Rider movie…’”
Still, Hasselhoff wouldn’t mind finding his way back into the Marvel fold — perhaps in Avengers 2? “I had a blast playing Nick Fury,” he said. “And if it ever came back and Nick Fury has a brother — Dick Fury? — I’d be there.”
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Follow Movieline on Twitter.CONNACHT COACH PAT Lam has refused to rule out his team’s chances of qualifying for next season’s European Champions Cup but accepts that after defeat at Glasgow Warriors they are probably going to have to do it the hard way – via end-of-season play-offs against clubs from England and France.
In a match that saw Tim Swinson, the Glasgow lock, sent off for an apparent punch on Dave Heffernan, and what Lam described as “a bit of niggle”, the coach was still frustrated that his side had been dominant but come away without even the comfort of a losing bonus point while the Scots claimed four tries.
“It was probably an entertaining game for the neutral,” he said.
“We did some really good things but unfortunately all their points came from our errors or our indiscipline. Our yellow card [against Jack Carty for a high tackle] was a big turning point. I have to admire the effort but we blew a few scoring opportunities and gave away a few.
“I am disappointed, I don’t think the scoreline reflects the game. For us to get nothing out of it is frustrating. There were chances there, there were times we did not reload quickly enough, there were chances to go right and we went left and vice versa.
“It is what it is. Now we have a chance to go back, assess the injuries and get into our catch-up game against Zebre.”
Connacht’s grip on the Guinness Pro12 title is just about over – Ulster need only four points from four games to be mathematically out of range in the final play-off spot. Since the Scots and Italians are guaranteed two of the seven automatic Champions Cup spots, that leaves only five for the Irish and Welsh teams to share with Connacht 19 points off that battle.
“As far as Europe is concerned we are looking at the play-offs where it is all about us and Cardiff. This thing that means there has got to be one from every country is an area I think that needs to change – the top seven should go through,” said Lam.
“As far as the play-offs go there is a big gap between ourselves and Cardiff and the rest. All we have got to do is keep playing, keep getting as many points as we can. There are still five rounds for us, four rounds for everyone else, and then we will see where we are.”
The42 is on Instagram! Tap the button below on your phone to follow us!Image caption The Jersey born actor is the first non-American to don the red Superman cape
Superman Henry Cavill will come to the island for the Jersey premiere of Man of Steel.
He is the first non-American to don the red cape, and is from the Channel Island.
Cavill and some of the film's other cast members will be in the island for the first showing of the film in St Helier on Friday 14 June.
The Jersey premiere at Cineworld is set for two days after the UK premiere next month.
The film is directed by Zack Snyder who also directed 300 and Watchmen.
Henry Cavill was born in Jersey and went to St Michael's preparatory school in St Saviour before going to Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire.
He found fame playing Charles Brandon in the Tudors and was shortlisted to play James Bond. He also appeared in Immortals.KAMLOOPS — American star Hilary Knight is among the players at these IIHF women’s hockey world championship that would like to see the sport’s two professional leagues become one.
Easier said than done, it would seem.
The National Women’s Hockey League ended its first season with its championship game on March 12 in New Jersey, and in the closing minutes of its broadcast teased at possible expansion to Montreal and Toronto, which are both strongholds of the rival Canadian Women’s Hockey League.
The CWHL, which was founded in 2007, had its finale on March 13 in Ottawa, and league commissioner Brenda Andress told reporters there that those overtures regarding Montreal and Toronto were a “very strategic move.”
The NWHL has already coaxed Knight and other U.S. Olympians to jump from the CWHL’s Boston Blades to their loop’s Boston Pride.
The Pride won the NWHL title this season. The Blades went from the CWHL champions in 2014-15 to a last-placed 1-23-0 club this past campaign.
The four-team NWHL pays its players salaries, topping out at $25,000 a player. The five-team CWHL handles expenses, but is pledging salaries for the 2017-18 season.
It’s complex times. Women’s hockey seems to be growing, but you can’t help but wonder if the fan base is becoming confused.
“Could we see one league one day? I hope so,” explained Knight, 26, who’s from Palo Alto, Calif., and played her NCAA hockey at Wisconsin. “I know I’ve talked to many fans who have voiced their concerns to me about how there are two leagues and about how it would be great if all the great players could play all in one league.
“So, who’s ever in charge of that, get it going. We will show up and compete and do whatever we’re supposed to do.
“When ever you’re an elite athlete, you’re extremely competitive and you’re a control freak in certain areas. When you don’t have full control of the reins and you can see this great product but it can’t get to the next level without other people’s help, it’s sometimes frustrating. Hopefully the right person can find a way to unite the leagues and we can all be happy.”
It’s easy suggest that there’s an appetite for a league featuring all the top Americans and Canadians, plus a handful of high-end players from other countries.
There were media reports that more than 325,000 people in this country online streamed Canada’s gold-medal win over the U.S. at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.
The Canadians averaged crowds of 4,755 in their three-game preliminary round at this worlds.
A crowd of 4,082 was announced for the Clarkson Cup CWHL finale between the Les Canadiennes de Montreal and the Calgary Inferno, although reports put actual attendance at closer to 3,000.
“It’s a product that could sell,” said Canadian defender Jocelyne Larocque, 27, who plays in the CWHL with the Brampton Thunder.
“Ideally, both leagues would come together and form one league. That would be best for the players.”
The NHL spearheaded the Les Canadiennes and the Pride playing an exhibition game at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass., on Dec. 31 as part of the NHL’s Winter Classic activities. The game seemed hastily arranged, receiving little promotion ahead of time. Attendance for the 1-1 draw was never announced; a Montreal Gazette report called it “sparse … there was one-tenth the turnout of the Alumni game later in the afternoon.”
That’s also the contest where Denna Laing of the Pride suffered a severe spinal cord injury.
There is a chance that the two leagues could square off again in an NHL-led Winter Classic exhibition, admitted CWHL director of marketing and communications Sasky Stewart via email. The Toronto Maple Leafs are slated to host the Detroit Red Wings on Jan. 1, 2017 at BMO Field and the Maple Leafs began a partnership with the CWHL’s Toronto Furies in 2012.
“I can’t comment on where those discussions are at simply because our operations department is handling it and I’m not across it at this stage. With the outdoor game coming to Toronto, though, with one of our NHL partner clubs, we are hoping it becomes a reality again,” Stewart wrote.
As for the two leagues situation, Stewart wrote: “We never expected two leagues. We always wanted to have one league. One league is better. Women’s sport in general needs to be together and stick together.”
sewen@postmedia.com
twitter.com/steveewenIndia has a long history of migration. More than a century ago, large numbers of Indian migrants – many of them involuntary ones – moved to Africa, the Caribbean and within the Indian subcontinent itself. Some of the top destinations of Indian migrants in more recent decades include Persian Gulf countries, North America and Europe. Here are five facts about India and migration.
1 India is the top source of international migrants, with one-in-twenty migrants worldwide born in India. As of 2015, 15.6 million people born in India were living in other countries. India has been among the world’s top origin countries of migrants since the United Nations started tracking migrant origins in 1990. The number of international Indian migrants has more than doubled over the past 25 years, growing about twice as fast as the world’s total migrant population.
(Use the interactive below to explore migration trends for India and other countries.)
Interactive: Origins and Destinations of International Migrants
Nearly half of India’s migrants are in just three countries: the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and the United States. About 3.5 million Indians live in the UAE, the top destination country for Indian migrants. Over the past two decades, millions of Indians have migrated there to find employment as laborers. Pakistan has the second-largest number of migrants, with 2 million.
Almost 2 million more live in the U.S., making up the country’s third-largest immigrant group. Among Indian Americans, nearly nine-in-ten were born in India. As a whole, Indian Americans are among the highest educated and have some of the highest income among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
2 India is also one of the world’s top destinations for international migrants. As of 2015, about 5.2 million immigrants live in India, making it the 12th-largest immigrant population in the world. The overwhelming majority of India’s immigrants are from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh (3.2 million), Pakistan (1.1 million), Nepal (540,000) and Sri Lanka (160,000).
3 Even though the country is the top source of the world’s migrants in total numbers, India has one of the world’s lowest emigration rates. Only about 1% of India’s birth population lives outside of the country, a similar emigration rate to that of the U.S. At more than 1 billion, India’s population is the second-largest in the world behind China. Consequently, it would take tens of millions more people to leave India before its emigration rate reached the world’s 3% average.
4 India receives more remittances from migrants than any other country. About $69 billion was sent by Indian migrants to family and friends in India in 2015, amounting to roughly 3% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the World Bank estimates. Most of the money comes from Indians living in Persian Gulf countries as well as the U.S., the UK and Canada. India has been the world’s top recipient of migrant remittances since 2008, when it overtook China on this measure.
5 India’s religious minorities have been more likely to migrate internationally. Religious minorities make up a larger share of India’s international migrant population than they do among the nation’s domestic population, according to 2010 Pew Research Center estimates. For example, about 19% of the Indian international migrant population was Christian, compared with only 3% of the population in India. Similarly, an estimated 27% of the Indian international migrant population was Muslim, compared with 14% of the population in India. The reverse is true for Hindus: Only 45% of India’s international migrant population was Hindu, compared with 80% of the population in India.
Topics: Immigration Trends, Global Migration and Demography, Religious Affiliation, Migration, Asia and the Pacific, ImmigrationStory highlights At least 11 people injured near London's Natural History Museum
Police say crash into pedestrians "not a terrorist-related incident"
(CNN) A man arrested in a London car collision that injured at least 11 people has been released and is under investigation.
The 47-year-old man was arrested on "suspicion of dangerous driving" after a car jumped the pavement and hit pedestrians near London's Natural History Museum Saturday, London's Metropolitan Police said. The incident is not terrorist-related, police said.
Eleven people |
or tax on carbon pollution. Most are still waiting on the sidelines. Why should any single country cut its carbon emissions when it knows that its reductions will only be a drop in the bucket toward solving climate change — and other nations aren’t asking their citizens to pay their fair share? Blame it on short election cycles, partisanship, or fossil energy interests, the political will often doesn’t exist — whether in Washington or the latest global environment gathering in Rio de Janeiro.
Sitting in the driver’s seat
"Free riders" are only half the problem. "Free drivers" may be as important. The allure of geoengineering derives from the simple fact that – given what little we know about it at the moment – it appears to be a comparatively cheap way to combat climate change. And it doesn’t take a global agreement to act. It takes one actor – one country – in the driver’s seat.
If, for example, the very existence of an island, nation, city, or agricultural region is threatened by global warming, the question among its leaders will no longer be whether geoengineering is an option, but what the effects, positive and negative, might be and how it could be carried out. That’s also where the science stands today, and the economics points in the same direction.
One option that will inevitably come under consideration is the possibility of shooting reflecting particles into the upper atmosphere to create an artificial sun shield for the planet. Blocking some of the sun’s rays from hitting the planet may sound like science fiction or hubris, or both. But geoengineers are already looking at which particles would work best, and how to deliver them: Planes, balloons or multiple mile-long hoses are all contenders.
All these options have one thing in common: They are cheap – at least from the narrow perspective of those doing the geoengineering. Hence the "free" in "free driver."
In fact, the price tag of these geoengineering strategies is likely to be negligible relative to the purported benefits: Columbia University’s Scott Barrett, among others, has calculated that it would cost pennies to offset a ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By comparison, it costs dollars per ton to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the first place.
The higher cost of attacking the problem head-on, by reducing carbon emissions, would still be a bargain compared to the financial, ecological and human costs of unchecked global warming. But "free riding" is so much easier, politically and financially.
That’s what makes the "free driver" effect so powerful. Geoengineering is seductively cheap, and it doesn’t take the collective will of billions of people – or policies guiding those billions – to have a major effect. Anyone capable of flying a fleet of planes at high altitudes could conceivably have a go at altering the planet’s atmosphere, and do so at a fraction of the cost of decreasing carbon dioxide pollution. But here’s the catch: Nobody knows the costs of potential unknown and sometimes unknowable side effects, and there could be grave political and legal repercussions when someone starts playing God with the climate.
Proof by volcano
What makes scientists believe geoengineering could work? It’s been tried before – by nature, not by humanity.
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in June 1991, it forced the evacuation of 200,000 Filipinos and shot 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The added sulfur counteracted the effect of 1,100 billion tons of carbon dioxide that had been accumulating in the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. In 1992 and 1993, it decreased global temperatures by a bit less than 1 degree Fahrenheit by reducing the amount of sunlight that hit the earth’s surface. That was about the same amount temperatures had risen at that point from carbon added to the atmosphere by human activity. In other words, Mount Pinatubo alone offset all temperature increases from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The aftermath of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption suggests the limitations of this kind of geoengineering. The excess carbon dioxide in the air isn’t being removed – geoengineering would simply add millions of tons of sulfur dioxide (or some custom designed material) to the atmosphere. That might lower temperatures — but it would not address other problems caused by global warming. For example, it wouldn’t stop the ongoing acidification of the oceans, which may kill much of the life they hold.
And there will probably be a host of unknown, unexpected consequences. For example, some climatologists blame the Mount Pinatubo eruption for flooding along the Mississippi River in 1993 and for droughts in sub-Saharan African. That still pales in comparison to the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in present-day Indonesia, which caused the "year without a summer" linked to some 200,000 deaths across Europe in 1816. Incidentally, the eruption also had some unexpected cultural repercussions: All those overcast days also forced Mary Shelley and John William Polidori to spend much of their Swiss summer holidays indoors, jumpstarting the creation of both Frankenstein and The Vampyre (an inspiration for Dracula).
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that pumping one pollutant into the atmosphere in an attempt to offset the effects of another could backfire. It may also be impossible to demonstrate which adverse climate events were caused by which single geoengineering intervention. That throws a wrench into the traditional research model: It’s one thing to study the effects of a past volcanic eruption or to fiddle in a lab with self-contained experiments. It’s quite another to devise an experiment that could be conducted in the real world. It would be all too easy to blur the line between experiment and deployment. That and many other questions need to be answered, lest we enter wholly unchartered territory when it comes to playing with the atmosphere of our shared home.
Seat belts are good, but there’s no avoiding speed limits
Talk of geoengineering inevitably leads to the question of "moral hazard." Will the exploration of these technologies lull humanity into thinking that it need not act responsibly and cut carbon emissions? Perhaps. Seat belt laws may make some drivers feel so safe that they drive more recklessly. Still, that is hardly an argument against those laws.
While the international community should not abandon efforts to limit carbon emissions, scientists must also be prepared to take geoengineering seriously. Humanity may already have passed so many global warming tipping points that – even with radical action to cut emissions – it may be important to have some form of geoengineering in our toolkit.
The worst we can do is fall into the trap of thinking geoengineering is a panacea to our climate change problem. While its initial costs may be seductively low, no one knows the unintended consequences of trying to alter the planet’s atmosphere. Just as it seems to cost almost nothing to emit carbon – leading all of us to emit more than we ought to – geoengineering may appear cheap at first, only to leave humanity and nature to foot a much larger bill later on. "Free riding" turns out not to be cheap after all. "Free driving" may face the same conclusion.
Nor is it likely that everyone will face the same costs. Climate change does not affect all areas of the globe evenly. Neither will geoengineering. What if it leads to a further drying out of the southwestern United States or of sub-Saharan Africa, or to flooding elsewhere?
While the risks cannot be ignored, not even considering geoengineering research is clearly not an option. Desertification and flooding are also among the many consequences of unchecked global warming. The benefit-cost calculation of geoengineering must take these effects into account.
The fact that climate change’s effects are distributed unevenly around the globe may also lead some nations to experiment with geoengineering on their own. India’s national security advisor wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t at least consider countering the monsoon effects of carbon with relatively small amounts of extra sulfur. And Bangladesh’s finance minister would be remiss if he didn’t weigh the all-too-real costs of moving tens of millions of people against the benefits of cloud-brightening (another possible way to deflect more sunlight back into space).
In short, it will not just be up to U.S. scientists or a handful of technologically advanced countries to weigh the pros and cons of geoengineering. These technologies will be available to many countries – and as we see today, world leaders don’t always succeed in working together to combat the threat of climate change.
All it takes is a single actor willing to focus on the purported benefits to his country or her region to pull the geoengineering trigger. The task with geoengineering is to coordinate international inaction while the international community considers what steps should be taken. The fate of the planet cannot be left in the hands of one leader, one nation, one billionaire.
Fortunately, we are still many years off from the full "free driver" effect taking hold. There’s some time to engage in a serious global governance debate and careful research: building coalitions, guiding countries and perhaps even individuals lest they take global matters into their own hands. In fact, that is where the discussion stands at the moment, with a governance initiative convened by the British Royal Society, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, and the Environmental Defense Fund, among other deliberations guiding how geoengineering research should be pursued.
With time come the "free drivers"
The clock, however, is ticking. A single dramatic climate-related event anywhere in the world – think Hurricane Katrina on steroids – could trigger the "free driver" effect. That event need not be global and it need not even be conclusively linked to global warming. A nervous leader of a frightened nation might well race past the point of debate to deployment. The "free driver" effect will all but guarantee that we will face this choice at some point.
"Free riding" and "free driving" occupy opposite poles of the spectrum of climate action: One ensures that individuals won’t supply enough of a public good. The other creates an incentive to engage in potentially reckless geoengineering and supply a global bad. It’s tough to say which one is more dangerous. Together, these powerful forces could push the globe to the brink.Kevin Harvick, finished 1 point behind Kyle Busch in second place
Jeff Gordon, who retired from full-time racing after the season, finished 5 points behind Kyle Busch in third place
The 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series was the 67th season of professional stock car racing in the United States and the 44th modern-era Cup season. The season began at Daytona International Speedway with the Sprint Unlimited exhibition race, the Budweiser Duels, and the Daytona 500. The season ended with the Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Kyle Busch won the championship, despite missing the first third of the season due to severe leg injuries suffered in an Xfinity Series race at Daytona. Busch also became the first Toyota driver to win a Cup championship.[1] Despite not running the full season, Brett Moffitt was named Rookie of the Year.
The season also marked the first season of a new television contract. During the season, races were televised in the United States on Fox, Fox Sports 1, NBC, and NBCSN. ESPN and Turner Sports, who televised races from 2007 to 2014, did not seek to renew their contracts with NASCAR following the completion of the 2014 season; this marked the end of a 31-year relationship between NASCAR and Turner's primary stations, TBS and TNT. In addition, it was the first season on the newly rebranded Fox Sports Racing in Canada and the Caribbean.
On January 22, 2015, four-time champion Jeff Gordon announced that 2015 would be his final season as a full-time driver, but he did not rule out complete retirement. Chase Elliott replaced him in the No. 24 car for Hendrick Motorsports in 2016.
Teams and drivers [ edit ]
Complete schedule [ edit ]
There were 43 full-time teams in 2015.
Limited schedule [ edit ]
Changes [ edit ]
Teams [ edit ]
Drivers [ edit ]
Crew chiefs [ edit ]
Rule changes [ edit ]
Sources:[77][78][79]
Private testing is banned starting at the conclusion of the 2014 season. Testing will only be permitted during NASCAR and Goodyear sanctioned tests. Further, there was not a pre-season test at Daytona in 2015. A violation of this rule will be a P6 penalty.
Only drivers licensed and approved for Sprint Cup competition will be permitted to participate in tire testing.
At road courses, it is now permissible to run qualifying and race sessions under wet-weather conditions. Goodyear will supply wet-weather tires for use in Sprint Cup competition and teams will be required to bring cars with windshield wipers, defoggers, and wet-weather racing capabilities.
Tapered spacers will be installed in the engines to reduce horsepower from 850 to 725.
Flat valve lifters will be replaced with roller valve lifters.
Lower differential gear ratios (higher gears) will also be mandated targeting a reduction from a 9,500 rpm max to a 9,000 rpm max.
Rear spoiler height will be reduced from 8 inches to 6 inches.
Teams will have the option of installing a driver adjustable track bar.
The radiator pan will be decreased from 43 inches to 38 inches.
The minimum weight of the car has been reduced by 50 lb to 3,250 lb.
NASCAR has approved a new brake caliper system for 2015 and issued a new parts approval process.
Teams are not allowed to alter the side skirts of their cars during the race. At tracks where aerodynamics were important in 2014, many teams would pull the side bodywork of the car during early pit stops. The practice, officially known as vertical rocker panel extensions, was used to limit airflow underneath the vehicle.
An automated electronic pit road officiating system will be implemented after extensive testing during the 2014 Chase, eliminating the need for human officials to stand in the pit lane.
If a vehicle has to pit outside its assigned pit box and the crew starts removing tire(s), the team can reinstall the tire(s) before moving the car back into its assigned pit stall to avoid penalties.
Additional crew member(s) assisting from an adjacent pit box may be counted towards the limit of seven over the wall.
Crew member interference with other teams' pit stops may lead to a penalty.
Rules with refueling have been clarified. Refueling can begin once the car comes to a complete stop and can continue when it starts leaving provided equipment and/or the fueler does not leave the pit box. Further, no equipment may be tossed or thrown over the wall at any time.
Weight ballasts must be in block form with a five-pound minimum for each block.
NASCAR no longer will penalize or monitor missing lug nuts during pit stops, leaving the teams to self-police lug nuts.
Qualifying session length times will be shortened. At short tracks and intermediates, the three sessions will be 15 minutes, 10 minutes, and 5 minutes in length. Road courses will consist of a 25-minute and a 10-minute session. Restrictor plate qualifying will consist of three 5-minute sessions as was used at the fall 2014 Talladega race.
NASCAR will use an electronic data log and capture system to increase efficiency of pre-race inspections.
In-season changes [ edit ]
Following disastrous crashes at Daytona 500 qualifying, NASCAR implemented a single-car two round qualifying system for restrictor plate races. In round 1, each car goes out one at a time for one warm-up, one timed, and one cool down lap. NASCAR will release the next car to begin their lap while the current car is finishing their timed lap with the goal to have the next car start their timed lap no more than 20 seconds after the previous car finishes. The top 12 cars from round 1 will make a second run in the same format to determine the starting lineup for positions 1–12, with positions 13–43 (as well as any DNQs) determined by round 1 result.
In an effort to increase competition, NASCAR made rule changes specific to the races at Kentucky, Darlington, Indianapolis, and the August Michigan race. [80] Kentucky and Darlington ran a lower downforce package, featuring a shorter spoiler (reduced from 6 inches to 3.5 inches in height for Kentucky, reduced further to 3 in for Darlington), a shorter splitter (reduced by 1.25 inches at Kentucky and 0.25 inches at Darlington), and a shorter radiator pan (reduced from 38 in to 25 in for both races). Indianapolis and the August Michigan race ran a high drag package, featuring a taller spoiler (9 in. height vertically with a 1 in wicker bill on the top of the spoiler), a 43 in radiator pan, and a 2 in spoiler extension. After complaints of overheating at the Indianapolis event, NASCAR mandated additional cooling holes in the right side window for the Michigan event. Due to concerns about drafting at these events, NASCAR also implemented the single-car qualifying system used at restrictor plate events for these two events. Goodyear was unable to change their tire compounds in time for Kentucky, Indianapolis, and Michigan, but was able to bring a softer tire to complement the package to the Darlington event. After the Darlington event, NASCAR and its teams suggested a similar package to that used at Darlington would be used for the majority of 2016 races. [81]
Starting at Watkins Glen, teams have the option of using a digital dashboard. The dashboards will be heavily regulated by NASCAR as to what can and cannot be displayed. The first team to use the digital dashboard was Kurt Busch at Darlington. The digital dashboards will be mandated in 2016. [82] [83]
Starting at the fall Richmond race, NASCAR began to closely review restarts due to drivers jumping the restart.
On October 20, 2015, NASCAR announced that they will reduce the number of green-white-checkered attempts from 3 attempts to 1 starting at the Chase race at Talladega. This rule will only be used for races at Daytona and Talladega. This led to the addition of the "overtime line" starting in 2016 at all tracks.
Schedule [ edit ]
The final calendar was released on August 26, 2014,[84] comprising 36 races, as well as two exhibition races. The schedule also includes two Budweiser Duels, which are the qualifying races for the Daytona 500.
Key changes from 2014 include:
Season summary [ edit ]
Race reports [ edit ]
Speedweeks 2015
Speedweeks 2015 started with the Sprint Unlimited. Matt Kenseth won the Sprint Unlimited ahead of Martin Truex, Jr. and Carl Edwards in a crash-filled race that saw only 12 of 25 cars finish the race. Following the race, tension arose between Kevin Harvick and Joey Logano over how Logano was racing Harvick in the later part of the race.[91]
Qualifying for the front row of the Daytona 500 took place the following day. Jeff Gordon won the pole for his 23rd and final Daytona 500. His teammate Jimmie Johnson joined him on the front row by qualifying second. Group qualifying was used for the first time, and a multicar crash occurred from Reed Sorenson and Clint Bowyer making contact, which also involved Bobby Labonte, J.J. Yeley, and Denny Hamlin.[92]
The following Thursday, the Budweiser Duels took place to set the remainder of the starting lineup for the Daytona 500. The first duel race was won by Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who held off pole-sitter Gordon to take the win.[93] The second duel race was won by Johnson from the pole. During the race, an incident occurred between Hamlin and Danica Patrick which resulted in a confrontation between the two following the race.[94]
The Friday before the Daytona 500, Kurt Busch was indefinitely suspended by NASCAR following possible charges of domestic violence against his former girlfriend Patricia Driscoll. Regan Smith would replace Kurt Busch in the Daytona 500.[95] The day before the race, Kurt's younger brother Kyle Busch broke his right leg and fractured his left foot in an accident in the Alert Today Florida 300 Xfinity Series race where he hit a wall without a SAFER barrier. Matt Crafton replaced Kyle Busch for the Daytona 500, making his Cup debut.[96]
Round 1: Daytona 500
Jeff Gordon started on the pole and led the most laps, but was involved in a late wreck.[97] Another wreck occurred on lap 41 involving Tony Stewart and Matt Kenseth.[98] Brad Keselowski lost an engine with 40 laps to go and caused Jamie McMurray and Ryan Newman to collide with each other.[99] Joey Logano would score his first Daytona 500 win on a two lap dash to the finish.[97]
Round 2: Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500
After a delayed start due to rain, Joey Logano led the field to green. Kevin Harvick dominated the first half of the race but would end up finishing second. Jeff Gordon was involved in a multicar accident with Denny Hamlin, Jamie McMurray, and Ryan Newman.[100] Gordon had hit a wall without a SAFER barrier and pointed the issue out to NASCAR.[101] Jimmie Johnson would go on to win the race.[100]
Round 3: Kobalt 400
Jeff Gordon won the pole but started from the rear in a backup car. Gordon drove to the front but was collected in a wreck with Jeb Burton after Jimmie Johnson got into the wall. Late in the race, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. took 2 tires on pit road while Kevin Harvick would take 4 tires. Harvick was able to get around Earnhardt, Jr. and score the win.[102]
Round 4: CampingWorld.com 500
Kevin Harvick started on the pole and dominated the race to score his second straight victory and his fourth straight win at Phoenix. Harvick was followed by Jamie McMurray, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, and Kurt Busch. Kurt Busch made his return to NASCAR following a three-race suspension.[103]
Round 5: Auto Club 400
Kurt Busch was on the pole and dominated the race. During a green-white-checker finish, Brad Keselowski was able to get around Kurt Busch on the last lap and score the win. Kurt Busch finished third, having been passed by Kevin Harvick for second. Harvick brought his streak of finishing first or second up to eight races dating back to the previous season.[104]
Round 6: STP 500
Joey Logano started from the pole. Denny Hamlin would come back from a pit road penalty for an uncontrolled tire and score his fifth win at Martinsville, finishing ahead of Brad Keselowski, Logano, Matt Kenseth, and David Ragan. Kevin Harvick finished eighth, ending his streak of top-two finishes. Chase Elliott made his Cup debut, finishing 38th after being involved in a wreck.[105] Kyle Larson missed the race after fainting during an autograph signing the day prior and was replaced by Regan Smith.[106]
Round 7: Duck Commander 500
Kurt Busch sat on the pole. Jimmie Johnson would pass Jamie McMurray and Kevin Harvick on the final restart with 20 laps to go to score his second win of the season and his fifth win at Texas. Johnson was followed by Harvick, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Joey Logano, and Brad Keselowski.[107]
Round 8: Food City 500
Matt Kenseth started the race on the pole. The race was red flagged 22 laps in due to rain.[108] During the red flag, Denny Hamlin would be unable to continue in the race due to neck spasms and would be replaced by Erik Jones, who made his unofficial Cup debut.[109] After the race resumed, Kevin Harvick would go on and lead the most laps but would be collected in a wreck with David Ragan that was triggered after Jimmie Johnson and Jeb Burton got into each other.[110] Kenseth would win the race in a green-white-checker finish following a red flag from more rain.[111]
Round 9: Toyota Owners 400
The race was supposed to be held Saturday night but was postponed until Sunday afternoon due to rain. Joey Logano started from the pole position. Kurt Busch took the lead from Logano after a competition caution and dominated the race, scoring the win. Kurt Busch was followed by Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Jamie McMurray, and Logano.[112]
Round 10: GEICO 500
Jeff Gordon won the pole for the race, with qualifying using single car runs instead of group qualifying.[113] The race saw multicar accidents including one on lap 47 that collected 15 cars and a spin by Carl Edwards on the final lap. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. would win the race ahead of Jimmie Johnson, scoring his sixth win at Talladega.[114]
Round 11: SpongeBob SquarePants 400
Joey Logano started the race from the pole. The race was red flagged on lap 98 due to rain. Martin Truex, Jr. led the most laps but had to make a late pit stop for fuel, which gave the lead to Jimmie Johnson. Johnson would go on to score his third victory of the season, finishing ahead of Kevin Harvick and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Erik Jones made his official Cup debut and ran up front until he hit the wall with 73 laps to go.[115]
Exhibition: NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race
In the Sprint Showdown held the day prior, Greg Biffle won the first segment while Clint Bowyer won the second segment in order to advance to the Sprint All-Star Race. Danica Patrick would win the fan vote in order to participate in the Sprint All-Star Race.[116]
Denny Hamlin started the race on the pole. Kasey Kahne would pass Hamlin for the lead and win the first segment. Brad Keselowski would hold the lead throughout the second and third segments. Kurt Busch would take the lead in the fourth segment. After mandatory pit stops, Hamlin would lead the final 10 laps in the fifth segment and win the Sprint All-Star Race. Kyle Busch made his return to NASCAR following the injuries he sustained in the Xfinity Series race at Daytona.[117]
Round 12: Coca-Cola 600
Matt Kenseth started the race from the pole. Jimmie Johnson spun twice during the race, with the second occurrence involving him hitting the pit wall and ending his race. Kurt Busch and Martin Truex, Jr. had the strongest cars, but Carl Edwards was able to stretch his fuel mileage at the end of the race and score his first win with Joe Gibbs Racing. Edwards was followed by Greg Biffle, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Kenseth, and Truex, Jr.[118]
Round 13: FedEx 400
Denny Hamlin won the pole for the race. Martin Truex, Jr. led the most laps, with Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick also leading laps throughout the race. After multiple late cautions and a green-white-checker finish, Johnson was able to win the race, his fourth win of the season and tenth at Dover. Johnson became one of five drivers to have at least ten wins at a single track.[119]
Round 14: Axalta "We Paint Winners" 400
Kurt Busch was on the pole position. Martin Truex, Jr. led the most laps for the fourth straight race and went on to score his first win of the season and his first victory since 2013. Truex, Jr. was followed by Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Joey Logano, and Kurt Busch.[120]
Round 15: Quicken Loans 400
Kasey Kahne started the race from the pole. The race saw four red flags due to rain. During the race, Kevin Harvick fell two laps down after a flat tire and Kyle Busch finished last after hitting the wall. After the fourth red flag, the race was called and Kurt Busch was awarded the win, his second of the season. The remainder of the top five included Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Martin Truex, Jr., Matt Kenseth, and Joey Logano.[121]
Round 16: Toyota/Save Mart 350
A. J. Allmendinger started on the pole but would finish 37th after an issue with the fuel system on his car. Jimmie Johnson led the most laps in the race. On a late caution on lap 100, Kyle Busch pitted for four tires while Johnson stayed out. Kyle Busch was able to get around Johnson and score his first win of the season. Kurt Busch finished the race in second, making it the first time the Busch brothers both finished in the top two in a race.[122]
Round 17: Coke Zero 400
Dale Earnhardt, Jr. started the race from pole after qualifying was rained out and the field set by practice speeds. The start of the race was delayed four hours by rain, running early into the following Monday. Several multicar accidents occurred throughout the race. Earnhardt, Jr. dominated the race and took the win in a green-white-checker finish as "The Big One" happened at the finish line, resulting in Austin Dillon flying into the catchfence. Dillon was uninjured in the wreck save for some bruises.[123]
Round 18: Quaker State 400
Kyle Larson was on the pole after qualifying was rained out. The race saw the debut of a new rules package that reduced the downforce of the cars, which allowed for more side-by-side racing and passing. Kyle Busch dominated the race and got by Joey Logano with 19 laps remaining to score his second win of the season. Logano finished second, followed by Joe Gibbs Racing drivers Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards, and Matt Kenseth. All four Joe Gibbs Racing drivers finished the race in the top five led by Kyle Busch.[124]
Round 19: 5-hour Energy 301
The 5-hour Energy 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in July
Carl Edwards started the race on the pole. Brad Keselowski went on to lead the most laps in the race. Kyle Busch made a pit stop under green flag conditions shortly before a caution came out. The leaders pitted, while Kyle Busch took over the race lead and went on for his second straight win and third of the season. Kyle Busch was followed by Keselowski, Kevin Harvick, Joey Logano, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.[125]
Round 20: Brickyard 400
Carl Edwards won the pole for the race.[126] The race featured a higher drag rules package intended to increase passing and drafting. Jeff Gordon was caught up in a wreck with Clint Bowyer, ending his chance to win his final Brickyard 400. Kyle Busch passed Kevin Harvick on a restart with 8 laps left in the race and was able to survive two restarts, including a green-white-checker finish, to win the race. This was Kyle Busch's third straight win and fourth in the past five races, moving him closer to the top 30 in points, which he needed to be in to be eligible for the Chase. Kyle Busch also completed a weekend sweep as he won the Xfinity Series race the day before. Joey Logano finished in second, followed by Harvick, Martin Truex, Jr., and Denny Hamlin.[127]
Round 21: Windows 10 400
Kyle Busch started the race from the pole position. Early in the race, Kasey Kahne hit the pit road wall and Kevin Harvick blew an engine. Toward the end of the race, several drivers gambled on fuel mileage. Joey Logano was leading but ran out of fuel with two laps to go. Kyle Busch took the lead and came to the white flag, but ran out of fuel on the final lap. Matt Kenseth was able to pass Kyle Busch and take the win, his second win of the season.[128]
Round 22: Cheez-It 355 at The Glen
A. J. Allmendinger started on the pole, but his day was plagued with a poor-handling car and his engine shutting off and not refiring on lap 51. Several wrecks and incidents happened throughout the race. Toward the end of the race, Kevin Harvick was leading but stretching his fuel mileage. Harvick ran out of fuel on the final turn and was passed by Joey Logano for the win. Logano completed a weekend sweep as he won the preceding day's Xfinity Series race. Kyle Busch passed Harvick for second and cracked the top 30 in points. Harvick ended up finishing the race in third.[129]
Round 23: Pure Michigan 400
Matt Kenseth dominated the race by winning the pole, leading the most laps, and scoring his third win of the season. Kenseth was followed by Kevin Harvick, Martin Truex, Jr., Austin Dillon (who had a career-best finish), and Denny Hamlin. During the race, Clint Bowyer was spun by Ryan Newman and hit the walls while Jimmie Johnson cut a tire and had multiple pit road issues.[130]
Round 24: Irwin Tools Night Race
Denny Hamlin started from the pole position. During the race, several incidents occurred, such as Matt Kenseth losing an engine and Kyle Larson hitting the wall. Drivers also had issues on pit road throughout the race. Joey Logano held off Kevin Harvick in the closing laps and won the race, his third of the season and second consecutive in the summer Bristol race.[131]
Round 25: Bojangles' Southern 500
Brad Keselowski began the race from the pole. The race utilized the low downforce package. In addition, to celebrate the return of Darlington to Labor Day weekend, several drivers ran throwback paint schemes. The race saw a record 18 cautions, including several single car spins, and saw a lot of battles for position. Carl Edwards came back from two laps down to battle Keselowski and Kevin Harvick for the lead. After a late caution, Edwards got the lead on pit road and went on to win his second race of the season. The top five was rounded out by Keselowski, Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano, and Harvick.[132]
Round 26: Federated Auto Parts 400
In the last race before the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Joey Logano started from the pole. The four Joe Gibbs Racing cars ran strong throughout the race, with all four cars in the top four spots at one point. Matt Kenseth led the most laps and went on to his fourth win of the season. Kenseth was followed by Kyle Busch, Logano, Aric Almirola, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Despite the fourth-place finish, Almirola was the first driver below the cutoff line for the Chase.[133]
Round 27: myAFibRisk.com 400
For the first race in the Challenger Round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Kevin Harvick was awarded the pole after qualifying was rained out. Denny Hamlin was involved in a spin on lap 2 but worked his way back to the front. On a restart, Chase contenders Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick made contact, with Harvick cutting a tire and hitting the wall to finish 42nd. On a late caution, Hamlin opted to stay out while most of the leaders came to pit road. Hamlin was able to get the lead on the restart and win the race, his second of the season and securing a spot in the next round of the Chase. After the race, Harvick confronted Johnson and attempted to shove him before he was restrained.[134]
Round 28: Sylvania 300
Carl Edwards was on the pole position. During the race, Chase contenders had trouble including Kyle Busch, who hit the wall after cutting a tire, and Brad Keselowski, who was black flagged for jumping a restart. Kevin Harvick dominated the race and led the most laps but was trying to save fuel to make it to the finish. Harvick ran out of fuel with 3 laps to go and Matt Kenseth passed him to win the race, his fifth win of the season that would advance him to the next round of the Chase.[135]
Round 29: AAA 400
Kyle Busch leads the AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway in October
For the final race in the Challenger Round, Matt Kenseth started the race on the pole as both practice and qualifying were rained out and he was the points leader.[136] Kevin Harvick dominated the race and went on to win his third race of the season. With the win, Harvick was able to advance to the next round of the Chase as he was in a must-win situation following his poor finishes at Chicagoland and New Hampshire. Jimmie Johnson broke a rear axle on lap 100 and spent time in the garage for repairs, finishing 41st. Following the race, Jamie McMurray, Johnson, Paul Menard, and Clint Bowyer were eliminated from the Chase.[137]
Round 30: Bank of America 500
This race marked the beginning of the Contender Round of the Chase. The race was planned to be run on Saturday night but was postponed to Sunday afternoon because of rain. Matt Kenseth led the field to the green flag and was strong in the early part of the race. Kenseth would later fall back and hit the wall multiple times, ending the race in 42nd. Kyle Busch and Kyle Larson had a collision coming to pit road under caution. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. got into the wall and fell off the lead lap. Joey Logano dominated the later part of the race and went on to score the win, advancing to the Eliminator Round.[138]
Round 31: Hollywood Casino 400
Brad Keselowski started the race from the pole. During the race, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. struggled with a loose wheel. Matt Kenseth led the most laps in the race. In the closing laps, Joey Logano caught up to Kenseth and battled him for the win. With 4 laps to go, Logano spun Kenseth, setting up a green-white-checker finish. Logano continued on and won his second straight race, putting Kenseth into a must-win situation at Talladega to advance. Kenseth felt that Logano was wrong for spinning him.[139]
Round 32: CampingWorld.com 500 at Talladega
For the final race in the Contender Round, Jeff Gordon won the pole position. For this race, NASCAR announced that there would only be one attempt at a green-white-checker finish instead of the usual three. During the race, Denny Hamlin had a loose roof escape hatch door and was forced to make repairs, putting him off the lead lap. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. had a strong car and was contending with Joey Logano for the win late in the race. The race |
resolutions requiring a degree of integration, compromise and sacrifice of individual interests to wider common cause are still being resisted even as calamity looms. Instead, moves to unite under a single roof and mutually respected rules — whether fiscal or social — are rejected as too messy, unpopular and scary.
Aversion to decisive integration is quite evident in the euro crisis. Even as the financial markets put pressure on the most indebted and economically febrile euro partners, the zone’s leaders have shied away from the one thing investors want most: binding and enforceable rules on deficit and debt levels for all the nations using the common currency.
The accord produced at June’s E.U. summit took some steps toward budgetary and banking integration across the euro zone. But that stopped well short of the far-reaching measures needed to resolve what critics like Paul Krugman argue is the currency’s essential failing: the absence of a single economic area functioning under the same fiscal rules, capable of pooling collective reserves and debt, and overseen by a strong central bank ready to intervene in the face of economic or monetary troubles.
Why all the aversion to integrate — even as the euro’s very existence still appears imperiled? Wealthier and reform-strengthened states like Germany and Finland don’t want to jeopardize their finances by conjoining them with partners like Greece and Italy — whose history of reckless spending, nonchalance with escalating debt and horror of reform helped create the crisis in the first place. Why trust them to obey new rules when they flaunted existing regulations, higher-minded and deeper-pocketed members ask?
Of course, all euro nations — including Germany — violated deficit and debt limits as governments put national priorities over mutually beneficial strictures. Crisis or not, none are thus far willing to bow to the crisis by relinquishing spending power they may want to abuse once calm has returned. Plus, nationalism gets in the way.
Countries with generous welfare states and weighty tax structures like France and the Netherlands don’t want to be told how they can and can’t raise and spend public money by Brussels — even if it’s for their own fiscal good. In the meantime, if spending ceilings were to impose de facto shrinkage of big welfare states, affected nations would doubtless call for an increase in minimal levels of state assistance and taxation to prevent what France has called “social dumping” by partners like Ireland. Despite the payoff of a far stronger and more stable euro zone, no one wants to surrender the autonomy serious integration would involve.
A similarly dissonant dynamic is evidenced whenever efforts are made to solve the growing divide between mainstream French society and its riot-prone suburban housing projects. French leaders demand that inhabitants of those areas adapt to and integrate into French society and culture to enjoy its benefits — a rather revealing exigence given that most project residents are French born and raised. Indeed, suggestions of willful segregation typically spark counterclaims that France actively inhibits their attempts to enter the nation’s mainstream. Banlieue residents contend that good schools, functioning public services, comfortable housing, and above all jobs, are found only in affluent city centers and are inaccessible and unaffordable where they live.
No one in France contests that a more widespread affluence would quell the eruptions of violence like the one that exploded in Amiens. But that would involve more faces from the ghetto turning up in predominantly white work places — and an educational and behavioral effort by defiant and angry project youths to qualify for and land good jobs and living arrangements. Too much change, compromise and potential loss are involved on both sides of the socioeconomic divide for that to happen, so France remains trapped in a ritual of mutual accusation of just who’s preventing the needed surge of integration.
Employment is, of course, the key to bridging France’s gap — and reversing Europe’s deepening economic slump and euro crisis. But the job outlook in both scenarios is bleak. Even before the current economic crunch set in, jobless rates in French projects flirted with 25% for all adults and nearly 50% for younger people. Those notoriously high figures for French banlieues are now rivaled by national averages in Spain (24.6%) and Greece’s (23.1%); youth unemployment rates in both countries are similarly estimated at around 50%.
That has left Europe’s southern flank looking to northern euro partners — like Germany (5.4% unemployment), Finland (7.5%) and the Netherlands (5.3%) — for help out of their deepening crisis in same the way French project dwellers have long appealed to mainstream society. In both cases, responses have been similar: short-term handouts to buy time dished out with stern instructions for the afflicted to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.
But tough love is only effective when it’s practiced as well as it is preached. To end Europe’s interminable debt crisis and economic spiral, all 17 currency members will have to give till it hurts — and then some. Stronger nations will have to pool their debt and reserves with debt-swamped countries like Greece, Spain and Italy to give them the breathing room they need to recover and rebound. In exchange for the higher borrowing costs and greater exposure to (theoretical) default that will involve fitter nations like Germany, Finland and even France, all euro partners will have to surrender considerable budgetary and fiscal autonomy in submitting to rules and enforcement on spending limits required to turn the euro zone into a real, united European economy. The only way out of the current crisis — and future prosperity — is through mutual strength and a far closer euro union.
In the same way, to end its regular fits of urban upheaval, France must end the geographical, occupational and economic isolation of its projects by welcoming a growing number of their residents as students, employees and neighbors within mainstream French society. Simply renovating blighted housing blocks and trying to spruce up shoddy public services in suburbs are not an alternative to true integration of banlieue residents. The denizens of the projects must want to buy into the idea of France and commit to the investment, with all privileges and hardships it entails.
In seeking to end divisions plaguing both France and the euro zone, all actors must resolve themselves to surrendering significant aspects of the familiar but dysfunctional status quo to create the possibility of receiving anything lasting in return. That’s a scary leap of faith that will provoke considerable political and public resistance. But it’s also an unnerving jump promising less trauma in the long term than sticking with unworkable arrangement that have produced so much instability and suffering thus far.Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 — From 0 to $100K
Matjaž Trontelj Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 12, 2015
Pinegrow Web Editor is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that lets web developers and designers build webpages more efficiently.
Pinegrow is a bootstrapped business with no VC investment.
The Launch
In the evening of January 8th 2014 I submitted Show HN story to Hacker News. My wife Ivona and I sat on the sofa with Google Analytics real-time view in front of us. Our three year old son was already asleep.
After two and a half years of on-and-off development the 1.0 release was finally out. Our approach was the opposite of the lean startup ideal. No users saw Pinegrow before launch. Nobody told us they would actually use such app. This huge effort was based solely on a hunch that web development could be made easier.
And forget about MVP. You can’t come out to a saturated market with just a couple of useful features. Pinegrow had to have all the main features from the start: ability to open any HTML file, full range of configurable Bootstrap components, CSS editor with integrated LESS parser and the ability to edit multiple pages at the same time. After all, that is what distinguished Pinegrow from the rest.
Although Ivona and I own and run our company Humane technologies together, it was just me working on Pinegrow. Ivona was focused on our mobile app business which at best times covered about 30% of our monthly expenses. But that’s a topic for another post.
The launch was a Hail Mary pass. Our savings were all gone. The credit lines were maxed out. We borrowed all the money we could and it was also all gone. The deal was that that night we had to sell at least two copies at $49 each, otherwise I’ll start looking for a job in the morning.
So imagine our sadness when Hacker News dropped the Pinegrow story after one hour on the front page. I asked a couple of friends to up-vote the submission and I suspect we triggered site’s vote ring detection. Votes of our friends were not even necessary at the end. The story was getting enough traction on it’s own merits.
But the first sale came in shortly after that. And another two by the morning. That meant that I could spend another day working on Pinegrow. For the rest of January, the first thing I would do in the morning was check how many Pinegrows we sold in the night to see if I needed to start looking for work. And each day we sold just enough Pinegrows to keep going. By February we even had a safety buffer of one or two days.
Looking back, the way we did things was immensely stupid. We should have launched sooner, just having the best Bootstrap support on the market would be enough for the start. Yet somehow our stupidity didn’t kill us. Good karma, sheer luck or stubborn perseverance… I have no idea what saved us.
Selling Pinegrows
Selling Pinegrows is our family’s obsession. The first thing we say to each other in the morning is “How many Pinegrows did we sell in the night?” Ben, our now four year old son, knows the number. In the early days riding the wave of fluctuating daily sales was very emotional. One day we would be happy, the other day disappointed and worried. But as sales grew and we emerged from the red, we naturally became less emotionally invested in ups and downs of our business.
In 2014 we sold about 3500 licenses to users in more than 100 countries:
App sessions of paid users by country
The revenue was a bit over $100.000:
Monthly sales in 2014
April and May sales include MightyDeals promotion where we sold lots of licenses for a greatly reduced price.
Conversion from trial to purchase is about 10%.
Pricing
The affordable price is another competitive advantage over established subscription based or higher priced solutions on the market. $49 was chosen because it is the price that would be a no-brainier for me if I would be buying an app like this.
We tried raising the price up to $79 but purchases decreased significantly. What ended up working OK is to sell two licenses:
Personal license for $49
Company license for $79
The two licenses are more or less the same, but we ask companies to purchase the higher priced license. There is no easy way to enforce that, so we simply trust users to select the appropriate license.
We also have a student license that costs $25.
We have a couple of enterprise clients, but they just ended up buying regular company licenses even when offered higher priced priority support packages. So I’m yet to meet those mystical $5000-is-a-rounding-error-for-me enterprise creatures that patio11 and others often talk about ☺.
Marketing
Well, we have a website. We did a MightyDeals promotion. Spent about $700 on Carbon, Google and Reddit ads. The ROI of ads was negative so we stopped doing that.
Starting the trial requires registering the email address and we have about 16000 subscribers on our mailing list. That has been by far our best marketing resource. Sending out a $10-off promo makes payment notifications rain down for the next few days.
That’s about all. I enjoy improving the product much more than promoting it around the web. That’s something I want to change in 2015. The post you’re reading is a part of this!
The Technology
Keeping it as simple as possible.
The app is 100% JavaScript packaged with node-webkit into Mac, Windows and Linux desktop apps. The same code also runs in the browser without using any back-end services.
Node-webkit has been a god-send. It has its quirks, but it makes up for them by giving you a simple way to deploy your app on all three major platforms.
Our webpage is static HTML hosted on GitHub Pages.
The Mac App Store
I spent about two weeks on getting Pinegrow compatible with the App Store. Node-webkit makes this very hard to do and OS X sandbox has lots of limitations that are difficult to deal with for an app like this.
In the end I simply gave up on getting Pinegrow into the App Store. 30% commission, long update times and unfriendly review process are all things I’m happy to live without.
Payment processing
We started out with PayPal but soon switched to Paddle. They are UK based and not very well known. The best thing is they take care of VAT and #VATMESS. Instead of dealing with 100s of small transactions we just get one large monthly payment. Their commission is about 5% including PayPal or credit card processing fees. The simplicity is well worth that extra 2% in commission compared to using PayPal directly.
The Team
For the most part of the year it was just me and Ivona. She took care of administration, I did the rest.
Being the engineering team of one can be huge productivity advantage. Discussing the product road-map with development, design, product and marketing departments is done just by sending neurons from one part of your brain to another.
In November we started hiring additional team members to help with development, support and design. This is still ongoing, so I can’t say anything conclusive at this point.
What’s next for Pinegrow
From the software architecture point of view, Pinegrow is a foundation that can be easily extended to support various frameworks, plugins and templates.
Website templates with Pinegrow plugins that let users easily build and customize the template are a powerful combination. Check out Kelvin Pine Pinegrow template to see how that looks in practice.
But the number one priority for 2015 is launching WordPress support. The workflow of converting HTML to a WordPress theme is seriously broken at the moment. And once your theme is encoded in PHP you’re stuck with using a textual code editor. We’ll fix both problems with Pinegrow — soon.
All these things will be sold as add-on products to new and existing Pinegrow users.
Competition
I don’t obsess over competitors. In practice that means that I don’t do any in-depth testing of their apps or services. I feel that would just obscure my vision for the product. Comparing yourself to others too much leads to losing the confidence and appreciation of your own unique identity.
Still, it feels good to hear our users refer to Pinegrow as the Dreamweaver replacement. We have at least one user at Adobe who is regularly using Pinegrow. It feels good to be the guy who’s single-handedly taking on the market leader with almost unlimited resources and engineering power ☺
Dealing with Piracy
Being a 100% JavaScript app, Pinegrow is not that difficult to crack. The code is minified, and there is no protection beyond that. I could spend countless hours on implementing anti-piracy measures and still, at the end, hackers would be smarter than me. So I choose not to do that. Improving Pinegrow is more fun.
Instead, when I come across a forum post where somebody is asking for a cracked version of Pinegrow, I reply that whoever needs a license but can’t afford it should contact us and we’ll help them out.
So, we give away free Pinegrow licenses to anybody who asks. Software is great for that. You can give away as much as you want without losing anything yourself.
Getting Stuff Done
Releasing updates regularly, gives a nice rush. Getting from ideas to implementation to release in about two weeks is a great source of motivation.
But sometimes you have to deal with difficult features that take months of development. That was the case in the last six months before launch and to smaller extend over the summer when I had to spend a couple of months on implementing the new source code parser for Pinegrow.
In such situations, all you can see in front of you are endless to-do items with no end in sight. For me it helps not to focus on that. Just relentlessly keep moving forward, one small step at a time. And then rest and relax. In those long six stress-filled months before launch I would go for a hour-long swim every day and with every stroke think:
“Move forward. Just move forward.”
Thank You
In the past year we met some amazing people through Pinegrow. Some users bought extra licenses just to support us. Friendly Pinegrow community has been the best unexpected bonus of this venture.
Big thanks to all of you who made this possible!
Let’s talk about this on Hacker News.One patch ago when you pressed tab, this is what you saw in the game:
It sucks not having a scoreboard. Traditionally, a scoreboard gave you a good overview of who’s on the server, and how well they were doing. This basic template carried over from the days of Quake where it was important for you to see your ping, your win / loss ratio, and gave you a sense of how you were doing. It’s also a place to be noticed, especially if you are dominating the server.
The reason it took us so long to implement a legit scoreboard was because we generally like to measure twice, cut once. As soon as we pass the design off to Biohazard, he’ll crank it out into something game-playable, and it would really suck to have to go back and change a whole bunch of things. In this situation it’s better to deliver a solid, well thought out design first before we even touch implementation.
In designing a scoreboard for Blade Symphony I had many considerations.
You need to see your ping, and other people’s ping. This was arguably the most important in an online fighting game.
You should be able to see your place in the arena queue, in order to know if your turn for duel is coming up. And since we had three arenas per map… The scoreboard really needs to be split into three scoreboards.
You should be able to see spectators. The use-case being that if you were to find your friend on the server, and he didn’t also show up, it would be really confusing for the both of you.
It *could* act as a UI for selecting arenas, since we don’t currently have something that explicitly lets you see all arenas at once. If we split the scoreboard up per arena, we can actually do this, making the scoreboard act as a kind of lobby.
It needs to be designed for 16:9 but also fit in 4:3 aspect ratio.
These conclusions were drawn from the various brainstorms and mockups the team threw together, which I’ll walk through.
My very first version of the layout looked something like this. Keep in mind this was simply a sketch to show what pieces of data needed to be displayed, and how it was to be laid out, not the actual look and feel of the final piece.
This was the super dead simple layout, it showed who was fighting in which arenas, their wins losses and ping, and highlighted you as a player (in this case Laguana), and dog-piled all the spectators at the bottom.
There were plenty of problems with this. For instance you wouldn’t be able to see who was queued in which arena, and poorly uses screen width.
Fedio pitched this idea for a layout that served as a lobby system which expands on this idea of splitting up arenas for a user interface. In this design you can select whether to spectate or join the arena, and see the queue for each arena. While this design wasn’t intended to serve as a scoreboard itself and acts as a lobby, the final scoreboard design draws heavily from this.
Termi pitched this one which was very similar to what you’d expect from a traditional scoreboard. You see the players participating in each arena and the relevant information tabulated. This design also brought up the discussion of showing server-wide info, such as map name, message of the day for server operators, map time left, and total player count.
Termi also pitched this design for a lobby to easily allow you to see who was fighting where, and how long the wait might be before you get to play again. Like Fedio’s design, it also adds a very clear “GO HERE” button, perhaps context sensitive to whether you want to queue or spectate that particular arena.
Twincannon pitched this one which I ended up deciding to borrow the layout from. I like how you can see a preview of the arena at the top to get an idea of what “Arena 1″ is. The use of space is also much better, since splitting the scoreboard up into columns like Fedio’s lobby mockup allowed us a lot more vertical space for adding players and player data.
The final mockup looks like this:
This design synthesizes the advantages of having a lobby screen without actually having a lobby screen. Here we can activate the user’s mouse when tab is held and allow the buttons at the top to be clickable. The top two players of each arena are shown in color since they are dueling and the text color uses their custom character color they picked from the customization screen.
In addition we narrowed down exactly what data we wanted to display, and in what order.
Rank seems really important, you want to know at a glance how good this opponent is, and wins/loss on a server isn’t necessarily going to do that.
We thought about how important wins-losses were in our game and in a server session they weren’t really. What we actually want is a ‘metric’ of determining how fun a player would be to play with, and this had to be peer-driven. What better time to copy Reddit’s upvote system? Each player is thus treated as a “thread” on reddit, and you can only upvote (or downvote) another player once. This system is still in the works and not ready to go yet, but I wanted to give this a mention to give you a better understanding of our thought process.
Finally, the win-loss ratio is displayed as a short hand in a single column and the ping on the far right.
I’ve also made the decision to place the data underneath each players’ name as a countermeasure for players possibly having insanely long names which could happen and screw up our scoreboard layout.
The spectators would be dogpiled at the end of each arena’s own scoreboard. One problem with this is that you wouldn’t be able to see your own ping if you were in spectator. I argued that this was fine so long as we provided another UI somewhere else that gave you such information, such as your own load-out and your ping. At least it would prevent the scoreboard HUD from being overly lengthy.
Finally, there were concerns about maps with greater than three arenas. Officially we’ll only support three, but it’s definitely possible for someone to build a map with four or more. In this scenario we would have to provide some kind of horizontal or vertical scrollbar for managing this.
Biohazard also did a killer job on the implementation. Originally I had only spec’d this for image thumbnails. He went ahead and added picture-in-picture live feeds of each arena. Hats off!!
I hope you enjoyed this article, if you want to play Blade Symphony find out more here.Marc Forster‘s film of World War Z appears to be on the absolute tip of the cusp of the verge of crossing the line and entering production. Right as we speak, the film’s cinematographer is busy prepping at one of London’s big film studios.
The DP in question is Robert Richardson, who recently wrapped Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret down at Shepperton. This time he will be working out of another one of our big production bases, over at Elstree. Amongst Richardson’s other credits are Kill Bill, Natural Born Killers and Eight Men Out. He’s commonly referred to as a “stylist” and I can certainly see why.
I knew Richardson was going to shoot the picture because his agency put it on his CV, but I was certainly a little surprised to learn just now that he’s already got his light meter out.
It’s nice to see work pressing ahead like this when, just a few weeks ago, the project seemed to be at real risk of collapse. We’d personally confirmed since then that the film was going to go into production this year, but if Richardson’s business is anything to judge by, they’re into bona fide pre-production and cameras could roll as soon as next month, perhaps even later this month.
World War Z, if you do not know, will be based upon the book by Max Brooks. It’s the one subtitled “An Oral History Of The Zombie War” and if you have even a fleeting interest in perambulatory cadavers, especially those with carnivorous predilections, you owe it to yourself to nab a copy.
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None foundYesterday I was in a bar in a British university city. Craft beers, food not served on plates, wonkily-typeset menus with obsessive levels of detail about the coffee beans they use, you know the sort of place. (That bar is no doubt currently telling a friend “Beard, waistcoat, Mary McCarthy novel in the pocket of a thrift-store tweed jacket, you know the sort of customer…”) It was early evening and quiet, which meant I could hear the conversations going on at the bar, instead of the background hum I’d been hoping for. A young woman came in and was greeted with enthusiasm by the barman.
“Hey! You’re wearing the same jacket you had on this morning!” She looked slightly surprised and he continued “You walked past the window this morning like you always do, and I was going to run after you down the street and say how good that jacket is. You look good in it!” She thanked him and made some comment about the Spring weather, then asked for a coffee to go. As he made it she asked about the beans (clearly the menu hadn’t satisfied her thirst for knowledge) and then paid and left.
“People are funny,” the barman declared to a friend sitting nearby, “That girl has been coming in here for months, and she never really opens up or has a proper conversation. I don’t know why people aren’t friendly.”
A fairly commonplace exchange, but later it made me think about the ways in which that conversation might have sounded different to men and women. To me it just seemed a slightly ineffective attempt by the barman to claim her as a regular at the bar, and a bid to while away his time chatting to customers. He probably thought he was making her feel at home; the “Cheers” touch, where everybody knows your name or at least your coffee order, etc.
But I think it also reveals a certain amount about how men feel entitled to women’s attention, and how they feel it’s appropriate to express that. First of all, I’d risk a small wager that if I had been the regular coffee-orderer, my lack of eagerness to chat wouldn’t have prompted a complaint. Men don’t tend to feel I owe them conversation as part of a general “people are friendly” attitude to life; or if they do, I don’t know about it because they don’t feel entitled to express grievance if I don’t chat to them. I strongly suspect that women, particularly young women, are expected to shoulder the burden of keeping the world “friendly” by talking to men they don’t know.
It’s also telling that the neutral subject he picked on to open a conversation was her physical appearance. Not the weather, or the game tomorrow, but what she was wearing. There’s a remarkable touch of entitlement in assuming that a woman’s clothing and whether you think she looks good is a casual fact to be remarked upon. It’s a reminder that women in our culture are assumed to be on show when going about their daily lives, that they are there to be looked at and remarked upon. To use a bit of critical jargon, his opening gambit asserted the male gaze, setting her up as an object to be scrutinised and evaluated even as he claimed to be addressing her as a speaking subject.
More than that, the way in which he expressed his interest in talking to her might well have rung alarm bells, if only momentarily. “You’re wearing the same jacket you had on this morning!” was no doubt intended to convey “We already know each other, and we’re part of the same neighbourhood, so you should feel comfortable chatting with me!” But it could very easily be heard as “I’ve been watching you.” There doesn’t need to be any unpleasant incident in her past to make a woman tense at those words, but enough women have had distressing experiences with men stalking them to make it a thoughtless opening comment. Especially as he went on to refer to the fact that earlier he saw her whilst she didn’t see him, and added that he knows part of her route to work and her morning routine.
This probably sounds, particularly to some of my male readers, as if I’m putting the most sinister interpretation possible on those words. But it’s worth pausing to think about why it’s even possible to read (or twist) his friendly opening remarks as the statement of a potential stalker. He didn’t mean them that way, but telling a woman that you were watching her earlier, and thought about chasing after her, could easily sound a bit threatening. They can sound both innocuous to the speaker and momentarily sinister to the listener because our culture continually blurs the lines between romance and male abuse.
How many romantic films and books involve a man pursuing a woman after he’s been turned down? How often is obsession and the desire to possess presented as evidence of true love? Heathcliff and Edward Cullen are only the extreme examples of an entire cultural attitude. Men spying on women and refusing to take no for an answer is part of the language of romantic love that our society endorses. The line between “charming” and “stalker” is difficult for women to discern because our culture seems to spend a lot of energy denying it exists. (And insisting that women are unfriendly, or worse, if they don’t put the most generous interpretation on a man’s actions and gestures…until he does something appalling and then they shouldn’t have encouraged him.)
As I say, I no doubt sound as if I’m entirely twisting this guy’s words, and holding up his innocent attempt at friendliness as a terrible crime. But my point is that this wasn’t an overtly unpleasant or threatening exchange, and that it didn’t need to be in order to make the young woman feel uncomfortable. It was just an everyday moment in which a man felt entitled to a woman’s attention, started a conversation by telling her about what she was wearing on her way to work, and then complained to his friend when she didn’t want to chat. His very lack of malign intent is part of the problem: he didn’t need to be a bad guy in order to treat her in a sexist way or to sound vaguely like a stalker. As men, we need to be aware that we’re living in a sexist society, in which women legitimately feel uncomfortable in what seem to us innocuous situations. And we need to recognise it as a problem with us, not with them.
AdvertisementsPutin couldn’t have done it without Bernie
Bernie and his Brats are trying to do a hit and run. They wrecked the election and are now attempting to flee the scene.
History unlearned, or worse, re-written, repeats. That’s why I stand up for examining truth. The Russian government may have installed Donald Trump as President, but they couldn’t have done it without Bernie Sanders, the guy who once honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
For some reason, the Bernie or Bust crowd seems thrilled with Trump beating Clinton, almost as if beating Clinton was always their only goal. Maybe they think Rust Belt voters would have swooned for a leftist socialist atheist who never held a job outside of government, but I don’t.
Now, after doing more than anyone to beat up Clinton, Sanders wants a say in a party he still hasn’t joined. He wasn’t a Democrat before he inserted himself into the 2016 Democratic Primary (a hijacking attempt that DNC leaders should have nipped in the bud by telling him to either join the party or be disqualified) and he isn’t a Democrat now, even after the destruction he caused.
The major reason Bernie never became a Democrat while seeking to lead the Democratic Party is because he’s a narcissist who never voted for anyone until he voted for himself. It is ALL about him.
Despite casting himself as a Civil Rights hero, Bernie Sanders never voted for any of the civil rights heroes of the Civil Rights era. He didn’t vote for anyone until he was into his 30’s when he voted for himself. He didn’t vote for Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey or McGovern. He didn’t care if Goldwater or Nixon won.
His supporters treat him like John Lewis while tossing the actual John Lewis under Rosa Parks bus (for daring to back Hillary Clinton).
Bernie trained his supporters to blame Hillary for the 1994 Crime bill that Bernie actually voted for. He claims he only voted for the bill because of the Violence Against Women Act, but he voted for each component of the bill – and he used to brag about his tough on crime votes, until he decided to paint Hillary as racist because she supported her husband for signing the bill Bernie voted for.
Here’s Bernie bragging about his tough on crime bona fides that he has since deleted from his resume.
Here’s Bernie bragging about not giving a damn about voting in a 1987 article in the Gadfly, a University of Vermont student newspaper.
Apparently, Bernie Sanders only liked to talk about politics, not do anything meaningful to change things like organizing voter drives or all the various things real community leaders do, for example: voting. (GOOGLE Obama, Barack or Clinton, Hillary for examples of effective community organizers.)
Some may question the relevance of Bernie’s narcissistic voting habits, but I believe it perfectly explains Bernie’s careless disparagement of the Democratic Party that so graciously endured his constant jabs at its leaders and longtime supporters like myself who have voted in every damn election since I was legally allowed to (and never once been called a “shill” until this year).
Remember when Bernie cried “rigged” over the Superdelegates? His supporters sure do. They still claim the election was rigged. Who can blame them when their leader said so?
Bernie’s top campaign advisor Tad Devine actually invented the superdelegate system in the 1980s, but that didn’t stop his fanatics from blaming Debbie Wasserman Shultz. The Bernie Brats know more about the hierarchy of the DNC than they do their own state governments.
Once Bernie was mathematically eliminated from the nomination, he changed his mind about those evil SDs. He needed them. Hillary had 18 million votes and he only had 13 million. What to do?
So he then called on those same dastardly SDs to reverse the election and nominate him instead of Hillary at the convention. His supporters then began harassing delegates at their homes. (It’s hard to distinguish Bernie’s and Trump’s supporters sometimes).
Bernie stayed in the race too long and held out the false hope to his fans that Hillary would get indicted over emails. His wife Jane even begged the FBI to hurry it up! He refused to concede when any other candidate would have to avoid dividing the party, but he wasn’t a Democrat anyway, so dividing the party he never cared for wasn’t really his concern.
Then WikiLeaks and Russia decided to get involved, selectively leaking hacked emails from the DNC suggesting (GASP) that longtime Democratic Party leaders might prefer nominating an actual Democrat to lead their party. The Bernie kids ate up the Russia propaganda like it was free college.
Hoping to change the outcome, his delegates disrupted the nationally televised Democratic Convention, an event meant to showcase the party platform and nominee.
The 227 year old glass ceiling got shattered when for the first time a woman became the nominee of a major party, but Hillary and her supporters were denied that celebration.
Instead of celebrating this history, instead of celebrating the achievements of a woman who has been an inspiration to millions world-wide, Bernie’s boorish delegates booed and interrupted speakers at the convention, including John Lewis. Even Bernie supporter Sarah Silverman got booed and she told them on prime time TV that they were acting like babies. Bernie more than anyone brought us Donald Trump.
Despite everything, Hillary was up 7-12 points in some polls 11 days from the election. It took the FBI Director’s last minute letter to defeat Hillary, but she shouldn’t have been in that danger zone where 80,000 votes in 3 swing States decided the election.
The answer to Hillary’s question on why she wasn’t up by 50 points against Donald Trump is: Bernie Sanders.When it comes to ethical actions that go beyond slick marketing and corporate mission statements, Microsoft might be outperforming some of its rivals in the tech space.
Microsoft, Adobe, eBay, T-Mobile and Salesforce were a few of the tech companies that made Ethisphere's annual unranked list of the world's most ethical companies. These companies have been recognized for their "real and sustained ethical leadership" across various industries.
Google, whose "don't be evil" motto and highly visible social good activities give the company a friendly public face, wasn't on the list; the company was present on the list in 2010, 2009, 2008 but has since dropped off for reasons unstated by Ethisphere.
As far as we can tell, this is the first time Microsoft has been recognized by this group.
So, what could have put a tarnish on Google's ethical reputation? The ad network acquisition that raised eyebrows in the FTC? The huge lobbying budgets in a year of increased user privacy regulations? The patent lawsuit wherein Oracle claimed that parts of Android were not authorized for such use? The ongoing lawsuits over Google Books' copyright violations? Or the $8.5 million settlement of a class action lawsuit over Buzz and its violations of users' privacy?
In corporate America, issues like the ones we've stated above are rather run-of-the-mill — and Microsoft, Adobe, et al. certainly face similar and sometimes identical troubles. But as far as Ethisphere is concerned, Microsoft's combination of corporate philanthropy, responsibility, innovation for social good, and compliance with standards makes the grade for truly ethical corporate behavior.
Ethisphere contends that these more ethical companies not only have more sustainable businesses, but that they also financially outperform their competitors in the S&P 500 and other indices of publicly traded companies.
Image courtesy of Flickr, bfishadow.What is Futures Trading?
Investоpedia defines futures as “financial cоntracts оbligating the buyer tо purchase an asset оr the seller tо sell an asset, such as a physical cоmmоdity оr a financial instrument, at a predetermined future date and price.” These financial cоntracts were оriginally created fоr farmers tо prоtect themselves frоm the drastic changes in crоp prices thrоughоut the year. Farmers wоuld negоtiate deals tо sell cr |
14 days post challenge birds were euthanized and IFN-γ ELISpots performed ( ). We found no significant difference in the mean antigen specific response to peptide pools post challenge ( A) although the mean responses were higher in all groups compared to 10 dpb ( ) indicating that as would be expected infection has boosted the response to NP and M1 peptides. Splenocytes were also cultured with inactivated challenge virus ( B) to assess responses to a whole virus antigen preparation. The highest mean response was seen in the Ad-NP + M1 prime-MVA-NP + M1 boost group and was significant compared with the Ad-GFP prime-MVA-NP + M1 boost group (p < 0.05). IFN-γ ELISpot incorporating recombinant NP ( C) produced very low mean responses with no significant differences seen between groups although the highest mean response was again in the Ad-NP + M1 prime-MVA-NP + M1 boost group. Interestingly analysis of the peptide ELISpot data revealed that an average of 42% of the IFN-γ-ELISpot response was attributable to NP, the majority of the response being to M1. This may explain the small changes in the response to recombinant NP and the relatively higher response to inactivated virus in the Ad-NP + M1 prime-MVA-NP + M1 boost group. Alternatively the inactivated virus data may reflect the relative abundance of M1 compared to NP during influenza infection. Open in a separate windowAlthough he handed over a treasure trove of intelligence, Mr. Wang was told he could not be granted asylum. He left the consulate and was taken into custody, where he has been since.
Mr. Bo has also been under some form of confinement since mid-March, and his wife, too, has been detained. No one representing any of the three could be reached for comment.
Mr. Heywood was an elusive business consultant who married a Chinese woman and carved a lucrative career in Beijing and Chongqing while keeping other British businessmen guessing about how he made much of his money, and he hinted of deep links to the Bo family.
When his body was found in a hotel room on Nov. 15 in Chongqing, the “alcohol-poisoning” death certificate was issued, although friends said Mr. Heywood rarely drank. His relatives said that they had been told he died of a heart attack, and that the body was cremated with their consent, without autopsy.
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The announcement of an “intentional homicide” appeared to surprise the British government, which had seemed anxious in recent weeks to distance itself from a major Chinese political scandal, saying that suspicions about the death they had passed to the Chinese were those of other Britons in China, not anything they could substantiate on their own.
After an urgent huddle with other British officials, William Hague, the British foreign minister, told reporters in London : “It’s a death that needs to be investigated, on its own terms and on its own merits, without political considerations. So I hope they will go about it in that way, and I welcome the fact that there will be an investigation.”
Xinhua’s statement appeared to confirm one of the swirling rumors in the case, that Mr. Heywood’s death was linked to business dealings gone awry. The Chinese news agency said Ms. Gu and her son, Bo Guagua, had had close relations with Mr. Heywood but later had “a conflict over economic interests.” But Xinhua did not specify how Mr. Heywood died, or what business interests were involved. The only other suspect in his death, Zhang Xiaojun, was described as an “orderly” working in Mr. Bo’s home.
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The shock of the Chinese announcement — claiming that a member of the ruling elite was linked through his wife to a possible murder, and that the killing grew out of private business interests of the kind that have made many Chinese officials rich — had far-reaching implications for the way that China is governed. The impact was amplified since China is facing a once-in-a-decade shift in power this fall to a new generation of leaders. Mr. Bo, 62, had become a contender for a seat in the inner sanctum of power, the nine-member standing committee of the Communist Party’s Politburo.
A charismatic figure, Mr. Bo tried to build his political stature by taking a page from the political playbook of Mao Zedong, presenting himself as a populist attuned to the interests of ordinary people and stirring up nostalgia for the hugely destructive Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, waged in the name of ordinary people against the Communist Party elite.
At the same time, Mr. Bo presided over a state-led economic boom in Chongqing, a provincial-level metropolitan region in southwestern China, and, detractors said, perverted the law enforcement process in what was billed as a campaign against organized crime. As the son of the legendary revolutionary leader Bo Yibo, he built a following among others with ties to Mao, as well as those unhappy with the get-rich-quick culture of recent decades — among them, top generals and unreformed leftists in the Communist elite.
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With Mr. Bo’s disgrace, top power holders in Beijing seem to have quashed his bid for power.
“China is a socialist country ruled by law, and the sanctity and authority of law shall not be trampled,” Xinhua said in its announcement of his ouster on Tuesday, attributing the remarks to unnamed senior officials. “Whoever has broken the law will be handled in accordance with law and will not be tolerated, no matter who is involved.”
According to one person who said he was briefly shown a copy of confidential information for party officials that was circulated on Tuesday, Mr. Bo was faulted for failing to oversee underlings, a reference to Mr. Wang, and mismanaging his family, a reference to the Heywood case, and flouting party procedures in those and other cases.
Significantly, the party document did not suggest Mr. Bo was a murder suspect, but rather implied he could have had a role in trying to cover up the killing by obstructing attempts to report the case and stripping Mr. Wang’s police powers without party authorization.
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The murder investigation appears to be based on information provided by Mr. Wang, who as the top police official in Chongqing was one of Mr. Bo’s closest aides — until he sought refuge at the American consulate. Mr. Wang is now being investigated for treason for that, according to Chinese sources familiar with the case, but is being credited with having come forward with evidence in Mr. Heywood’s death.
Before Mr. Heywood’s death, Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang were already under scrutiny by central disciplinary authorities over corruption and other allegations, according to these sources, and to others with ties to senior party figures. If so, the evidence of a murder would have come as an opportune development in the inner-party struggle over the new leadership lineup.
During more than 30 hours spent at the consulate, Mr. Wang told officials that Ms. Gu had plotted to poison Mr. Heywood, and turned over a police file with highly technical documents, according to people knowledgeable about the case. But Mr. Wang, these people said, also apparently revealed far more: an unprecedented trove of knowledge on the leadership struggle.
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A man answering the door on Tuesday at the London home of Mr. Heywood’s mother, Ann Margaret Heywood, said she was not available for comment. But 10 days earlier, she rejected any suggestion that her son might have been murdered, insisting that he had a heart attack, like his father at age 63. “I don’t know where it comes from, this stuff about his being poisoned and so on,” she said. “This is not about Neil, this is about Chinese politics, and people’s desire to write about Chinese politics. It is absolutely horrid to be caught up in this side of things.”
Friends of Mr. Heywood in Britain and China have said that his habit of giving little away about his business dealings left them with few clues as to what may have gone wrong in his dealings with Mr. Bo’s wife, Ms. Gu.
A maverick who chain-smoked, drove a Jaguar and loved sailing with his wife and two children, Mr. Heywood told friends he met Mr. Bo in the northeastern city of Dalian, where Mr. Bo served as mayor and in other posts from 1993 to 2004. He told a friend, a British journalist named Tom Reed, that he sent out letters of self-introduction to a flock of officials and that Mr. Bo answered.
There also Mr. Heywood met Wang Lu, whom he married. Later on, Mr. Heywood told friends, he was instrumental in getting the Bos’ son Guagua into his alma mater, Harrow, and in making the contacts that eased the son’s way to Oxford.
Ms. Gu, who wrote a book about how she won a case in the United States, is listed as a partner in a Beijing law firm, but a spokesman there said she had not practiced at the firm for 10 years.
Mr. Reed said in an interview that the exact nature of Mr. Heywood’s relations with the Bos was always unclear. “I didn’t get the impression it was anything commercial,” Mr. Reed said. “I got the impression it was much more informal.” He said that three nights before Mr. Heywood’s death, they met for dinner in suburban Beijing. Mr. Heywood said he had not seen Mr. Bo for about a year because of a falling out, and that back then “someone in Bo’s inner circle was talking against him because of fears of his influence over Bo.”
Mr. Heywood acknowledged that at one point he had been concerned, and even considered leaving China with his family, Mr. Reed said. But, Mr. Reed said: “I got the impression that Bo had moved on, and Neil had moved on. He couldn’t have seemed less worried.”Richard Huddy, AMD's boss of the Developer Relations department Quelle: PC Games Hardware Using a Compute Shader path in DirectX 11 could offer up to three times the performance possible with DirectX 10.1, mentions Richard Huddy, AMD Developer Relations, in an interview with Pc Games Hardware. And even in DirectX 10.1 modern Radeon cards with their Fetch4 feature are able surpass pure DirectX 10 devices like the current Geforces.
But at the same time Huddy explains that Compute Shader is uncharted territory for developers and thus it is hard to integrate. Getting the optimum out of it is even harder currently.
In matters of possible performance benefit Huddy calls the Local Data Share (the memory shared between different Threads), which is required by DirectX 11, a Killer-Feature. Especially in Screen Space based Ambient Occlusion it is possible to safe huge amounts of data traffic resulting in less workload for the bandwidth and texture units which are used to read the data.
PC Games Hardware has already reported about AMD's DirectX 11 graphics cards of the Evergreen family, which are said to be released in 2009. We have integrated the first video with Richard Huddy's interesting remarks about the expected performance into this article again.
[futuremark]
As it has already been the case at the Computex AMD concealed the real performance of the graphics card - accordingly the fps values visible on the display are not representative for the final products. The Evergreen card with a dual slot cooling solution is, according to Huddy, neither an entry level nor a high-end product - it is supposed to be part of the product array above 100 USD.
Reklame: Die besten Grafikkarten für Spieler Die besten Grafikkarten für Spieler bei Alternate entdecken
Bildergalerie (Ansicht vergrößern für Quellenangaben) The Galerie will be downloaded...Prism is the best way to check all your balances, track your paydays, and pay all of your bills, anytime, anywhere! Best of all: it's completely free! Prism is the ultimate financial planning app that will replace all your other banking apps—it’ll help improve your credit score and get you out of debt! It's easy to get started! Simply add your billers and your bank, and enter your login details. We'll present you with the balances in your accounts, as well as all of your bills and recent payments--and you'll be able to quickly see what's due. When you're ready, pay your bills in seconds! Don’t forget to add your payday in the app to manage your money too! • Prism is 100% free. There are no monthly charges or hidden fees. • See when your upcoming bills are due and how much you owe. • Pay your bills anytime, anywhere, directly from within the app. • Check your account balances to make sure you have enough cash. • Be instantly notified as new bills arrive or if anything is amiss. • Get reminder notifications when your bills are due. Never get a late fee again! • Pay with maximum flexibility: use your credit card, debit card or bank account. • Message our friendly support team with any questions or feedback. • Your information is safe and secure with us, protected with bank-level encryption. Prism is 100% dedicated to your customer experience. We don’t have any sneaky fees for payment; if any payment method requires fees, we’ll show you up front, before payment. You always have 10 minutes to cancel any payment, and most bills are credited same-day. You can message our support and rest assured that Ryan will personally get back to you quickly and help resolve your problem. Check out all our 5 star reviews! Prism supports thousands of banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bancorp, Capital One, Mellon, HSBC, PNC, TD Bank, SunTrust, Fifth Third, Santander Bank, U.S. Bank. We also support most credit unions, including USAA, State Employees Credit Union, Pentagon Credit Union, Boeing Employees Credit Union, America First Credit Union, Suncoast Credit Union, Alliant Credit Union, Schools First Credit Union, Digital Credit Union, Golden1 Credit Union, and many others. You can see your credit card balances and pay your bill for most credit cards, including: AMEX (American Express) Credit Cards, Discover Credit Cards, Bank of America Credit Cards, Capital One Credit Cards, Citibank Credit Cards, Credit One Credit Cards, Macy’s Credit Cards, Target REDcard, Barclaycard, JCPenney Credit Card, Victoria’s Secret Angel Card, Kohl’s Credit Card, GE Capital Credit Cards, Best Buy Credit Cards, Amazon.com Cards, Home Depot Credit Cards, Lowe’s Credit Cards, Sears Credit Cards, and hundreds more. Even better, we support all of your billers. The most popular include: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Comcast, T-Mobile, Orchard Bank, DirecTV, Netflix, Time Warner, GEICO, DISH, PayPal, Bill Me Later, Sallie Mae Student Loans, State Farm, Travelers, Progressive, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Ally Auto, Allstate, Travelers, National Grid, and thousands more, including many utility, mortgage, rent, and loan providers. If you’re looking for a Mint or Manilla replacement, look no further! If you're looking for Mobilligy, Mobiligy, Mobilogy, Mobillogy, Prisim, or Prizm, you're in the right place!ULS License
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This license did not have tribal land bidding credits. Demographics Race Ethnicity GenderBy Tony Cartalucci
The October 8, 2015 US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing titled, “Russian Strategy and Military Operations,” gave viewers an instructive snapshot at the current state of America’s dwindling power.
Enter the American Empire
The hearing is one of many interfaces between corporate-financier funded policy think tanks and the politicians who will ultimately rubber stamp their schemes and designs into law. It consists of a panel of bought-off, self-serving senators, listening to think-tank academics with no practical experience along with retired generals drawing paychecks by keeping big-defense, big-oil, big-ag, big-finance, and others well fed.
This particular hearing included Heather Conley of the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) (donors here), Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) (donors here), General James Jones (USMC ret.) now of the Brent Scowcroft Center On International Security of the Atlantic Council (donors here), and General John Keane (US Army, ret.) of the Institute For The Study Of War (ISW) (donors here).
Image: This Tomahawk cruise missile was brought to Libya by, Raytheon – a corporate sponsor of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and CFR – all of whom helped engineer, sell, and execute the war in the first place.
Each witness providing testimony is a member of a corporate-financier funded and directed policy think tank. Looking through their donors and boards of directors, one sees several common denominators – big-oil, big-defense, big-agriculture, big-pharma, big-finance, and other big-businesses forming the foundation of Wall Street and Washington’s current power structure.
Considering that the issues being discussed before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services revolve around the application of military force throughout the world toward achieving not the territorial defense of the United States, but defending what are called US “interests” abroad – including the encirclement, containment, and eventual overthrow of geopolitical and socioeconomic competitors – immense conflicts of interest are obvious. In fact, it is clear that these corporate-financier interests are the primary force driving US foreign policy and military planning.
Corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman are all well represented. With war and confrontation constantly peddled before the committee, including the senseless expansion of NATO along Russia’s borders, it is clear who stands to benefit whether or not a sound long-term strategy can be achieved, or even for that matter, developed and articulated properly in the first place.
Image: F-35 – the most expensive weapons program in human history.
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter program alone will cost nations around the world well over a trillion dollars – making it the most expensive weapons program in human history – all justified by the conflicts and confrontations dreamed up in the halls of various corporate-financier funded think-tanks and sold to the US Senate by witnesses like General Jones, General Keanes, Sestanovich, and Conley.
Likewise, the sponsorship and direction of Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell, and others involved in discussions about how to disrupt European-Russian relations to cut off and isolate Russia’s gas export industry has less to do with defending peace and stability globally, and more to do with defending and expanding the monopolies of Western energy-giants – even at the cost of global peace and stability.
A Snapshot of American Megalomania
During the hearing the four witnesses established the threat they claimed Russia posed to US interests abroad and more specifically the need to expand NATO to confront this threat. Rather than welcoming Russia’s involvement in Syria aimed at destroying terrorist forces operating there, the witnesses portrayed the deterioration of US primacy in the region and in the world while pleading with an agreeing Senate committee that America must reassert itself.
To illustrate just how irrational and absurd US foreign policy has become, at several points General Keane suggested that the US create “free zones” inside Syria for US-backed militants to seek shelter from Russian airstrikes. To ensure Russia will not strike them anyway, General Keane suggested that refugees also be placed in these zones. In other words – use the refugees as human shields against Russian attacks.
That he shared this plan in front of a committee full of nodding US Senators reveals US foreign policy to be reduced to almost a tropism – no longer rationally examining itself and the world it fits into – but rather simply attempting to grow as large as possible like a blind force of nature.
A grand strategy for how the US imagines the world in the future and how it fits into that world was noticeably absent as the witnesses traversed the global map from the Arctic to the Mediterranean scheming on how best to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin. It constitutes a strategy not toward any pragmatic or sustainable goal or world outlook, but rather the naked pursuit of power – of hegemony.
Hegemony is a self-serving pursuit. It requires that the US establish proxies, not partners – and that those proxies remain weak and dependent on their patron – two characteristics few national leaders would aspire toward or be satisfied with for long.
It also requires justification at home, since few taxpayers would willingly support a ruling elite who sought hegemony and all the benefits it entailed for themselves while passing on costly wars, social neglect, and all related expenditures to the average citizen. Therefore, the pursuit of hegemony also requires massive amounts of unsustainable deception, both at home and abroad – and explains why the media also plays a prominent role within the think-tank-government equation.
Despite the committee hearing the witnesses and senators were all in agreement that Russia was the problem and that wider war and confrontation was needed to meet it, they acknowledged the ineffectiveness of all available mechanisms to actually achieve that.
They acknowledged Russia’s domination of the information war, America’s shrinking military, and a rudderless domestic energy policy. Not once did the witnesses or senators discuss the idea of looking inward for strength, with all solutions seemingly revolving around disrupting, undermining, targeting, or confronting others.
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And while these senators were all technically elected by the American people to represent their best interests, it was clear they were far more interested in what the corporate-financier funded think-tanks had to say about America’s future.
Mulipolarism – Searching for an Exit
Russia has confounded American aspirations toward primacy not because it possesses a larger military or a stronger economy. It certainly does not have more resources to fund its media operations. Instead, it has studied, understood, and applied the basic fundamentals of war.
Russia possesses at the moment the moral imperative – it is widely seen around the world as confronting American hegemony, meddling, warmongering, and domineering. It has successfully exposed the methods with which the US has waged proxy war on Syria and Libya, and highlighted the betrayal of America’s alleged allies in Iraq. In essence, while Russia has been the principle agent leveraging these developments, it was the US itself who provided the fulcrum.
Russia’s concept of a multipolar world gives those who have been offered a place among America’s unipolar world as a proxy, the alternative of a partnership underpinned by national sovereignty, self-determination, and a prevailing balance of power between nations rather than entangling interdependence over which the US and its international institutions arbitrate.
Russia, Iran, Syria, and others who have found themselves on the wrong end of American-driven globalization have learned the merits of national self-sufficiency and self-reliance. It would be hoped that these good habits carry themselves over should this multipolar world emerge.
Localize – Your Exit from the American Empire
While Russia and its allies attempt to create a wider balance of power across the world on the global stage, it is important for people to understand that unless fundamental changes are made regarding what a nation is and how it fits into the wider geopolitical world, the world runs the risk of trading one hegemony in for another inevitably in the future.
A balance of power between nations is not enough. A balance must then be struck within each nation, on a provincial or state level. Further still, that balance must be established locally.
Technology has made it possible for a wider range of modern social, political, and economic processes to be carried out by fewer and fewer people. The ability for nations to nationalize economic activity that they once depended on immense multinational monopolies to do for them is an example of this trend on the larger end of the spectrum. Russia, China, and Iran have in many areas reached parity with the US military industrial complex regarding key technologies – as admitted by the witnesses before the US Senate Armed Services Committee.
Nations developing their own domestic car manufacturing companies, pharmaceutical production, and telecom and IT solutions are also examples of this.
On a more local level, technology has made it possible for communities and even individuals to engage in social, economic and political activity that once required immense amounts of capital and manpower. The Internet alone allows writers to access millions of readers with free, open source tools. A half-century ago, a printing press, TV studio, or radio station requiring huge amounts of money and manpower would have been required to do the same. The same could be said of the widening proliferation of personal manufacturing technology like computer-controlled mills, lasers, water jets, and 3D printers.
Looking again at the US Senate Committee on Armed Forces and the immense corporate-financier interests selfishly, almost blindly pushing US foreign policy along from one war to the other like a swarm of locust, Americans must realize that no matter who they vote in, until that nexus of unwarranted power and influence is removed from the equation, nothing else can or will change.
Many communities today – regardless of what country they are in – depend on many of the corporate-financier interests driving US foreign policy. By moving away from these corporate-financier monopolies, and replacing them permanently with local alternatives, we begin to drain the swamp where special interests and the many disease they carry breed. In addition to putting in check runaway foreign policy, building stronger communities upon a foundation of local industry and entrepreneurship is an effective way to take the wealth hoarded by Wall Street and put it back into the hands of the people more evenly.
Images: Local car manufacturing, urban organic food production, leveraging technology like drones and personal manufacturing tools like 3D printing, and local farmers’ markets all form the growing foundation of modern, local industry, economy, and even local institutions. This phenomenon will help balance power within any given state, just as the emerging multipolar world represents a balance of power between states.
Stronger communities then have a greater say in the destiny of their provinces or states, and more say in the destiny of their country. They have a greater say because they have greater socioeconomic leverage to put pressure on political parties and representatives who have thus far been content listening only to policymakers furnished by the Fortune 500.
And while this seems like a distant dream, the world should understand that this change is already underway. The number of national businesses around the world able to compete and dilute the monopolies of Wall Street and London have already contributed to the deterioration of American primacy on the global stage.
General James Jones while answering questions during the recent hearing noted that America’s position in the world was not based solely on military power, but also included political and economic components. The key to repositioning America in the world – preferably back behind its own borders and regional spheres of influence – also must include political and economic components in addition to the very obvious military component now being exercised by Russia and its allies in Syria.
While the military and political components include a relatively limited number of direct participants, the economic component includes literally every worker on the planet. Where and how they choose to spend their money effects directly the Fortune 500, their wealth and influence, and those competitors that threaten to upset and dilute their still overwhelming monopolies.
Some may believe their individual contribution is too insignificant to matter, but it is a fact that millions of these “insignificant” individual contributions have already made a difference and each contribution is no less significant than the actions of any single soldier fighting on a battlefield. Individually they may seem insignificant. Collectively, they add up to victory.
The bottom line is that you are not a spectator. A single act has an effect on the vector sum of global events – however insignificant. By building up stronger communities, through local organic agriculture, through the proliferation and use of personal manufacturing and IT technology, and by the creation of local businesses and institutions that permanently replace domineering national and multinational corporations, we can begin adding up our individual acts into a final exit from the American Empire.
Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg.A $5 million lawsuit claims Gore was "adamant" about not selling his network to oil-rich Qataris but had a "change of heart," then stiffed the man who came up with the idea for the deal.
Current TV's $500 million sale to Al Jazeera has prompted a lawsuit that claims co-founder Al Gore originally was opposed to the deal but had a "change of heart" on selling his cable network to oil-rich Qataris.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court by John Terenzio, who presents himself as a highly regarded media consultant, executive and TV producer who conceived the idea for the distribution of an American version of Al Jazeera.
Now, Terenzio claims that he has been cut out of the lucrative deal.
Read the full lawsuit here.
Terenzio, who says in the suit he created China Central Television and reprogrammed it for American audiences, alleges that in late 2011, he presented a proposal for Al Jazeera titled "Path to U.S. Distribution" by Richard Nanula, a principal in Colony Capital. The purpose of the presentation was to explore potential financing and joint venture partners for the project.
Terenzio says that in June, he identified Current TV as a potential acquisition target for Al Jazeera given its vast distribution network and well-publicized financial woes.
At Terenzio's direction, Nanula is said to have approached Richard Blum, a member of Current's board of directors (and the husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein), who was interested because "he and other Current investors were concerned about the prospect of losing their shirts in the financially troubled Current."
VIDEO: Jon Stewart Grills Al Gore on Current Sale to Al Jazeera
Terenzio says he met Blum in July and presented "a step-by-step approach for making the sale of the liberal media outlet to Al Jazeera palatable to U.S. lawmakers, pro-Israel factions, cable operators and, most importantly, the American public."
The lawsuit claims that the structure proposed and the strategies developed were the same ones developed by Terenzio for CCTV and that there was a "mutual understanding that Terenzio would be compensated if Current TV utilized his idea to consummate a sale to Al Jazeera."
The presentation was left with Blum to show other Current investors, according to the lawsuit. Blum is said to have opined that Gore might find a transaction with Al Jazeera "politically unappealing" but that he would present it to the former U.S. vice president.
What happened next likely will generate much conversation given that Gore has made the media rounds defending the sale. According to the lawsuit, "Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Gore was adamant in his rejection of the proposal to sell his liberal, environmentally friendly network to the oil-rich Quataris who owned Al Jazeera. Apparently, Gore had a change of heart."
VIDEO: Al Gore Defends Current Sale to Al Jazeera, Dismisses Fossil Fuel Hyopcricy Charges
Terenzio said that without his knowledge or approval, and "notwithstanding Gore's original objection," Current was sold to Al Jazeera on Jan. 2.
Indeed, in a series of media appearances to promote his book latest book, The Future, Gore has defended Al Jazeera’s editorial independence from its patron, the royal family of Qatar, which has derived vast wealth from Middle Eastern oil. During a Jan. 29 interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today, Gore conceded that he understood the criticism but added: “I disagree with it. I think Al Jazeera has, obviously, long since established itself as a really distinguished and effective newsgathering organization. And by the way, its climate coverage has been far more extensive and high-quality.”
Lauer pointed to a passage in Gore’s book that criticizes television newscasts for taking advertising money from oil companies. “Well, I get the criticism,” Gore responded. “I just disagree with it, because this network has established itself. It’s objective, it’s won major awards in countries around the world, and its climate coverage, as I said a moment ago, has been outstanding and extensive."
The plaintiff in the lawsuit says he has confirmed that the Current sale was "motivated by Terenzio's presentation and that the transaction was patterned on the structure proposed to Blum."
Terenzio is suing for breach of implied agreement, unjust enrichment and quantum meruit ("what one has earned"). He's seeking $5 million for each cause of action. The lawsuit was filed by Ellyn Garofalo at Liner Grode Stein Yankelevitz in San Francisco.
THR has reached out to Current TV for comment and will update with a response.
E-mail: eriq.gardner@thr.com; Twitter: @eriqgardnerLaura Hillier (pictured), who had leukemia, died after waiting for a bed to become available in a Canadian hospital for a bone marrow transplant
A girl who died of leukemia was given a final send off after her friends signed her casket with loving messages on January 30.
Laura Hillier got to experience a few normal childhood milestones like graduating high school and getting her senior year book signed before she died on January 20.
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Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman.
Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton's Juravinski Hospital didn't have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure.
Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.
Laura was first diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at age 13.
She had been completely cancer-free for approximately four years after her first battle with AML, and relapsed this past May.
Though Laura was able to achieve remission for a second time, she relapsed again in November 2015.
Dr. Ralph Meyer, Juravinski's vice-president of oncology and palliative care, told Ontario's TheStar.com there are plenty of others facing the same situation as Laura in Canada.
He said donor registries are growing in size, and technological advances allow transplants to safely happen between people who are less of a match for each other are becoming more and more common.
Laura's friends signed her casket in a final good bye at her funeral ten days after she died on January 20
In loving memory: Friends gathered around Laura's signed casket to speak about their experiences with her
'It is crazy to have to be on a wait-list when you have a donor and you are ready to go,' Laura told TheStar.com in July of 2015.
Putting off the surgery meant Laura had to endure her fifth round of painstaking chemotherapy.
After her death in January, her obituary slammed Canada's bed shortage as having 'deadly wait times':
'In Laura's last year with us, she was determined to bring public attention to the problem of deadly wait times for bone marrow transplants in Ontario and across Canada.
'In July 2015, Laura achieved remission for the second time from acute myeloid leukemia and was blessed to have a perfect donor match.
'However, she found out that she would not be able to receive her life-saving transplant for months as there were many waiting ahead of her and not enough resources to handle the demand.'
After her death, the outpouring of love was so great for Laura, her family asked some people to only attend the visitation, rather than the funeral, because they were worried about running out of room.
Friends of the musical theater-loving teen came out in droves, signing the casket in marker, |
Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York started a craft-brewing minor, and in December Pizza Hut announced it was teaming up with Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K. to offer a degree in the pizza making business.
But considering that University of Kentucky tuition is $24,278 for in-state and $37,610 out-of-state, the idea of a taco class could be hard for some to stomach.As conservative religious voters grapple with how to respond to an audio recording of Donald Trump lewdly boasting about groping women, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, released on Monday a blistering critique of the GOP presidential nominee.
The editorial, written by executive editor Andy Crouch, was accompanied by a subtitle that minced no words: “Evangelicals, of all people, should not be silent about Donald Trump’s blatant immorality.”
For the magazine founded more than 50 years ago by famed evangelist Billy Graham as an alternative to mainline Christian publications, the editorial amounts to a grenade tossed into the presidential campaign. Roughly 70 percent of white evangelicals in the most recent Pew Research polls support Trump, and few conservative evangelical leaders have criticized him, even following the release of the recent tape.
But Crouch, who spent years as an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship campus minister before coming to the magazine a decade ago, used the editorial to channel the growing concern among younger evangelicals that the political deals cut by previous generations have compromised the integrity of their faith.
Noting that the magazine is a nonprofit organization and does not endorse candidates, Crouch nonetheless writes: “Just because we are neutral, however, does not mean we are indifferent. We are especially not indifferent when the Gospel is at stake. The Gospel is of infinitely greater importance than any campaign.”
As for Trump, Crouch says, “There is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the ‘earthly nature’ … that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: ‘sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry’ (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date.”
“That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one,” he continues, “should have been clear to everyone.”
Crouch does not spare Trump’s evangelical supporters, who have proposed a variety of theological justifications for making him their candidate. He is particularly dismissive of the argument put forward by many high-profile conservatives, including Graham’s son, Franklin, that because the Bible includes examples of God using flawed men to accomplish His will, evangelicals shouldn’t be concerned about Trump’s personal morality.
And he calls out the long-standing conservative evangelical reasoning behind backing Republican candidates simply out of concern over the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“There is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry — an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support,” writes Crouch. “Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength — the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome — at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed.”
Crouch’s indictment of Trump is not dissimilar from complaints lodged by Trump’s secular critics as well, but the language he uses may remind many of Christianity Today’s 130,000 subscribers of Old Testament prophets: “He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn.”
“He is,” Crouch concludes, “the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.”Researchers from the Technion and Harvard are offering a new theory on how Parkinson’s disease develops that could change the way the neurological disease is treated.
Associate Professor Simone Engelender of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and her colleague Ole Isacson at Harvard Medical School say the toxic protein behind Parkinson’s may not spread like an infection from nerve cell to nerve but rather that the protein, called alpha-synuclein, may simultaneously affect all parts of the nervous system inside and outside of the brain.
They describe this “threshold theory” of Parkinson’s for the first time in a report recently published in Trends in Neuroscience.
“Instead of studying how proteins move from one neuron to another and searching for compounds that prevent the ‘spread’ of aggregated a-synuclein, we need to study why a-synuclein accumulates within neurons and how these neurons die in the disease, and search for compounds that prevent the general neuronal dysfunction,” said Engelender.
Parkinson’s disease destroys nerve cells throughout the body, especially key neurons in the brain that produce a compound called dopamine that helps to control movement and posture. The disease grows worse over time, and there is no known cure.
More than one million people in the United States have the disorder, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.
The disease is caused by accumulation of a-synuclein, which overwhelms and destroys nerve cells. The most commonly-held theory about the disease suggests that patients get progressively worse as clumps of a-synuclein spread between neurons, almost like an infection.
But Engelender and Isacson think the scientific evidence points to a different model of the disease. Instead of spreading from neuron to neuron, they say, aggregations of a-synuclein develop throughout the body at the same time. Different parts of the nervous system vary in how much of this toxic protein they can tolerate, depending on how well the cells in that part of the system work together to compensate for any destroyed cells.
The researchers say their theory fits better with patients’ symptoms.
“The only specific treatment that is and will continue to be beneficial is the replenishment of dopamine in the brain, through the intake of the supplement L-Dopa, to improve the motor symptoms,” said Engelender. “This has been done for several decades and should be continued to be done since it can at least alleviate the motor symptoms for a few years, even if does not cure and does not prevent the progression of the disease.”
“Nevertheless, I believe that the search for compounds that specifically decrease a-synuclein levels are the only hope to provide a real and more effective treatment for the disease,” said Engelender.In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.
A good decade before Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, and Death From Above 1979 all became international stars, a band from a far less densely populated area put Canada on the indie rock map. Halifax, Nova Scotia’s Sloan may not have achieved the same amount of international recognition as said bands, but in 1992 they did what so few before them could: They made the rest of the world take notice of Canada’s burgeoning underground scene. After buzz began to travel from their hometown, Sloan were signed by Geffen Records, the label behind Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, and Sonic Youth, and almost immediately turned East Coast music into a scene. The press began calling Halifax “the next Seattle” and “Seattle of the North,” and soon their friends in Eric’s Trip (Moncton), Jale (Halifax), the Hardship Post (St. John’s) all found deals, ironically, with Seattle’s Sub Pop.
The East Coast music explosion may have been short-lived, but Sloan persisted by going against the grain. Their 1992 debut album, Smeared, fit in nicely with both the grunge and shoegaze movements, but come 1994, they were ready to evolve. And despite insistence by their label not to, Sloan went and made what turned out to be their most endearing album, the jangly power/chamber pop of Twice Removed. Of course, it nearly killed them. Actually, it did kill them—at the end of 1994 they actually broke up. But circumstances led to making one more album, 1996’s One Chord To Another, which turned out to be both a critical and commercial success. After this, Sloan came to their senses and released eight good to great studio albums over the next 18 years.
What is unique about Sloan isn’t their longevity or their consistency, but the fact that this band features four talented singer-songwriters. On most of Sloan’s 11 albums, Jay Ferguson, Chris Murphy, Patrick Pentland and Andrew Scott all contributed equally to the songwriting process. They might not be the only band to achieve such a democratic state (i.e. the Beatles, the Beach Boys, etc.), but for 24 years, Sloan has always been about Ferguson, Murphy, Pentland, and Scott bringing their own songwriting flair to the table, oftentimes with a different concept in mind.
Noisey put Jay Ferguson to the test to see if he could rank all 11 of Sloan’s full-lengths. He found it to be an arduous task. “I like all of our records,” he says. “There aren’t any where I look back and cringe. I don’t know how my picks stand, because it’s the kind of thing that could change tomorrow. It really is a bit like Sophie’s Choice. I find sometimes an album isn’t my favorite, but I like all of my songs on that particular album. But it’s a fun exercise.”
11. Action Pact (2003)
Noisey: Action Pact at the bottom?
Jay Ferguson: I almost feel bad because when I listen to it, I like it. The reason why it’s at the bottom is because it’s the one album where we gave the decision of which songs would be on the album to the producer, Tom Rothrock. We sort of knew this going in, but he was leaning more towards songs that leant themselves to being played on stage. There are basically no piano songs or acoustic songs, no ballads. So it’s a record that was less about variety and taking what we do best live and translating that into a record. One of his things was that he didn’t think any of the songs Andrew had on the go would fit the template of the record. The fact that there aren’t any Andrew songs makes it feel unbalanced, like it’s less of a Sloan record. And I felt like I really had to fight to get some of my songs on. I also think the songs I was writing didn’t fit the template either. So he was definitely leaning more towards Patrick and Chris’ songs. And I think most of the songs he was choosing weren’t my favorite of the bunch. It was more of an experiment for us. Up until that point we had made most of our records without any outside refereeing, but for this one we decided to. I don’t think I agree with all of his choices, even though on the record there are some excellent songs.
10. Pretty Together (2001)
Maybe there are certain production choices that I would have made in this day and age, but I think there are some excellent songs on the record. I’m not bowled over by my songs. I really like Andrew’s contributions and Chris’ “I Love A Long Goodbye” is one of my favorite Sloan songs. It’s one of those records, along with Parallel Play, where I don’t know if I love the whole record, but some of my favorite Sloan songs are within that record. I think there is maybe a bit of gloss that I am not as fond of. It took two years to make, which was a little longer for us. It was the first record we made in our practice space, and we recorded with Brendan McGuire, so it was made over a long period of time. And we had also changed labels. We took Murderecords from MCA/Universal over to BMG, so there was a bit of gap there due to negotiation and figuring out what we’d do next. I don’t know if it was a songwriting thing. Chris was almost trying to put together a riff farm. There are all these CDs we made as reference discs with 30-second riffs and bits so we could build songs out of them.
I read that you were really into the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin while you were writing this record, but your management said you should go in a more “rock” direction.
Really? Wow! [Laughs] No, I don’t think we’ve ever had any intervention from management about management. And The Soft Bulletin? That might have come from Patrick, because I know he liked that record at the time.
Around this time, Alan McGee had shut down Creation Records and started Poptones. Apparently he was courting Sloan?
That is actually true. I guess Pretty Together was done, but it hadn’t come out yet. We played in England at one of his Poptones nights in Notting Hill, in 2000, and he was DJing. We had met McGee years ago when we had made Smeared, which he liked. We had already signed to Geffen by the time he heard it, but he said, “If things don’t work out with Geffen call me up and we’ll figure something out for Creation.” We had lost touch with him over the years, but when he started Poptones he saw us play and asked if we had a label for the next record. He offered to put it out in England sight unseen, or without even hearing it. So we stayed in touch with him and eventually it was going to come out on Poptones. And that fall of 2001, as we were negotiating with Poptones, I think it was the economic slump after 9/11 and businesses were all doing badly, his label was starting to really go under. So we basically just stopped negotiations. He said, “I don’t think I can put out records for a while.” He kind of buried Poptones for a while. And that’s what happened with that relationship. It fell through, and his label started to fall apart, unfortunately.
9. Parallel Play (2008)
Overall, I think we’ve made better records, but on that record I was really happy with my own songs. I feel bad putting it low on the list, but I think if I take in the context of the whole band I think we’ve made better records than that. There are just a few things that knock it down a bit for me.
The title is great.
I think it really sums up our band. It’s the way children play on their own sitting next to each other before they begin to interact. Chris heard the term, and by the time the record came out his kid was two years old, so he had already gone through that stage already. It sort of summed up the way we make records. We don’t necessarily interact with each other but we all make recordings next to each other. I mean, we play on each other’s songs but not all the time. Sometimes Andrew and Patrick will play all of the instruments on their songs, but I feel like Chris and I are the most involved in each other’s songs, as well as Gregory Macdonald, who plays keyboards with us. Once again it falls into that category where I don’t know if I love the album as much as our other records, but I really like the songs I contributed. I think it just falls down the list as a result of the quality.
8. Smeared (1992)
I still love Smeared. It’s the record we made in a living room in Halifax and it got us signed. We started it about seven or eight months after we began, and finished it about a year and two months after we formed. We made it on our own dime and that’s the way Geffen released it. There are certain songs that I’m not crazy about, but it’s probably the most current, of-the-time record that we’ve ever made. In Canada, the music press really called it a grunge record. But we felt it was more of a British record informed by those bands on Creation Records, whether it was Ride, Swervedriver or My Bloody Valentine, or even things like Dinosaur or Sonic Youth. And I even think Andrew drums like Dave Grohl on the record, but I definitely don’t think of it as an angsty grunge record. I know Chris is always crapping on “Raspberry,” and “Lemon Zinger” I would never perform live until we do a Smeared reissue and I’m forced to play it live. There are still songs we play live like “500 Up,” “I Am the Cancer,” and “Underwhelmed.” I’d say “Underwhelmed” still holds up and it’s the song that did it for a lot of people. I think it’s excellent. It just feels like an early record to me, like the first Beatles record, which I still love. It just seems very young compared to the second side of Abbey Road.
This album was important as it really put Canada on the map for alternative music. It also established the East Coast music scene and brought on those comparisons between Seattle and Halifax. It was highly influential.
We were aware of it. Things were moving so fast. I was shocked, even in the beginning when a guy from Nettwerk saw us in Halifax and within 48 hours we had a contract for that label. We were like, “Holy shit! This is insane!” But a guy named Cam Carpenter in Toronto said, “Don’t sign with Nettwerk yet because I think there’s a guy at Geffen who’s interested.” And we were like “Geffen?” They had Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, and Urge Overkill. It was really Geffen’s golden era. To me that was almost the most overwhelming part. Because I was really into music and records and record labels, and I was blown away by DGC. No Toronto labels were ever interested in East Coast bands, and then the most influential label in the United States wanted to sign us. But we had some things that put us in our place. Like we’d sell out our show in Hamilton and the stage collapsed, and then play an in-store in Detroit with a lot of people there. But then we’d drive to Cincinnati and there was nobody there. So we were able to put it into perspective early on. No doubt though that it was an exciting time. It was basically what I wanted to do since I was young and it was coming true. And there were a lot of our friends’ records that were getting noticed, like Eric’s Trip, Jale, and Hardship Post, who were getting scouted by Sub Pop. Everything was happening so quickly.
7. Commonwealth (2014)
I think it was the sort of experiment whose time has come. We had sort of joked about each making solo records because I think we can. Without sounding obnoxious, I think we’re one of the few bands where everybody can make a solo record. I don’t think Peter Criss should have been allowed to make his solo record. Ace, sure. Gene’s is pretty bad though. Also doing four solo albums at once, we couldn’t afford to do that. I mean, 48 songs to put all out at once? That seemed overwhelming and obnoxious. So we just said, “Let’s try and do it in the template of a Sloan record and make a double album where everyone gets their own side.” And we could still sell it as Sloan, just to keep it under the brand. But I really like it because of, I forget what Pitchfork said about it, I think that it was a glorious failure or a valiant effort but in the end a Sloan album should have a Chris song, then a Patrick song, then an Andrew song, and one of my songs. I was very happy with my side of the record. I liked my songs and how they flowed together. And I liked how Andrew decided to just make one long song, where it’s not just like Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” where it’s just verse after verse after verse. He made a bunch of mini songs all strung together. I think Chris really helped Andrew seam parts together or come up with melodies. Andrew had all of these bits that had been lying around for years that he hadn’t made into fully formed songs, so he just decided to string them together. So I think it was a way for cleaning house for him. He’s so musical.
How did you decide on the album’s sequencing?
We did it alphabetically basically. For a CD, it’s alphabetical. There’s no real side one, two, three, or four. It’s just a diamond, heart, spade, or clubs. With the record any side can be side one, technically. But because of a CD or a download scenario it has to begin and end somewhere so for that case it’s just alphabetical: Ferguson, Murphy, Pentland, Scott. But I think you can start with Andrew’s side. If my side started the record, technically, there is a little intro that actually references our band, and I think it’s s good starting place for the record. And then ending with Andrew’s giant song I think makes sense. If you take that out of the context though I think you can start anywhere. When we finished mastering I started to panic because I thought Chris’ side was stronger than mine. That starting it with my songs, people would skip through it thinking, “What is this crap? What is this fruity music? I just want to get to a recognizable voice.” So I was having a bit of a panic attack.
6. Double Cross (2011)
I was really happy with Double Cross when we finished it and I still like it a lot. It’s a short record, which is something I really like about it. I think it’s economical and it’s quality. Again I was happy with my contributions. After Parallel Play I thought Chris’ songs on this record were really great, and better than Parallel Play. I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking him as a songwriter, because I’m a big fan of his songs. And I liked how the first three songs are interconnected. And I liked Andrew’s songs on here. And I like Patrick’s songs, which are short and snappy and a lot of fun. There’s nothing I dislike about this record. I would put it even higher, to be honest. I was almost going to put it up to two or three, but I’ll leave it there for now. I rate it highly.
This album came out when Sloan was celebrating a 20th anniversary. The title signifies that: two crosses in Roman numerals being 20.
I think we knew it was the 20th anniversary and talked about whether we should do an anniversary tour. There was a point where we didn’t know what we’d do next. But we felt with a 20th anniversary we should “exploit it.” So we were quite aware of it. We interviewed people in other bands, like Sebastian from Death From Above, Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene, and Jason Schwartzman, asking what their favorite record of ours was and what they liked about it, for this 20th anniversary video. We thought it was a good time to reflect on our history, but not completely bask in our nostalgia by making a new, good record. So it was really about making a new record for the 20th anniversary and not make it so much about nostalgia. I really liked that we were able to make a record I liked that much that far into our career.
5. Navy Blues (1998)
Navy Blues is probably the record I play the least on. I played a bit of guitar on “Money City Maniacs” and some acoustic guitar on “Keep On Thinkin’,” but aside from that, I really did not play a lot on this record. I think maybe that's why I didn't consider it, but when I listen back to it I think there are a lot of great songs. “Suppose They Close the Door” we played at Coachella recently, which was maybe a weird choice. When we play it live though I love it. “She Says What She Means” is excellent too. I think that is Leslie Feist's favorite Sloan song, I believe.
I wasn’t expecting such big rock songs after One Chord To Another.
From what I remember at the time, I think the common feeling was, "Oh, they're making a jokey, 70s riff rock record." Even in reviews they would say things like, "What is Sloan doing? Why are they making fun of 70s riff rock? Is this a joke or something?" Well, it wasn't. That was a song of Patrick's and AC/DC was one of his favorite bands growing up, and they might still be. I think that was a bit of an homage to that. And I think it was a way of writing a song that could graduate to being a top ten rock radio record. He might have been thinking about that. Not doing anything he didn't want to do, but at that time I think he thought, "If I write a song like this I wonder if it could get on the radio." Because it's something that he loves. And "She Says What She Means" I think is definitely one of the best songs on the record, and that is a big riff rock song.
“Money City Maniacs” really became your signature song after that. Before that it was “Underwhelmed.” They play it at hockey games, it was in those Future Shop and beer ads. It's really become an anthem.
I think you're right. And I’m grateful for it because it’s definitely paid the bills over the years for sure. But yeah, it really has superseded it. We notice when we play live that at the end of a show we'll play “Underwhelmed” and there is a smattering of applause. But when we play “Money City Maniacs” and the place goes bananas. It definitely has eclipsed “Underwhelmed” as the song people know us for, for sure. To me I prefer “Underwhelmed,” but “Money City Maniacs” is super fun to play and I’m grateful it's in our catalog. I like it, and I like a lot of Navy Blues. When I go back to it I really love Andrew's songs. It was recorded to tape, and I was talking to a friend of mine recently and he said he thinks Navy Blues is the best recorded Canadian album of all time. He thinks it’s the most technically satisfying record of ours, and all of the records ever made in Canada! [Laughs]
I don’t think I’d go that far but I really like the way it sounds. I remember the first time Death Cab For Cutie came to Toronto they went to Chemical Sound because Navy Blues was recorded there and they loved that album so much they had to go see the studio where it was made. The same with Between the Bridges, they loved that record, so when they found out it was made at Chemical they went there to check it out. I don't know if they were planning to record there or what. I think it had an effect on a lot of people, even in the States where it wasn't a big record like it was in Canada, or even one that got a lot of attention. I think it was seen as an underground record, and I think it had a lot of people listening to it at a different angle than in Canada.
4. Between the Bridges (1999)
Once again, it's a record that I have fond memories of. It came after Navy Blues, where I feel my contribution wasn’t great. After Navy Blues I felt I wasn't carrying my weight in the band, so I just sat down and really analyzed songs that I liked and tried to come up with my own that I thought were good. I was happy with contributions to this record, which were “Take Good Care of the Poor Boy,” “Don't You Believe A Word,” and “Waiting For Slow Songs.” I felt better about the record, and we enjoyed making it. We worked with Brendan McGuire for the first time, he's our live sound engineer, and it was made again at Chemical. I felt like I connected with Brendan on this record, because we had a lot of similar things we really liked, like Prefab Sprout and Aztec Camera. So it was a fun process for me, and it was a quickly made record. We wanted to get it out in 1999 so we could go back to Japan and Australia before we did North America. Also I really liked all of the contributions from Andrew, Patrick, and Chris. It was one of the first records where we experimented with stringing songs together.
Is this the one Sloan album where you each have three songs?
Do we have another album like that? Maybe we don't have another album. You're right! I think that does make it a unique record. It was the beginning of Sloan being very democratic as well. And I think it benefits from that. Like you said, the album was carved up evenly. The next album, Pretty Together, was close. Everyone had three songs on that one, but “The Other Man,” which was Chris's song, was more of a hybrid. Everyone was involved with that one and had their fingers in it. So Between the Bridges is the most democratic album, maybe along with Commonwealth, which doesn't have the same number of songs, but everyone gets their own side.
I think this is your best album cover.
Really? It's nice of you to say but at the time I thought it was a bit of a failure. I really wanted it to look like this old poster for a movie called Putney Swope, which I know very little about. But I saw it in a book and it was black and white, like it was photocopied. So I thought, "Let's make a cover like this." Between The Bridges was made really quickly, and I didn't want to get into a really elaborate cover. So I said to do something quick and photocopy looking. I just remember thinking it turned out too grey and bland, not as contrast-y as we had intended. So it’s funny that you say that because I think of it as one of our album cover failures. Except for the font! We were happy with the font.
3. Never Hear The End Of It (2006)
This was a very long, double record. It’s a kind of record I think Chris and I had talked about making for years. And I think it was the time to make it, after Action Pact, which we sort of gave the reins of to Tom Rothrock. After it came out I think some people were asking where the Andrew songs were, and where the variety of most Sloan albums was. So after that we just decided to make a 180-degree record that was sprawling, with all different types of songs. Some of the songs are 50 seconds long, and some are five minutes long. It was an attempt to make something like The White Album, which was a real reaction to Action Pact, where we just said, “Let’s go for it!” There was such a span of time between Action Pact and Never Hear The End Of It, that we had amassed a lot of songs over those three years. If we were ever gonna make that record it was the right time. And I think it really freed up Andrew. He was like, “I have a song that’s just a riff and a verse. Can I do that?” It was the kind of record where you could just do something like that and it would be fine. We weren’t working with three songs each. Andrew had eight songs on this record! When you have that much real estate with a record, it’s more freeing to do something that’s more of an experiment and not have to think, “Oh, I only have three songs. Maybe I should do something more substantial.” It was fun to make that record, for sure. A lot of it was recorded live off the floor, and even while it was being mixed.
The fact that it’s such a free-for-all is what made it such a refreshing Sloan album.
I love records like that, like The White Album and Screamadelica by Primal Scream. It’s all over the place. I love records that bounce around like that but still have some sort of cohesion. That’s the kind of record that we made. We were with BMG at the time, and there was a guy there who was trying to convince us to release it as two separate records within a short period of time. But I said no. It had to come out as one giant, 30-song lump, because maybe it was harder to sell but I think it was more of a statement.
One of my favorite songs is “HFXNSHC” because it sounded nothing like Sloan.
Me too. There’s a hardcore song in the middle of the record. I thought that was really freeing and it was definitely a side that hadn’t come out on our records before. Chris had played in hardcore bands and Patrick played in punk bands before Sloan ever got together. I didn’t really grow up with hardcore, and I didn’t really know any of the records until I met Chris. But I thought it was a good way of reflecting that influence, by putting it in the middle of this “anything goes” type of record.
2. Twice Removed (1994)
I enjoyed making this record, but there were times when it was frustrating. I really like the songs and the lyrics, and it’s kind of a Chris-heavy record. We may have criticized Jim Rondinelli to the press afterwards about the way he made the record, but I can’t criticize him for the sounds that he got. I think it’s a great sounding record. I just think everything from the bass, to the guitars, to the drums, to the mix, it really stood out at the time in a glut of post-Nirvana, grunge fall out. I think at the time we were trying to escape from that. And that’s why the record goes in this direction. It ends on what is maybe my favorite Patrick song, “I Can Feel It.” I know that Chris, for example, doesn’t like it as much. But I also know that Chris is reactionary. He thinks everybody likes it, so he’s gonna crap on it. He thinks it’s like Sgt. Pepper. That is the most important Beatles record so it’s his least favorite. I’m happy with my two songs. I remember Ric Ocasek hearing “Snowsuit Sound” and saying, “Hey man, that should be the single!” So that made me feel really good. Overall I really like the album and I was really happy when it was done. It was sort of sad that Geffen said, “We just don’t know how to market the record in this musical climate.” We sort of understood, but it was a little defeating. In Canada it was treated a little differently, but over the years it became an underdog record. I think that’s part of its charm.
Were you surprised at the reaction people had to the sound of this record considering it sounded so different from Smeared?
I had friends that weren’t really as keen on Smeared. But when they heard Twice Removed they were like, “Wow, this is fantastic!” It was nice to hear that. People were surprised. Some people thought it was a weird left turn, but there was nobody that really didn’t like it. Though when we did the Twice Removed box set a few years ago, we made sure to include the one star review writer Tim Perlich gave us in Now magazine. He basically called it a bunch of “Pavement rip-offs” and said, “these guys don’t have a leg to stand on.” Which I thought was funny.
I’ll never forget how Chart Magazine listed Twice Removed at number one on its list of the Top 50 Canadian Albums of All Time, ahead of Neil Young’s Harvest and Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
It happened once, then it slid down to number four, and then the next time they did a poll it was back up at number one. Of course, in the press we’d say, “That’s ridiculous! Harvest and Blue are the best records. This is preposterous!” But behind closed doors we were high-fiving and saying, “Yeah, of course!” But it’s a little bit ridiculous. It’s a good record that, again, had an underdog status, so people felt the need to cheer for it. But is it better than Joni Mitchell’s Blue? I don’t know. That’s a pretty great statement by one person. And Neil Young’s Harvest? I don’t know if that’s his best but it’s preposterous when you think about it, in the history of music. But at the time it was very flattering. Our band was kind of over at that point, and it was really a good boost to our confidence because we were starting to think about whether we should continue. I think we had actually begun recording One Chord To Another at that point, so it was a really good boost to our spirits.
1. One Chord To Another (1996)
Making One Chord To Another was very relaxed, and I was glad we were back together making a record. I didn’t know if it would be the last one, but with Universal backing Murderecords in Canada, things really snowballed with making videos and touring. I remember we egomaniacally listened to One Chord To Another in full on the bus about a year or two ago and we all felt it was a really great record. So aside from it being a really great record, it was also meaningful because we were back in control of our career, we owned the record, it was on our own label, and it was the most successful record of our career. It still is the record that has sold the most, but at the time it was out-selling our first two by a wide margin. It just felt really good, like owning our own small business that was doing well, and we were making good music. That’s probably why it’s number one for me. I think it’s the reason why we’re still here today, because we decided to make One Chord To Another.
This album is your only Juno win.
[Laughs] It is our only Juno win! Best Alternative Album. We’ve been nominated for every record except Commonwealth, which I was annoyed by.
How broken up was Sloan before you made this album?
Pretty broken up. We knew Geffen in the States weren’t going to put much effort into the record. We did the American tour, which was pretty disheartening. I think we were still going to be signed to Geffen, and they were going to renew a series of three two-album options. So six records where every two records they could pull out of the deal. The ball was in their court. And I remember we had a meeting over the phone, and Andrew was living in Toronto, which was fine. It did kind of affect the band, Chris was a little annoyed by that. But we just didn’t think we could exist as a band anymore. We kind of ended our band in a meeting. I think Patrick |
vote, interim Superintendent Michael Goar acknowledged that mistakes were made in paying $1.2 million to Reading Horizons, a Utah-based company that provided the books as part of a curriculum for kindergarten through third grade. Teachers who got the books this summer were astounded and repelled by the stereotyped characters and gender roles, including an illustration of an American Indian girl titled “Nieko the Hunting Girl” and another with a black girl called “Lazy Lucy.”
The books reportedly were returned before being handed out to students.
Goar said he and his team failed on a number of fronts, including not following policies in purchasing the books and failing to recognize the derogatory material. “I’m deeply sorry you’re in this predicament,” he told the board. “I deeply apologize that you have to do my job.”
Telling board members to hold him accountable, he said he was committed to ensuring policies are followed and that the community is engaged in helping review future reading materials. But policies alone won’t prevent a similar problem, he said.
The board’s vote to cancel the Reading Horizons contract came after angry parents and community leaders crowded the boardroom, waving blue hankies, raising signs and forming a long line to voice their outrage in the allotted three minutes given to each speaker. The board, before the start of the meeting, proposed holding small group listening sessions outside the boardroom. But Nekima Levy-Pounds, president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, spoke on behalf of many in the audience who wanted to voice their opinions in public.
Chaun Webster, a parent of two children, said the district should strive to attain critical literacy. “Functional literacy is a low bar,” he said.
Tyson Smith, president of Reading Horizons, attended Tuesday’s meeting with the hope of publicly apologizing for the offensive material. But he said board Chair Jenny Arneson asked that he not speak at the meeting.
Listening to the speakers’ anger and frustration, Smith said he was disappointed he couldn’t “tell the people in the room how sorry we were for the role we played.” But he also wanted to explain the lessons the company has learned from the incident in becoming more culturally competent.
The company is putting together an advisory committee that is reviewing its curriculum and will provide cultural and diversity training for its employees.
With the focus on student achievement, Smith said he suggested to Goar a couple weeks ago that his company would refund some of the money or make restitution and continue its contract with the company, which would include setting a benchmark for closing the achievement gap.
With the board’s vote to cancel the contract, the district will explore options to get its money back.
Smith said he couldn’t comment on that, saying that’s something for his company and the district to work out.Vlad Tenev, co-founder of commission-free stock trading app, Robinhood, spoke this morning at the UCLA Founder School. The Forbes 30 under 30 and UCLA Math PhD dropout talked about the experiences that led him to cofound Robinhood, the trend that he sees in consumer products, and his personal portfolio of stock picks.
Tenev started the talk by mentioning that 90% of all financial trades are now managed by algorithms and that algorithmic trading tends to perform better in volatile markets because of wide spreads in a stock’s ask and bid price. Back in 2008, he started a company with his former Stanford roommate Baiju Bhatt in the finance space, but by the time that the company had was established a year later, the market conditions had changed so much that their ideas were not as effective. He followed up by creating another company, called Chronos Research, to respond to this shift in algorithmic trading much faster, helping big financial institutions like hedge funds and banks adopt algorithms at a larger scale.
Tenev then realized that the same technology that helped institutions make millions of commission-free trades a day could be translated into a consumer product. This eventually led to Robinhood. With Robinhood, Tenev and Bhatt wanted to start a new brand, since older players in the market like AmeriTrade and Etrade already had a bad reputation due to hidden fees and bad software. Brand affinity was almost non-existent for millennials.
The talk was followed by questions from the audience.
How should I network?
In the early stages (right out of college) it is really hard to network because you are unknown and have no track record. It is difficult to get someone’s attention and connect with them past a conference if you don’t have something to show for. Therefore, Tenev recommends spending more time shipping the product than networking. If you are exciting enough, people will come.
Favorite book?
Crossing the chasm. It talks about how you should approach your marketing depending on which stage of growth you are in. Early-adopters care more about features whereas the mass cares about the reputation (“will this company be around for long”) and saving time or money.
How do you balance work and life?
Try to integrate your significant other in your activities. It is important that you have a supportive partner. Tenev mentioned that he probably doesn’t spend as much time visiting his friends and family as he would like.
Why are some countries/companies slow to adapt?
It is hard to change something that has already been established (it requires changes in policies, huge switching costs, etc). Some countries and companies can adapt much faster because they had nothing established yet and can easily adopt a technology.
What are the biggest threats for Robinhood?
A lot of people think that big institutions can wipe us out easily by offering commission-free trading. However, that would mean that the market is reacting to us and that we are the trendsetters. I believe being in a position where you are getting copied shows how valuable your product is. When Facebook tried to copy Snapchat and launched Poke, it only helped grow Snapchat’s popularity. A threat for Robinhood would be to not be able to deliver the technology that our users need.
What keeps you up at night?
Being the leader in the market. To stay ahead of the pack, you need to keep releasing exciting updates and push features. If you are not able to do so, then you become vulnerable and stop growing. Think of Dropbox for example, they had a great product but they stopped shipping new versions and they failed to integrate with other services and were quickly overthrown by Box and Drive.
Are you an avid trader? Which stocks do you own?
Tenev trades, but not a lot. However, he uses the Robinhood platform on a daily basis. The stocks that he has on Robinhood are probably the ones you are guessing right now: Solar City, Tesla, Apple, Linkedin, Chipotle, Google.
What do you see as the future in consumer products?
Startups currently are integrating technology as a layer on top of the physical world (Uber, Postmates, etc). So in the future we will see more services and industries arise that take advantage of the vast amount of data available.One out of every 30 children in the United States experiences homelessness at some point during the year.
That’s nearly 2.5 million children, up from 1.6 million in 2010, reports The National Center on Family Homelessness in Waltham, Mass., part of the American Institutes for Research.
“When you look at the resources and where they’ve been driven … there’s been a national priority to address the issues for the chronic homeless and for veterans … and we’ve seen those numbers decline,” says the center’s director, Carmela DeCandia. “That’s a good thing. The problem is the same level of attention has not been paid to kids and families.”
The report relies on the definition of homelessness that schools are required to use under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, which is broader than the definition used by federal housing authorities and includes children “doubled up” with friends or relatives because of economic hardship. Based on recently released 2012-2013 data, it also includes an estimate of the number of children under 6 whose families experience homelessness.
Many of these families include single mothers struggling to raise small children. Researchers estimate that about half of homeless children are under age 6. For 20 to 50 percent of the mothers, their homelessness is caused primarily by intimate-partner violence, the report notes.
Homeless children show higher rates of developmental problems and mental health needs. Because of “the human and economic toll … we have to have decisive action now,” Ms. DeCandia says.
The report also ranks the states on a variety of factors related to child homelessness.
Kentucky is identified as the state with the highest portion of its children experiencing homelessness in a year: 66,818 in 2012-13, down from 70,090 the year before. But on another measure, the quality of state policy and planning around this issue, it ranks 20th (with 1st being the best).
The state with the smallest portion of homeless children is Connecticut: 5,508, a number similar to the year before.
One ranking uses a composite score that includes state policies, the portion of homeless children, risk factors for homelessness related to benefits and housing costs, and child well-being factors such as food security and health.
With this measure, Minnesota ranks the best and Alabama the worst.
In Alabama, more than 59,349 children experienced homelessness; there’s a high teen birth rate (39.2 per 1,000 teens); 27 percent of children live in poverty; and there is no active state interagency council on homelessness.
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In Minnesota, by contrast, 23,608 children were homeless; the teen birth rate is 18.5 per 1,000; 14 percent of children live in poverty; and there is a state interagency council.
Minnesota has roughly triple the amount of shelter and housing units for families that Alabama has.RYE — Entrepreneur Josh Adler was brainstorming with other tech professionals several years ago, about the possible uses for giant robots, when someone asked, "What if we just make them fight?"
"I thought, 'Of course,'" Adler recalled. "Who wouldn't want to see giant robots battle?"
That solution in search of a problem was the conception of MegaBots, "giant piloted fighting robots" that shoot 3-pound paint balls 110 mph, hurl washing machines 80 feet into the air, toss cars and wield 6-foot chainsaws. Human pilots sit in cockpits 17-feet high inside the bots that Adler said "look like they're straight out of a comic book."
Millions of viewers have watched video of a MegaBot battle that first streamed on Tuesday night. Plans now call for big-bot battles to be a national sport, but before a single MegaBot was built, it was Adler who wrote the first check to start MegaBots Incorporated.
He said his angel investment was enough to build one third of the first MegaBot and produce a Hollywood-quality video to promote the concept of fighting giant robots. "A lot" of money and one international MegaBot battle later, Adler hopes Business Insider was right when it said, "The next billion dollar sports league could be giant robots that fight to the death."
A Rye resident, Adler got to giant robots by way of other ventures. He launched his first startup in high school when he and a classmate founded a matchmaking site called amour.com. He said they continued to grow the company while they were students at Yale "before the internet was a big deal" and about the same time he got an offer from a venture capitalist to start a medical device company. Amour.com was sold to a French company that wanted the domain name and Adler began developing wireless miniature devices for tracking vital signs. He said he worked on that for six years, got it through the FDA and "raised a lot of money," before the dotcom crash of 2001.
The crash meant funding dried up, so Adler accepted a job as the chief speechwriter for the U.S. Treasury Department, he said. After two years of speech writing he worked in real estate, then in 2012 was granted a Sloan Research Fellowship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a focus on energy ventures. That led to his founding the company Sourcewater, an online marketplace for water and water services, which remains his primary business focus.
Also at MIT, Adler said, he connected with mechanical engineers interested in robotics when he "saw an opportunity to invest in startups." A college roommate's friend, whose wife's had a former roommate, whose husband was friends with Gui Cavalcant, introduced the two. Cavalcant had a background in military robots and they met for lunches when they thought about using giant robots for construction applications, before deciding to make them fight.
After Adler wrote a "low six-figure" check to start the MegaBots company, they launched a Kickstarter campaign with a $2 million fundraising goal that "flopped," he said. In hindsight, Adler said, the $2 million goal was too high, "a strategic error."
By 2015, a break came when the CEO of Autodesk said if the MegaBots operation moved to California's Bay Area, Autodesk would be a corporate sponsor and cover equipment costs.
"It was that or nothing," Adler said.
They developed and build the first MegaBot, the Mark II, and debuted it at Maker Faire in 2015 where it got "a lot of press," he said. The same year, the development team released a video promoting their MegaBot and challenging a similar bot in Japan to a battle, he said. Adler's wife Shannan, a television producer and journalism professor, got them international press.
"There was a global viral meltdown," Adler recalled, explaining that the MegaBot video challenge was covered by news agencies in 60 countries. After the challenge was accepted by a Japanese team, they launched a second Kickstarter campaign and raised more than a half-million dollars from 8,000 donors.
With that under their belts, Silicon Valley investors paid attention and "real money" started coming in, he said.
"The battle with Japan took two years to pull off," Adler said. "No one had ever done this before. You're creating a sport like Nascar, while at the same time inventing the car."
Tuesday night's battle pit the American MegaBot Eagle Prime against Japanese Megabot Kuratas, with Adler's team winning. It was held in an abandoned acres-large Japanese steel mill, with drone and hand-held cameras used to create "Hollywood-grade" filming of the fight, he said.
Crates of tools and spare parts had to be shipped to Japan as backup and the two opposing teams had to work together after developing their warriors independently. Adler said it cost "a lot" to bring the MegaBots battle to fruition, "real engineering expertise to build this stuff and different skills to make it fun to watch."
While views of the fight on Twitch continue to climb, Adler said there are a number of questions to answer while going forward with plans to turn MagaBots battles into an international sport.
He said the development team wonders if future MegaBot fights should be more scripted, family-oriented entertainment, or real battles. They wonder where future fights will be held, how to keep audiences safe and if a movie will follow. They also wonder what the rules should be and who'll pay for damage to an opponent's MegaBot.
Adler said a built-in audience is "half the population that's ever been a 12-year-old boy." The potential audience is also global and the most logical place to do battles is in arenas, he said.
But now, said Adler, who serves on the MegaBots board with Cavalcanti and Matt Oehrlein, it's time to raise more money.Enlarge By Laura Rauch, AP Professional player Phil Hellmuth makes a grand entrance into the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on the third start day of the World Series of Poker. LAS VEGAS (AP) Flanked by dozens of women, heralded by trumpeters and mobbed by his fans, Phil Hellmuth channeled Julius Caesar as he arrived at the World Series of Poker on Sunday. The no-limit Texas Hold 'em champion who won the main event 20 years ago slowly made his way to his table nearly two hours after play began, joined by body-painted female gladiators and muses carrying rose petals in tote bags. "When you dress as Caesar you actually feel more powerful," Hellmuth told The Associated Press as he waited in a car outside the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, before his stunt. "Kiss my ring!" the 11-time gold bracelet winner said. "Hail Caesar!" He greeted World Series of Poker Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack and his table mates while television cameras rolled, then changed into more normal attire as the tournament broke after its first level. Hellmuth, who last year entered the series dressed as Gen. George S. Patton, said his entrances have become a personal tradition at the series that he has looked to top each year. "It's kind of a fun spectacle," Hellmuth said. "I think it's great for poker." Nearly 1,700 players entered the tournament on Sunday, and officials expected a sellout of about 2,600 players on Monday, the last day the tournament will accept entries. The series was on pace to undershoot last year's total entries by about 800 players if Monday sells out. Peter Eastgate won $9.15 million last year after emerging from a field of 6,844 players in the $10,000 buy-in tournament. While nobody tried to top Phil Hellmuth's arrival at the series, other players routinely use gimmicks in the tournament to try to draw attention to themselves and sometimes distract other players. Dennis Phillips, a trucking account manager who placed third last year and won $4.5 million at the series' final table in November, had a few dozen supporters dressed like him in a white collared shirt and a St. Louis Cardinals hat as he began the tournament. Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreSamir Nasri wants to follow in Thierry Henry's footsteps by finishing his career in the MLS.
The Frenchman signed a new five-year deal last summer, which will take him through to his 32nd birthday.
And the Manchester City star, speaking to Sportsmail at the recent New Balance Football global launch in London, has outlined his plan to play in America, after insisting a return to France is not an option for him.
Manchester City playmaker Samir Nasri is keen on ending his career in the USA
Thierry Henry ended his career at MLS outfit New York Red Bulls after an outstanding career in Europe
Nasri, pictured at Euro 2008, played alongside Henry during his time with the France national team
'I would like to play MLS, not go back to France,' he said.
'Maybe I would go back to Marseille but it would be too difficult - maybe impossible.
'I would like the MLS, like Thierry Henry. I love the lifestyle in USA and everything about it.'
The MLS' profile is set to increase in the following months with Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard both due to arrive in the USA to continue their playing careers.Tweet Share Share Google Plus
Feature engineering is an informal topic, but one that is absolutely known and agreed to be key to success in applied machine learning.
In creating this guide I went wide and deep and synthesized all of the material I could.
You will discover what feature engineering is, what problem it solves, why it matters, how to engineer features, who is doing it well and where you can go to learn more and get good at it.
If you read one article on feature engineering, I want it to be this one.
feature engineering is another topic which doesn’t seem to merit any review papers or books, or even chapters in books, but it is absolutely vital to ML success. […] Much of the success of machine learning is actually success in engineering features that a learner can understand.
— Scott Locklin, in “Neglected machine learning ideas”
Problem that Feature Engineering Solves
When your goal is to get the best possible results from a predictive model, you need to get the most from what you have.
This includes getting the best results from the algorithms you are using. It also involves getting the most out of the data for your algorithms to work with.
How do you get the most out of your data for predictive modeling?
This is the problem that the process and practice of feature engineering solves.
Actually the success of all Machine Learning algorithms depends on how you present the data.
— Mohammad Pezeshki, answer to “What are some general tips on feature selection and engineering that every data scientist should know?”
Importance of Feature Engineering
The features in your data will directly influence the predictive models you use and the results you can achieve.
You can say that: the better the features that you prepare and choose, the better the results you will achieve. It is true, but it also misleading.
The results you achieve are a factor of the model you choose, the data you have available and the features you prepared. Even your framing of the problem and objective measures you’re using to estimate accuracy play a part. Your results are dependent on many inter-dependent properties.
You need great features that describe the structures inherent in your data.
Better features means flexibility.
You can choose “the wrong models” (less than optimal) and still get good results. Most models can pick up on good structure in data. The flexibility of good features will allow you to use less complex models that are faster to run, easier to understand and easier to maintain. This is very desirable.
Better features means simpler models.
With well engineered features, you can choose “the wrong parameters” (less than optimal) and still get good results, for much the same reasons. You do not need to work as hard to pick the right models and the most optimized parameters.
With good features, you are closer to the underlying problem and a representation of all the data you have available and could use to best characterize that underlying problem.
Better features means better results.
The algorithms we used are very standard for Kagglers. […] We spent most of our efforts in feature engineering.
— Xavier Conort, on “Q&A with Xavier Conort” on winning the Flight Quest challenge on Kaggle
What is Feature Engineering?
Here is how I define feature engineering:
Feature engineering is the process of transforming raw data into features that better represent the underlying problem to the predictive models, resulting in improved model accuracy on unseen data.
You can see the dependencies in this definition:
The performance measures you’ve chosen (RMSE? AUC?)
The framing of the problem (classification? regression?)
The predictive models you’re using (SVM?)
The raw data you have selected and prepared (samples? formatting? cleaning?)
feature engineering is manually designing what the input x’s should be
— Tomasz Malisiewicz, answer to “What is feature engineering?”
Feature Engineering is a Representation Problem
Machine learning algorithms learn a solution to a problem from sample data.
In this context, feature engineering asks: what is the best representation of the sample data to learn a solution to your problem?
It’s deep. Doing well in machine learning, even in artificial intelligence in general comes back to representation problems. It’s hard stuff, perhaps unknowable (or at best intractable) to know the best representation to use, a priori.
you have to turn your inputs into things the algorithm can understand
— Shayne Miel, answer to “What is the intuitive explanation of feature engineering in machine learning?”
Feature Engineering is an Art
It is an art like engineering is an art, like programming is an art, like medicine is an art.
There are well defined procedures that are methodical, provable and understood.
The data is a variable and is different every time. You get good at deciding which procedures to use and when, by practice. By empirical apprenticeship. Like engineering, like programming, like medicine, like machine learning in general.
Mastery of feature engineering comes with hands on practice, and study of what others that are doing well are practicing.
…some machine learning projects succeed and some fail. What makes the difference? Easily the most important factor is the features used.
— Pedro Domingos, in “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning” (PDF)
Sub-Problems of Feature Engineering
It is common to think of feature engineering as one thing.
For example, for a long time for me, feature engineering was feature construction.
I would think to myself “I’m doing feature engineering now” and I would pursue the question “How can I decompose or aggregate raw data to better describe the underlying problem?” The goal was right, but the approach was one of many.
In this section we look at these many approaches and the specific sub-problems that they are intended to address. Each could be an in depth article of their own as they are large and important areas of practice and study.
Feature: An attribute useful for your modeling task
Let’s start with data and what is a feature.
Tabular data is described in terms of observations or instances (rows) that are made up of variables or attributes (columns). An attribute could be a feature.
The idea of a feature, separate from an attribute, makes more sense in the context of a problem. A feature is an attribute that is useful or meaningful to your problem. It is an important part of an observation for learning about the structure of the problem that is being modeled.
I use “meaningful” to discriminate attributes from features. Some might not. I think there is no such thing as a non-meaningful feature. If a feature has no impact on the problem, it is not part of the problem.
In computer vision, an image is an observation, but a feature could be a line in the image. In natural language processing, a document or a tweet could be an observation, and a phrase or word count could be a feature. In speech recognition, an utterance could be an observation, but a feature might be a single word or phoneme.
Feature Importance: An estimate of the usefulness of a feature
You can objectively estimate the usefulness of features.
This can be helpful as a pre-cursor to selecting features. Features are allocated scores and can then be ranked by their scores. Those features with the highest scores can be selected for inclusion in the training dataset, whereas those remaining can be ignored.
Feature importance scores can also provide you with information that you can use to extract or construct new features, similar but different to those that have been estimated to be useful.
A feature may be important if it is highly correlated with the dependent variable (the thing being predicted). Correlation coefficients and other univariate (each attribute is considered independently) methods are common methods.
More complex predictive modeling algorithms perform feature importance and selection internally while constructing their model. Some examples include MARS, Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Machines. These models can also report on the variable importance determined during the model preparation process.
Feature Extraction: The automatic construction of new features from raw data
Some observations are far too voluminous in their raw state to be modeled by predictive modeling algorithms directly.
Common examples include image, audio, and textual data, but could just as easily include tabular data with millions of attributes.
Feature extraction is a process of automatically reducing the dimensionality of these types of observations into a much smaller set that can be modelled.
For tabular data, this might include projection methods like Principal Component Analysis and unsupervised clustering methods. For image data, this might include line or edge detection. Depending on the domain, image, video and audio observations lend themselves to many of the same types of DSP methods.
Key to feature extraction is that the methods are automatic (although may need to be designed and constructed from simpler methods) and solve the problem of unmanageably high dimensional data, most typically used for analog observations stored in digital formats.
Feature Selection: From many features to a few that are useful
Not all features are created equal.
Those attributes that are irrelevant to the problem need to be removed. There will be some features that will be more important than others to the model accuracy. There will also be features that will be redundant in the context of other features.
Feature selection addresses these problems by automatically selecting a subset that are most useful to the problem.
Feature selection algorithms may use a scoring method to rank and choose features, such as correlation or other feature importance methods.
More advanced methods may search subsets of features by trial and error, creating and evaluating models automatically in pursuit of the objectively most predictive sub-group of features.
There are also methods that bake in feature selection or get it as a side effect of the model. Stepwise regression is an example of an algorithm that automatically performs feature selection as part of the model construction process.
Regularization methods like LASSO and ridge regression may also be considered algorithms with feature selection baked in, as they actively seek to remove or discount the contribution of features as part of the model building process.
Read more in the post: An Introduction to Feature Selection.
Feature Construction: The manual construction of new features from raw data
The best results come down to you, the practitioner, crafting the features.
Feature importance and selection can inform you about the objective utility of features, but those features have to come from somewhere.
You need to manually create them. This requires spending a lot of time with actual sample data (not aggregates) and thinking about the underlying form of the problem, structures in the data and how best to expose them to predictive modeling algorithms.
With tabular data, it often means a mixture of aggregating or combining features to create new features, and decomposing or splitting features to create new features.
With textual data, it often means devising document or context specific indicators relevant to the problem. With image data, it can often mean enormous amounts of time prescribing automatic filters to pick out relevant structures.
This is the part of feature engineering that is often talked the most about as an artform, the part that is attributed the importance and signalled as the differentiator in competitive machine learning.
It is manual, it is slow, it requires lots of human brain power, and it makes a big difference.
Feature engineering and feature selection are not mutually exclusive. They are both useful. I’d say feature engineering is more important though, especially because you can’t really automate it.
— Robert Neuhaus, answer to “Which do you think improves accuracy more, feature selection or feature engineering?”
Feature Learning: The automatic identification and use of features in raw data
Can we avoid the manual load of prescribing how to construct or extract features from raw data?
Representation learning or feature learning is an effort towards this goal.
Modern deep learning methods are achieving some success in this area, such as autoencoders and restricted Boltzmann machines. They have been shown to automatically and in a unsupervised or semi-supervised way, learn abstract representations of features (a compressed form), that in turn have supported state-of-the-art results in domains such as speech recognition, image classification, object recognition and other areas.
We do not have automatic feature extraction or construction, yet, and we will probably never have automatic feature engineering.
The abstract representations are prepared automatically, but you cannot understand and leverage what has been learned, other than in a black-box manner. They cannot (yet, or easily) inform you and the process on how to create more similar and different features like those that are doing well, on a given problem or on similar problems in the future. The acquired skill is trapped.
Nevertheless, it’s fascinating, exciting and an important and modern part of feature engineering.
Process of Feature Engineering
Feature engineering is best understood in the broader process of applied machine learning.
You need this context.
Process of Machine Learning
The process of applied machine learning (for lack of a better name) that in a broad brush sense involves lots of activities. Up front is problem definition, next is data selection and preparation, in the middle is model preparation, evaluation and tuning and at the end is the presentation of results.
Process descriptions like data mining and KDD help to better understand the tasks and subtasks. You can pick and choose and phrase the process the way you like. I’ve talked a lot about this before.
A picture relevant to our discussion on feature engineering is the front-middle of this process. It might look something like the following:
(tasks before here…) Select Data: Integrate data, de-normalize it into a dataset, collect it together. Preprocess Data: Format it, clean it, sample it so you can work with it. Transform Data: Feature Engineer happens here. Model Data: Create models, evaluate them and tune them. (tasks after here…)
The traditional idea of “Transforming Data” from a raw state to a state suitable for modeling is where feature engineering fits in. Transform data and feature engineering may in fact be synonyms.
This picture helps in a few ways.
You can see that before feature engineering, we are munging out data into a format we can even look at, and just before that we are collating and denormalizing data from databases into some kind of central picture.
We can, and should go back through these steps as we identify new perspectives on the data.
For example, we may have an attribute that is an aggregate field, like a sum. Rather than a single sum, we may decide to create features to describe the quantity by time interval, such as season. We need to step backward in the process through Preprocessing and even Selecting data to get access to the “real raw data” and create this feature.
We can see that feature engineering is followed by modeling.
It suggests a strong interaction with modeling, reminding us of the interplay of devising features and testing them against the coalface of our test harness and final performance measures.
This also suggests we may need to leave the data in a form suitable for the chosen modeling algorithm, such as normalize or standardize the features as a final step. This sounds like a preprocessing step, it probably is, but it helps us consider what types of finishing touches are needed to the data before effective modeling.
Iterative Process of Feature Engineering
Knowing where feature engineering fits into the context of the process of applied machine learning highlights that it does not standalone.
It is an iterative process that interplays with data selection and model evaluation, again and again, until we run out of time on our problem.
The process might look as follows:
Brainstorm features: Really get into the problem, look at a lot of data, study feature engineering on other problems and see what you can steal. Devise features: Depends on your problem, but you may use automatic feature extraction, manual feature construction and mixtures of the two. Select features: Use different feature importance scorings and feature selection methods to prepare one or more “views” for your models to operate upon. Evaluate models: Estimate model accuracy on unseen data using the chosen features.
You need a well defined problem so that you know when to stop this process and move on to trying other models, other model configurations, ensembles of models, and so on. There are gains to be had later in the pipeline once you plateau on ideas or the accuracy delta.
You need a well considered and designed test harness for objectively estimating model skill on unseen data. It will be the only measure you have of your feature engineering process, and you must trust it not to waste your time.
General Examples of Feature Engineering
Let’s make the concepts of feature engineering more concrete.
In this section we will consider tabular data like that you might have in an excel spreadsheet. We will look at some examples of manual feature construction that you might like to consider on your own problems.
When I hear “feature engineering is critically important”, this is the type of feature engineering I think of. It is the most common form that I am familiar with and practice.
Which of these is best? You cannot know before hand. You must try them and evaluate the results to achieve on your algorithm and performance measures.
Decompose Categorical Attributes
Imagine you have a categorical attribute, like “Item_Color” that can be Red, Blue or Unknown.
Unknown may be special, but to a model, it looks like just another colour choice. It might be beneficial to better expose this information.
You could create a new binary feature called “Has_Color” and assign it a value of “1” when an item has a color and “0” when the color is unknown.
Going a step further, you could create a binary feature for each value that Item_Color has. This would be three binary attributes: Is_Red, Is_Blue and Is_Unknown.
These additional features could be used instead of the Item_Color feature (if you wanted to try a simpler linear model) or in addition to it (if you wanted to get more out of something like a decision tree).
Decompose a Date-Time
A date-time contains a lot of information that can be difficult for a model to take advantage of in it’s native form, such as ISO 8601 (i.e. 2014-09-20T20:45:40Z).
If you suspect there are relationships between times and other attributes, you can decompose a date-time into constituent parts that may allow models to discover and exploit these relationships.
For example, you may suspect that there is a relationship between the time of day and other attributes.
You could create a new numerical feature called Hour_of_Day for the hour that might help a regression model.
You could create a new ordinal feature called Part_Of_Day with 4 values Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Night with whatever hour boundaries you think are relevant. This might be useful for a decision tree.
You can use similar approaches to pick out time of week relationships, time of month relationships and various structures of seasonality across a year.
Date-times are rich in structure and if you suspect there is time dependence in your data, take your time and tease them out.
Reframe Numerical Quantities
Your data is very likely to contain quantities, which can be reframed to better expose relevant structures. This may be a transform into a new unit or the decomposition of a rate into time and amount components.
You may have a quantity like a weight, distance or timing. A linear transform may be useful to regression and other scale dependent methods.
For example, you may have Item_Weight in grams, with a value like 6289. You could create a new feature with this quantity in kilograms as 6.289 or rounded kilograms like 6. If the domain is shipping data, perhaps kilograms is sufficient or more useful (less noisy) a precision for Item_Weight.
The Item_Weight could be split into two features: Item_Weight_Kilograms and Item_Weight_Remainder_Grams, with example values of 6 and 289 respectively.
There may be domain knowledge that items with a weight above 4 incur a higher taxation rate. That magic domain number could be used to create a new binary feature Item_Above_4kg with a value of “1” for our example of 6289 grams.
You may also have a quantity stored as a rate or an aggregate quantity for an interval. For example, Num_Customer_Purchases aggregated over |
like that we need to get something in place that just doesn't have to do with a conference champion from a weaker conference or doesn't have to do with money. It has to do with pitting the best teams at the end of the year against each other."
To coaches, this would force would-be contending teams to schedule marquee opponents during non-conference play; in turn, this would help create a more clear picture of which teams belong in the playoff conversation – or, better yet, which teams do not.
"I don't think there's any doubt the goal of all of us is going to be to get in that four-team playoff and win it," Brown said. "So if you allow teams not to play a tough schedule, and get in the four-team playoff, it's going to be encouraging people not to play great games across the country."
Strengthening non-conference schedules to match up with the new playoff format was ostensibly behind the upcoming home-and-home series between Oregon and Nebraska, with the Ducks traveling to Lincoln, Neb., in 2016 and the Cornhuskers returning the favor a year later. Oregon has also signed upcoming non-conference agreements with Michigan State, Virginia, Texas A&M and Ohio State through the 2021 season.
MIDSEASON REPORT: Best players, games to come
Relying on the strength of a team's schedule – its 12- or 13-game résumé, in essence – could help the committee ignore "a political agenda" or outside influences like "the media or some relative statistic," Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio said, and "instead look at who's playing against who."
"I guess I would like to see them use the win-loss percentage against teams that they played, so value the opponents but also the skill level that's on the field," he said.
Bolstering the non-conference schedule with one marquee game against a program from another power league takes on added importance with the near-universal shift toward a nine-game conference schedule. The Pac-12 and Big 12 have already adopted the in-season format; the Big Ten and the SEC have alluded to a similar shift in the near future.
Colorado coach Mike MacIntyre advocated for a strength of schedule component "like they do in basketball" and alluded to the "fine line" that the committee could face in weighing a team with a better record against weaker opponents against a team with a weaker record against better opponents.
Having an FBS standard on conference games – having each major league play nine games, for example, and play three out-of-conference games – would give the selection committee the sort of empirical data it would need to settle on a final four teams, Stanford coach David Shaw said.
"The one thing that I'll say, and not that everybody needs to be a former coach or whatever, is I I would love for them to be able to watch the games and watch the teams and have discussions amongst themselves about who does what better than who else," Shaw said. "Because it can't come down to rankings, it can't come down to stats, it can't come down to things that come off a computer because otherwise we'll just have a computer instead of a committee. There has to be some objective conversations about which are truly the four best teams."
Paul Myerberg, a national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports, is on Twitter @PaulMyerberg.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S WEEK 7 HIGHLIGHTSResearch desk investigates: How does college explain unemployment numbers, but not inequality?
By Dylan Matthews
jkrantz1 asks:
[Ezra] had a post yesterday, "The benefits of a college degree in one graph", saying that the recession isn't being felt among the college educated. But the anecdotal stories of the PhD's who can't find jobs in this climate aside, economists documenting the growing income gap (Saez, Krugman) have shown that the College-High School wage ratio doesn't do much to explain inequality. So how would you reconcile the fact that, while rising numbers of college graduates can't explain systemic income inequality, it can create a divide between those who feel the recession and those who don't.
The chart Ezra put up shows that college graduates have an unemployment rate of 4.5 percent, far below the 10.1 percent rate for high school graduates, or the 13.8 percent rate for high school dropouts. This seems to suggest that educational attainment contributes to economic inequality.
To be sure, it does. Indeed, some economists, such as Greg Mankiw, Edward Lazear and Daron Acemoglu, credit the increasing wage premium that comes with greater education with most of the increase in economic inequality in recent decades. However, this ignores that income inequality has risen not just because upper -and upper-middle-class people have pulled further ahead, but because the super-rich have pulled ahead of everybody. Here's the median income of each level of educational attainment in 2007:
Now, $100,000, the highest figure here, is a very high annual income, but according to data (Excel file) from Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, it is not enough to reach the top 10 percent of earners. It's within that 10 percent, and specifically its higher reaches, that income differentials become really dramatic:
The top 5 percent make over $161,328, the top 1 percent over $414,225, the top 0.5 percent over $656,367, the top 0.1 percent over $2,131,875, and the top 0.01 percent over $11,917,298. While these earners are more likely to have advanced degrees than the average head of household, an increased number of professional degree holders making an average of $100,000 cannot explain these kinds of income concentrations. When the differentials are this large between people who are all very highly educated, some other factor is needed.The Sarasa features a fine 0.4 mm gel pen tip that is sturdy enough to endure hard writing pressure, drops, and other pen abuses. It's also retractable, has smooth writing, is affordable, and is even made of recycled plastic. The ink is water based, pigment gel ink and is acid-free as well as archival safe. All of these characteristics make it a favorite for travelers and office workers who want a high quality pen you can take anywhere, and yet lose without too much monetary sorrow. Nine colors available including: black, blue, blue black, green black, magenta pink, mustard yellow, olive green, red and red black.
JetPens has two versions of the Sarasa gel ink pen. One has a standard clip and one has a push clip that can be used to attach the pen onto thicker objects such as binders.A monkey head transplant has been performed in China, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has claimed. Images released appear to show a head stitched onto another body, and researchers say the monkey survived the procedure without neurological damage, adding it was kept alive for 20 hours following the operation – for ethical reasons.
The surgery was led by Xiaoping Ren at Harbin Medical University, China. The team connected the blood supply between the head and the body, but they did not try to connect the spinal cord, New Scientist reports.
Canavero, who hopes to carry out the world's first head transplant next year, told the magazine the procedure shows if the head is cooled to -15C, the monkey can survive without brain damage. "The monkey fully survived the procedure without any neurological injury of whatever kind," he was quoted as saying.
In a press release sent to Motherboard, Canavero said: "A full monkey head transplant has been successfully accomplished by Prof Ren's group in China with the goal of testing cross-circulation and hypothermia as an effective neuroprotective strategy. The first studies on human cadavers have already begun in China and will be expanded shortly."
Ren announced his plans to carry out head transplants on monkeys last year, having reportedly carried out 1,000 operations on mice. He said they had carried out head transplants on a couple of monkeys in 2015.
The Italian neurosurgeon added he and researchers from China and South Korea have carried out a series of experiments that will be published in seven papers over the coming months – but this could not be verified.
Other experiments carried out involve experimenting on human cadavers and mice. In video footage, mice apparently having had their necks severed then re-fused are seen sniffing and moving their legs. This experiment was carried out by C-Yoon Kim from the Konkuk University School of Medicine in South Korea. He said that the mice could recover motor function, suggesting "it is possible to reconnect the [spinal] cord after complete severance".
Canavero says the mice experiment shows the spinal cord can be refused if the cut is clean and polyethylene glycol (PEG), a chemical that preserves nerve cell membranes, is used. "These experiments prove once and for all that simply using PEG, you can see partial recovery," he says.
"It's important that people stop thinking this is impossible," he added. "This is absolutely possible and we're working towards it."
However, the announcement has been met with criticism from some in the scientific community. Thomas Cochrane, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School's Centre for Bioethics, told New Scientist releasing research before the studies is "frowned upon for good reason" because it creates a buzz around the work "before excitement is warranted".
"It distracts people from actual work that everyone can agree has a valid foundation," he said. "As far as I can tell, that operation has mostly been about publicity rather than the production of good science."
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University School of Medicine, added: "When it gets published in a peer-reviewed journal I'll be interested. I think the rest of it is BS."Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters vs. Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: The Movie, the latest in the Super Sentai VS film series, debuted at #4 during the January 19-20 weekend. The film ranked at #6 on Box Office Mojo's chart and earned US$1,581,020 on 175 screens.
One Piece Film Z fell from #3 to #5 during its sixth weekend. The film features "Z" (Zetto), the Straw Hat pirate crew's "strongest enemy yet" who was designed by original One Piece manga creator Eiichiro Oda. Oda served as the executive producer of this film, as he did for the 10th feature film, 2009's One Piece Film Strong World. The film ranked at #4 on Box Office Mojo's chart and earned US$1,831,554 on 302 screens for a new total of US$72,752,722.
The Hunter × Hunter: Phantom Rouge film fell from #1 to #6 during its second weekend. The film centers around the character Kurapika, who became a hunter to seek revenge on the Phantom Troupe for the massacre of his clan. The film featured the new character Omokage, the person with the No. 4 spider tattoo. The film is based on an unpublished story manga creator Yoshihiro Togashi wrote around 10 years ago. The film ranked at #5 on Box Office Mojo's chart and earned US$1,655,960 on 257 screens for a new total of US$9,820,080.
The live-action film adaptation of Kanan Minami's Kyō, Koi o Hajimemasu shōjo romance manga fell from #8 to #11 on Box Office Mojo's chart in its seventh weekend. Emi Takei (live-action Rurouni Kenshin's Kaoru, Ai to Makoto's Ai) stars as the old-fashioned "Showa-era girl" Tsubaki Hibino opposite Tori Matsuzaka ( We Can't Change the World. But, We Wanna Build a School in Cambodia, Samurai Sentai Shinkenger,.hack//The Movie ), who plays a "modern" boy named Kyōta. Takeshi Furusawa ( Ghost Train, Another ) directed the film. The film earned US$307,620 on 301 screens for a new total of US$19,499,312.
The film version of the 2011 live-action television series based on the classic supernatural adventure anime Humanoid Monster Bem (Yōkai Ningen Bem) fell from #9 to #12 on Box Office Mojo's chart during its sixth weekend. Key cast and staff from the television show returned for the film, including KAT-TUN's Kazuya Kamenashi (playing the title character), model/actress Anne (playing Bera), and child actor Fuku Suzuki (playing Berro), as well as writer Masafumi Nishida (Tiger & Bunny) and director Shunsuke Kariyama. The film earned US$273,216 on 331 screens for a new total of US$12,628,578.
The Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (Evangelion Shin Gekijō-ban Q) film fell from #10 to #13 on Box Office Mojo's chart during its 10th weekend. The film is the third in Hideaki Anno and Khara's four-part remake of Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. The film earned US$255,062 on 124 screens for a new total of US$58,709,582.
The Blue Exorcist anime film fell from Kogyo Tsushinsha's chart in its fourth weekend. Box Office Mojo has not been listing the film on its chart.
The Kamen Rider × Kamen Rider Wizard & Fourze: Movie Taisen Ultimatum film fell from Box Office Mojo's chart during its seventh weekend. Ōoku ~Eien~ Emonnosuke・Tsunayoshi Hen, the second live-action film adaptation of Fumi Yoshinaga's Ōoku: The Inner Chambers manga, also fell from Box Office Mojo's chart in its fifth weekend.
Sources: Kogyo Tsushinsha, Box Office MojoIf you’ve ever been to a climbing gym, you’ve probably heard someone screeching like a pterodactyl as they pull through the toughest sequence of holds. It’s commonplace in the sport, and professional climbers Chris Sharma and Adam Ondra are perhaps as well known for their distinctive screams as for their accomplishments on the rock.
Screaming while climbing may sound silly or like just a way to get the entire gym’s attention, but recent studies suggest that climbers like Sharma and Ondra are actually on to something. Yelling, and even swearing, at the right moments might improve your athletic performance.
“It does help me,” says Ondra. “If it didn’t, I would not do it.”
It Makes You Stronger
In a 2014 study published in the International Journal of Exercise Science, researchers at Drexel University had 18 women and 12 men squeeze a device three times each while vocalizing, forcefully exhaling, and passively breathing and measured their grip strength each time. The results? When the participants grunted, their compression power increased by an astounding 25 percent compared to passively breathing, and 11 percent versus exhaling. The scientists suspected that grunting boosted power by “increasing sympathetic drive,” or a response of the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the body’s fight-or-flight response.
“Basically, grunting increases your adrenaline, which gives your muscles a momentary boost in power,” says Daniel Heller, a physician at Blue Ridge Orthopaedic and Spine Center in Warrenton, Virginia. “Simply exhaling won’t give you the same jolt.”
That adrenaline-fueled power surge will help in “any sports situation where you need a momentary burst of strength, like lunging during a rock climb, dunking a basketball, or hitting a tennis ball,” says Heller, adding that it’s a good idea to stay quiet when you need precision motor skills—adrenaline can make you shaky.
“It is very important to yell in the right places,” says Ondra. “When I yell, I am giving it everything I have. In the easier sections, I must give only the minimum necessary.”
Yelling can also boost athletes’ performance in the lower body. In 2015, researchers from Drexel University published a study in which they asked 15 women and 15 men to jump forward as far as possible while exhaling forcefully. Then they had the volunteers repeat the test while yelling. On average, participants of both genders leaped about five percent farther when they shouted. The researchers again credited the extra power to increased sympathetic drive.
M. Brennan Harris, an associate professor of kinesiology at the College of William and Mary, suspects that the biomechanics, or the mechanical laws governing our body movements, of yelling also play a role in increasing our power. “When you grunt or yell, the muscles around your rib cage contract,” he says. “That contraction makes your core rigid—it stabilizes your trunk. And when your trunk is stable, your body can transfer more power to your limbs.” That surge from trunk stabilization would carry over to any sport where there’s a moment of maximum effort or torque—like a hard paddle while kayaking, a long reach to the next climbing hold, or a big pedal push when you’re mountain biking.
Swearing, it turns out, can have similar benefits. In a 2017 study that’s currently under peer review, researchers at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, had volunteers cycle on stationary bikes for two 30-second periods—once while cussing and once while chanting a neutral word. When allowed to curse, the participants pedaled 4 percent harder for the first five seconds and 2 percent harder throughout the whole half-minute. They also tested 52 peoples’ grip strengths using the same parameters. When swearing, the volunteers squeezed eight percent harder, on average.
Unlike neutral words, curses are processed our amygdala, which controls the body’s fight-or-flight response. Similar to screaming, cussing triggers a jolt of strength-boosting adrenaline. “Swearing is usually tied to emotional situations,” says Dangaia Sims, a data scientist with a PhD in sports psychology. “While swearing doesn’t necessarily equate to fear, cussing may almost trick the brain into thinking a threat is imminent.”
It Helps You Block Pain
In December 2016, ultrarunner Zach Miller was leading the 50-mile North Face Endurance Challenge Championship in Marin, California, with three miles to go. Another runner, Hayden Hawks, was close behind him and narrowing the gap. Miller—having just run 47 miles and refusing to relinquish the lead—grunted, screamed, and moaned as he sprinted the last 5K at five-minute-per-mile pace and won. Whether Miller realized it or not, research shows that his yelling and grunting worked to not only boost his strength but also ease his agony.
In 2015, two researchers at the National University of Singapore published a paper in the Journal of Pain noting that their volunteers—29 women and 26 men—were able to keep their hands submerged in a tub of icy water for seven seconds longer when allowed to yell during the ordeal versus staying silent. The authors suspect that shouting helps ease discomfort by preventing pain signals from reaching one’s brain. In fact, they suggest that “vocalizing responses” should be a “first line of defense when individuals get hurt.”
And if you’re okay with possibly offending bystanders, swearing is even more effective than screaming for reducing pain. As detailed in a 2009 study in Neuroreport, a team of three scientists from Keele University had 64 volunteers immerse their hands twice in icy water. The participants swore during round one and yelled a neutral word throughout round two. On average, the men and women reported less pain when swearing and kept their hands submerged for 40 seconds longer.
It Might Increase Your Confidence and Focus
While there hasn’t been much scientific research into whether shouting boosts confidence and focus—at least compared to the volume of peer-reviewed studies on its physical benefits—many professional athletes swear by it.
Take tennis players, for example. Elites like Venus Williams and Rafael Nadal often grunt or scream when they strike the ball. “The timing of when they actually grunt helps them with the rhythm of how they’re hitting and how they’re pacing things,” said Louise Deeley, a sports psychologist at Roehampton University, to the Guardian. “It’s going to give you confidence and a sense of being in control of your game.”
Elliott Waksman, a certified sports performance consultant in Portland, Oregon, who has a degree in sport and exercise psychology, has seen this firsthand. “During individual sessions, some of my clients have reported a link between vocalization and self-confidence,” Waksman says. “Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks, for example, seems to do this. It helps him maintain his mindset.Justin Thomas Joins PawSox
MLB.com/blogs Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 28, 2012
By Josh Maurer & Will Flemming
After breaking camp with the Red Sox, left-handed reliever Justin Thomas has been assigned to Pawtucket as a result of Boston activating lefty Rich Hill from his minor league rehab assignment (Tommy John).
While Thomas no-doubt would’ve preferred to stay with the parent club, he’s grateful for the time he was able to put in with Boston.
“It was just great to get back to the big leagues and have the opportunity to pitch … Being at Fenway Park for the first time, seeing that place, and seeing the 100 year anniversary game there, it was awesome.”
http://www.vimeo.com/41209196
Thomas, who appeared in seven games for the Red Sox, returns to the International League where he made a league-high 63 appearances last season.
“I’m ready to go everyday. I’m a guy who can come in and throw to one batter to get a lefty out in a situation, or go an inning or two.
Thomas joins an already crowded bullpen with rehabbing Andrew Miller and hard-throwing righty Mark Melancon. As Thomas pointed out, however, he will provide the club with a strong option versus left-handed hitting. Last season Thomas held opposing left-handed batters to a stingy.188 average (19-for-101), while allowing just one extra-base hit.
We may get our first look at Thomas tonight as the PawSox and Clippers play Game 2 of the series from beautiful Huntington Park in downtown Columbus. Thomas, and the rest of the bullpen, will need to bundle up. It’s predicted to be 48 degrees for our 7:05 first pitch. We hit the air at 6:50 with the pre-game show.
Talk with you then.
-AG
@aaronmgoldsmith
agoldsmith@pawsox.comWealthy homeowners take on oystermen in war for the coast
In this Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017 photo, oysterman Chris Ludford, works sorting oysters on his lease oyster beds on the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach, Va. As the shellfish makes a comeback, a modern-day oyster war is brewing, this time between wealthy waterfront property owners and working-class fishermen. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Oystermen, pirates and police clashed violently more than a century ago over who could collect the Chesapeake Bay’s tasty and lucrative oysters. As the shellfish makes a comeback, a modern-day oyster war is brewing, this time between wealthy waterfront property owners and working-class fishermen.
Over the past five years, oyster production has doubled on the East Coast, driven by new farming methods, cleaner water and Americans’ growing taste for orders on the half shell. The resurgence has led to unprecedented resistance from coastal Virginians who want to maintain picturesque views from their waterfront homes and has fueled a debate over access to public waterways.
“These people can’t have it all,” said Chris Ludford, an oysterman in Virginia Beach who sells to nearby farm-to-table restaurants.
Ludford said he faces fierce pushback along a Chesapeake Bay tributary from people with “a $2,000 painting in their house of some old bearded oysterman tonging oysters.
“But they don’t want to look out their window and see the real thing,” he said.
Homeowners say the growing number of oystermen — dressed in waders and often tending cages of shellfish — spoil their views and invade their privacy. Residents also worry about less access to the water and the safety of boaters and swimmers.
Low tides often expose oyster cages, usually accompanied by markers or warning signs that protrude from the surface. In some places, cages float.
“All of sudden you have people working in your backyard like it was some industrial area,” said John Korte, a retired NASA aerospace engineer in Virginia Beach who’s among residents concerned about oyster farming’s proliferation. “They may be a hundred feet away from someone’s yard.”
Ben Stagg, chief engineer at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, said the state is poised to break its record of leased acreage for oyster growing. But nearly 30 percent of more than 400 new lease applications face opposition, an unprecedented number that has led to a backlog of leases awaiting approval.
“Occasionally I can resolve those by having the parties get together and adjust the area further offshore,” Stagg said. “But oftentimes, I can’t.”
There hasn’t been this much interest in oysters in Virginia since the early 1960s. Since then, disease and overfishing took hold and growers started to disappear.
Over the last few decades, breeding programs have produced more disease-resistant and faster-growing oysters. The water’s cleaner. American palates have evolved, increasing demand.
Farming techniques also changed. Traditionally, oysters are grown on the bottom of a calm and salty river or bay, then harvested with tongs or dredges that pull them onto boats.
Now, fishermen are increasingly using cages to grow oysters over a two-to-three year period. The equipment keeps predators away and produces oysters with a more uniform shape and size, which restaurants prefer.
But the cages are often placed in shallower water closer to shore — and people’s homes.
Virginia Beach is perhaps ground zero for today’s oyster war. The state’s largest city sits at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. And oysters thrive in the city’s Lynnhaven River, a network of bays and creeks flowing past expensive homes. Lynnhaven oysters are well-known for their salty taste and size.
A state task force was formed to find compromise. It recommended giving residents more power to block nearby oyster leases. But the idea was rejected by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, with the majority of commissioners saying state lawmakers should step in.
Proposals in the Statehouse have included raising the cost of an oyster farming lease from $1.50 an acre annually to $5,000. But legislators haven’t found a solution.
Conflicts also have flared up along Maryland’s Patuxent River, the coastal lagoons of Rhode Island and on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
In Delaware, a group of people who mostly own vacation homes successfully blocked potential oyster farming along their part of an inland bay.
“Oftentimes, affluent and new members of the community have the point of view that they own the water in front of them, which is really not true,” said Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association. “We need to win back our social license to farm.”
Rheault said he’s seen these battles “up and down the East Coast” — even before the crop began to double five years ago.
“The industry was there before the waterfront mansions were built,” Rheault added. “But it hasn’t been there for this generation.”
Ludford, who also works as a Virginia Beach firefighter, is relatively new to the business. He and other relatives started growing oysters in 2010 after leaving the crab industry.
On a recent morning, Ludford sorted through cages as he stood in the Lynnhaven River, hundreds of yards from the nearest home.
He dragged cages into view as grass shrimp wriggled on the shells. He and two helpers retrieved more than 500 oysters, which he sold at 75 cents apiece to three restaurants — totaling about $375.
“Really, people haven’t seen an oysterman behind their houses in 50 to 60 years,” Ludford said.
Steven Corneliussen, who owns a waterfront home in Poquoson, Virginia, said he’s among a group that successfully protested new leases along his corner of the Chesapeake. He said waterways should be subject to zoning, like land.
“That water out in front of me doesn’t belong to me,” he said. “But it doesn’t belong to them, either.”Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia is a remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, the Japan-exclusive Famicom title. Using that “Echoes” name may not just be a one-time thing.
A new developer quote (probably from Nintendo Dream or another similar Japanese magazine) has one representative from Intelligent Systems saying that “Echoes” would probably be used again with another Fire Emblem make – if one were to be made.
The person stated:
“We put a lot of thought into a title like ‘echoes’ that can let older games ‘echo’ with the modern players. We were very pleased with it, and, if there were to be more remakes, we would likely use the “ECHOES” title again.”
Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia launched in Japan last week. It’s due out on May 19 in North America and Europe.
Thanks to Brian for the tip.
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PocketORANGE COUNTY, Fla. - Orange County deputies are searching for the man who robbed a string of stores, disguising himself as Batman.
The robbery was reported at the 123 Dollar Store in the 1500 block of North Semoran Boulevard Tuesday at 8 p.m.
Deputies said the man went into the store, appearing to be wearing a Batman mask and shirt, and demanded money from the clerk.
About an hour-and-a-half later, the Dollar General on South Goldenrod Road was robbed by a culprit with a similar description, according to deputies.
It's not clear how much money was stolen.
The suspected robber was described by deputies as a white or Hispanic male with thin build, wearing a Batman mask, blue jeans and carrying a backpack.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crimeline at 800-423-8477.
Copyright 2016 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.You say new nuclear reactors at Hink ley Point in Somerset could provide electricity for 5 million people (Hinkley Point go-ahead kickstarts nuclear drive, 20 March). If the proposed new reactors do generate 3.2GW, it should be noted that this is still only about 1.6% of UK energy, rather than electricity, needs. Though 3.2GW is not an inconsequential figure, there are three key weaknesses with new nuclear: cost, waste and long-term low-carbon goals.
In terms of cost, it should be remembered that just five years ago the Department of Energy confidently asserted new nuclear would come in at around £33 to £41 per MWh. As your report has noted, EDF is seeking a £100 per MWh "strike price", locked in for 40 years, costing tens of billions to the taxpayer in subsidy. In addition, the planning inquiry did not have the opportunity to take into account that there is now no part of the country volunteering to host a deep-underground radioactive waste repository. This means neither the existing radioactive waste legacy, nor new Hinkley waste, has an effective long-term storage solution. The government can't simply ignore this fact.
Finally, if we do spend so much money on a project lasting just 60 years, with such significant environmental risks, are we really pursuing long-term sustainable goals to reduce carbon emissions? I think not. We should pursue the renewable energy options that most of our economic competitors are successfully developing, with the vigour and political will being put into new nuclear.
Councillor Bill Brown
UK and Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities Steering Committee
• Ed Davey gives planning permission to the Hinkley C nuclear power station when scrutiny of the design safety (generic design assessment) remains uncompleted, when the location, design, safety, cost or even the availability of a final repository for the high-level waste it produces remain huge uncertainties, when the spent fuel from the plant will remain on the site for over a century, way past the date by which EDF will have faded from memory, when electricity demand is falling, when the links between ill-health in local children and routine emissions are being more strongly identified, when the emergency plans designed to evacuate large numbers of people in the event of a major off-site radiological accident remain unimplementable and when the ability to meet the two goals upon which nuclear's reintroduction were based – a reduction in climate change impacts and the bolstering of energy security – look increasingly thin.
As I write, Fukushima is on the verge of yet another catastrophe. What sort of head-in-the-sand government have we lumbered ourselves with and what can we expect from a supine opposition?
Pete Wilkinson
Wilkinson Environmental Consulting Ltd
• There will be absolutely no subsidy for nuclear power has been the constant reassurance from ministers for at least the past year. Now two new reactors are to be built at Hinkley Point and guess what – with the aid of massive subsidies. Yet again the government has caved in to relentless lobbying from multinational corporations. Is it any wonder that ever more people despise the promises of politicians?
Jim McCluskey
Twickenham, Middlesex“Widely acclaimed as one of the main contributors to the Allied victory, the M4 Sherman is perhaps the most recognizable American fighting vehicle of the entire Second World War.”
THE GRITTY WAR DRAMA FURY conquered the box office over the weekend, drumming up more than $23 million in North American ticket sales according to Forbes Magazine. And while the action packed World War Two flick gives Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf and Jon Bernthal top billing, the real star of the show is the movie’s restored M4A2 Sherman tank. Widely acclaimed as one of the main contributors to the Allied victory, the M4 Sherman is perhaps the most recognizable American fighting vehicle of the entire Second World War. Yet despite its prominence in the public consciousness, the Sherman was far from the finest tank on the battlefield. Here are some essential facts about this legendary wartime workhorse.
Help Wanted: One Medium Tank — The M4 Sherman was the result of an urgent U.S. Army requirement in late 1941 for a main battle tank that could match top-of-the-line German panzers. Although the country wasn’t yet at war, the fighting in Europe had made it disturbingly clear that America’s existing tanks, like the lightly armed M3 Stuart and heavier M3 Grant and Lee, were already obsolete. Production of the first Shermans began in July of 1942 at Ohio’s Lima Locomotive Works.
Performance — Named for the controversial Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, the 30-ton M4 was originally powered by a Continental nine-cylinder, 400-horsepower engine. Later models, like the M4A4 were outfitted with four-speed, 30-cylinder, 470-horsepower Chrysler powerplant. Shermans could reach speeds of 30 mph (48 km/h) and had a range of 120 miles (200 km).[1] It got a whopping 1.4 miles to the gallon.
Packin’ Heat — Early Shermans were outfitted with a largely mediocre 75 mm main gun along with a single hatch-mounted.50 caliber machine gun and two lighter.30 cals positioned in the turret and forward hull. Later models were upgraded to a more powerful 76 mm anti-tank weapon that was capable of throwing a 15-pound projectile 2,600 feet per second. [2]
Armour — Perhaps the most recognizable feature of the Sherman was its sloping front armour. The two-inch-thick, angled hull, while giving the tank a far too conspicuous nine-foot high profile, was engineered to deflect shells away from the tank’s four- or five-man crew.
Baptism by Fire — Ironically, it was the British, not the Americans, who first used the Sherman in combat. In October 1942, a platoon of M4s attached to the Eighth Army rolled into action against German and Italian tanks at El Alamein. Just weeks later, hundreds of American Shermans would do battle in the western desert during Operation Torch. The M4 quickly proved itself an equal match for the Panzer III and IV. By the time of the Normandy invasion, the Sherman had completely supplanted the M3 as America’s principle tank. Tens of thousands of the machines served in Europe during the last year of the war, while a smaller number (fewer than 2,000) were sent to the Pacific. More than 4,000 were transferred to the Soviets under Lend-Lease and Britain received a grand total of 17,000 M4s during the war. [2] Other recipients included France, Australia, China and Brazil.
By the Numbers — Between 1942 and 1945, a mind-blowing 49,000 Shermans of various makes and models rolled off American assembly lines. That’s equal to all German tanks manufactured over ten years beginning in 1935. Only the Soviet-made T-34 was more numerous with 55,000 models produced. Each Sherman cost a modest $33,000 in 1942 (that’s about $550,000 in today’s money). Amazingly, the U.S. War Department hoped for as many as 67,000 Shermans, but with warship production stepped up in 1943, steel was too scarce to complete the order. [3] Canada engineered its own Sherman variant, which became known as the Grizzly I cruiser. Between 1943 and 1944, nearly 200 were manufactured in Montreal.
Versatility – Up to 15 Sherman variants were produced during World War Two. These included the A1 through A6 models and numerous sub varieties. Versions like the British Firefly were retrofitted with a high-velocity, 17-pounder anti-tank gun, while the M4A3E8 “Easy Eight” carried a powerful 105 mm howitzer. Other Shermans were fitted with bulldozer plows to clear minefields and large protruding blades to cut through hedgerows, while the so-called “Zippo” models mounted flamethrowers instead of a main gun. The tank’s chassis also served as the foundation for an array of other vehicles like M-10 and M-36 tank destroyers and self-propelled guns such as the M-43.
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year, from 1,007 in 2012 to 939 in 2013. The number of groups that the SPLC considers part of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement fell by 19 percent, from 1,360 in 2012 to 1,096 in 2013.
Hypothesizing about the causes of the drop in numbers, the SPLC said that Obama’s re-election in 2012 “appears to have drained energy from the movement.”
“Other factors that apparently are contributing to the decline are an improving economy, crackdowns by law enforcement, and the adoption of far-right issues by mainstream politicians,” the group said in a press release.
Despite the numbers, the SPLC still considers the radical right to be operating at historically high levels
“The radical right is growing leaner and meaner,” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC, said in a statement. “The numbers are down somewhat, but the potential for violence remains high.
The full report is available here.For the second straight year, MeleeItOnMe is ranking every SSBM Player and counting them down on Twitter (#SSBMRank2014 @Meleeitonme), from No. 100 to No. 1.
We asked a panel of ~30 players/commentators/figureheads from all across the world to rate the overall level of play for each player in 2014 (From January 2014 –> The Big House 4). This includes evaluating perceived skill in tandem with the tournament results.
Rank Alan “Excel Zero” Baretto | @ExcelZeroPR Score 60 (NEW)
Main(s) Peach Region: Puerto Rico 7.173 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 25th – – 49th – Summary: At Apex 2014, Excel Zero surprised everyone with his victories over PewPewU and Cactuar, making out of the pool in winner’s bracket. This Puerto Rican Peach has been heralded as a mini- Armada with his amazing float cancel aerials and damaging combos.
Rank Jaden “VaNz” Carr Score 59 (36)
Main(s) Peach/Sheik Region: NEOH/PGH / Tri-State 7.188 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 – – – – 33rd Summary: VaNz is recognized as a world class Peach main. He views himself more as a tactician when it comes to playing Peach, as opposed to an all out aggressive player, and his crisp punishes prove that. VaNz has taken wins over many great players such as Unknown522, PewPewU, Cyrain, and Abate. Although an honorary member Midwest’s NEOH/PGH region, he now resides permanently back in New York City.
Rank Team Liquid | Ken “Ken” Hoang | @LiquidKen Score 58 (100)
Main(s) Marth Region: SoCal 7.200 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 – 21st 33rd 33rd – Summary: The King of Smash made his epic full return in March when he was sponsored by Team Liquid, and has since been pushing forward in his home region of SoCal, taking out big names like Westballz and MacD, and remaining to place consistently at the always stacked local biweeklies, Super Smash Sundays.
Rank Rob “OkamiBW” Schueller | @OkamiBW Score 57 (82)
Main(s) Sheik Region: SoCal 7.214 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 49th 21st – 33rd – Summary: One of the earliest players to effectively implement “shield dropping”, OkamiBW has a highly technical Sheik with solid spacing and zoning that’s difficult to hit, especially with floatier characters. He’s been experimenting with different styles of play in his recent SSS/Mayhem tournaments.
Rank MGFC | James “Swedish Delight” Liu | @LamesJiu Score 56 (66)
Main(s) Sheik Region: Tri-state 7.222 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 49th – – 25th – Summary: This no-frills Sheik continues to turn heads with his alarming rate of improvement. Originally rising to prominence as a “Falcon slayer”, taking sets off of S2J, Scar, and Hax, The Swede proved he’s no one-trick pony in 2014 with an outstanding 25th place at EVO after a summer abroad with no contact with the game. Known for his immaculate fundamentals and endless tech-chases, Swedish is arguably the best player in New Jersey in the absence of Mew2King. Expect that domain of dominance to expand as this rising talent continues to fine-tune his game.
Rank Dustin “Darc” Hayes | @darcssbm Score 55 (45)
Main(s) Jigglypuff Region: New England 7.234 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 17th – – – – Summary: Wielding a deadly combination of Jigglypuff and Captain Falcon, New England’s Darc remains to be a powerful player in his local community and always does solidly at majors and nationals alike, despite relative inactivity.
Rank Imadh “IB” Bedri | @ib_theone Score 54 (73)
Main(s) Marth Region: Ontario 7.237 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 – – – – – Summary: Despite infrequent stateside appearances, Toronto Marth main I.B. maintained top-player status in 2014 largely through a 7th place finish at Get On My Level and strong performances in local Ontario competition. His GOML run saw him flex a formidable punish game and claim quality wins over the likes of Raynex and Idea, losing only to Mew2King and DJ Nintendo.
Rank Versus | Clay “Porkchops” Eau Le Doet | @VsPorkchops Score 53 (NEW)
Main(s) Falco Region: Florida 7.242 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 65th – 17th – 25th Summary: Although active for several years, Porkchops has recently been on the rise in Florida and nationally, currently ranked 4th on Florida’s Power Rankings. Receiving training from other top Floridian Falco’s like Beer Man and DaShizWhiz, Porkchops continually increasing skill and determination makes him a big threat, proven further by his defeat of aMSa at CEO 2014.
Rank Binyan “Darkatma” Lin | @darkatma Score 52 (46)
Main(s) Sheik Region: Missouri 7.245 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 17th – – 65th 65th Summary: Darkatma is a Peach/Sheik main, playing out of St. Louis and formerly of NorCal. For part of 2014, he was arguably the top player in the lower Midwest, with a number of victories over Illinois’s finest and a 17th-place finish at Apex. At tournaments like UFGTX and SMYM 15, his results fell behind those of Kels, but he remains one of the region’s top threats.
Rank LP | Bernard “Raynex” Maffi | @raynexpress Score 51 (NEW)
Main(s) Fox Region: Ontario 7.250 Tourney Results Apex 2014 MLG Anaheim CEO 2014 Evo 2014 The Big House 4 – – – – 25th Summary: A veteran of nearly a decade in Ontario’s Melee scene, Raynex clawed his way back to prominence in 2014. With strong finishes at nationals including ROM 7 (17th), Get On My Level (9th), Super SWEET (7th), and The Big House 4 (25th), the Scarborough native and Fox main remains a credible threat to do damage at any event he enters.
SSBMRank 2014: 100-91 | 90-81 | 80-71|70-61 |60-51 | 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-26 |25-21 | 20-16 |15-11
10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1This week, House Republicans launched two joint investigations, spanning three congressional committees, aimed at sowing confusion about the nature of Russian influence over last year’s election.
This isn’t liberal gloss on a series of news developments that muddy a clean scandal ensnaring President Donald Trump. Rather, it describes a documentable, partisan effort to use the levers of government to confuse the public about a foreign conspiracy—the subject of a federal criminal investigation—to bolster President Donald Trump’s campaign and sabotage his rivals.
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple compiled the most compelling circumstantial evidence that one of the two investigations is a put up.
Republicans greenlit that inquiry after a report in The Hill last week suggested a 2010 uranium deal approved by the Obama administration was the fruit of a corruption-ridden Russian effort to acquire a greater share of the U.S. atomic energy market.
One problem, as Wemple noted, is that “none of this was news.” Not only was the shady activity reported in other outlets over two years ago, but the Justice Department successfully prosecuted crimes connected to the deal. Another problem, that Wemple did not note, is that one of The Hill report’s authors, John Solomon, is notorious for hyping Republican-friendly stories, presented with a patina of investigative rigor, that ultimately fall apart.
Solomon’s well-plated serving of upchuck is now the basis of a congressional investigation, and of Republican claims—from President Trump and the chairman of the House intelligence committee on down to the rank and file—that Russia really interfered on behalf of Democrats last year.
Wemple—who, in the interest of full disclosure, mercilessly edited my embarrassing copy over a decade ago when I was a stringer for the Washington City Paper—has documented the makings of a pseudo-scandal. Perhaps unintentionally, he has also written a genre-bending article we sorely need at a time when certain strictures of political journalism—that journalists can’t divine intention, that America’s two parties mirror one another—are overwhelming the imperative to report truth.
Though the nominal subject of Wemple’s piece is The Hill, the lead may as well be that Republican House investigators are participating in a demonstrable propaganda campaign for the protection of their scandal-plagued president. The fabrication of the scandal, not the scandal being fabricated, is the scandal itself.
That is not how most media outlets have framed the story.
“Obama-era uranium deal yields new questions, new accusations and new investigation,” blared a CNN headline.
The New York Times’ version read “Courting Democratic Ire, Republicans Open New Obama-Era Inquiries.”
Wemple’s access point to the heart of the story was granular criticism of a bad piece of journalism, and it’s understandable that national political desks didn’t have the benefit of his specific perspective. Moreover, when a congressional committee launches an investigation, oftent the news is that something is coming under scrutiny. But here’s what makes this uranium pseudo-scandal a perfect case study in how the sticky norms of political journalism are ill-equipped to expose a single party’s deep rot of bad faith: Republicans already hoodwinked the political media with the exact same uranium story before the presidential election, and everybody knows it.
About two and a half years ago, as the 2016 presidential campaign was ramping up, the New York Times published a curious piece about a Russian atomic energy agency that swallowed a Canadian uranium mining company known as Uranium One. As the transaction unfolded, the company’s chairman made multiple donations to the Clinton Foundation, which made the story interesting to the Times, because the acquisition could not have happened without the permission of the U.S. national security apparatus, including Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Here was quid and quo, laid side by side, on the front page of the nation’s paper of record. The following year, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, would rest his ludicrously false claim that Clinton “handed over” 20 percent of American uranium to Russia on this central insinuation in the Times’ story. Upon mild scrutiny, though, Trump’s attack, and the broader implication of corruption, collapsed.
“The State Department was one of nine [U.S.] agencies…that approved the deal,” the Washington Post noted in its debunking. “The deal was also separately approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” which is politically independent from the White House. The suggestion that Clinton approved the deal as a favor to a donor was a crock.
Innuendo-driven exposés of the Clintons’ vast financial and geopolitical network formed their own genre in 2015 and 2016, but what made the Times report uniquely puzzling was a two-sentence disclosure, nine paragraphs into the story, that it was the fruit of a partnership with Peter Schweizer, a right-wing muckraker who presided over a think tank bankrolled by anti-Clinton billionaires. Eventually, the political press developed a healthier skepticism of the uranium story, and other anti-Clinton stories Schweizer seeded. But this was all too little, too late for Clinton. “The effect on Clinton’s popularity was profound,” wrote Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, his biography of Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon. “The percentage of Americans who thought she was ‘untrustworthy’ shot up into the 60s.”
Bannon, as Green documented, was one of Schweizer’s closest associates, a patron of his think tank, and the person who recognized that laundering Schweizer’s reporting on the uranium deal through the Times would make it far more damaging to Hillary Clinton than if it lived exclusively on his website, Breitbart, and other right-wing agitprop sites.
Today’s credulousness is so frustrating because it’s a case of fool-me-twice: This deal, and the deal House Republicans are now investigating, are the same deal. Warmed over, picked apart, digested, and, of course, completely sideways to the conduct of the current government.
The purpose of the propaganda has changed from defaming Hillary Clinton to blurring the truth about Russia’s subversion of the election, but the underlying content is the same. The facts of the matter are all out in the open, as are the ways and reasons the right manipulated those facts and has now returned to them a year later. But the press, once bitten, hasn’t yet learned to be shy.Just before Christmas, Nine Inch Nails frontman (and, lest we forget, Oscar winning composer) Trent Reznor announced the imminent arrival of The Fragile: Deviations on vinyl, alongside the release of a brand-new EP called Not The Actual Events. Nails fans everywhere rejoiced, made their purchases, and sat patiently waiting for them to arrive.
Not The Actual Events arrived pretty much on time. The Fragile: Deviations, on the other hand, never made it across the finish line. Rumors circulated that something had gone wrong during production, and for months fans have been waiting for an official update on the situation: how long would the album be delayed? What was the hold-up?
Today, Reznor himself sent out an email laying it all out. It reads:
TWO APOLOGIES, A STATEMENT, AND A QUESTION.
APOLOGY 1:
FIRST, AS SOME OF YOU MAY KNOW WE ARE CHANGING OUR FULFILLMENT PARTNER. I HAVE NOT BEEN HAPPY WITH FIREBRAND FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS AND WE ARE NOW PARTNERING WITH SANDBAG. I’M SORRY IT’S TAKEN AS LONG AS IT HAS TO MAKE THIS CHANGE, AND I APOLOGIZE FOR ANY AGGRAVATION YOU MAY HAVE EXPERIENCED ON THIS FRONT. YOUR SUPPORT IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED AND I ASSURE YOU THERE’S BEEN AN EXTRAORDINARY AMOUNT OF SCREAMING DONE ON MY END. YOU DESERVE BETTER.
APOLOGY 2:
THE VINYL RELEASES FOR DEVIATIONS, NOT THE ACTUAL EVENTS AND THE REISSUES HAVE BEEN DELAYED AS MANY OF YOU ARE AWARE. THE BLAME FOR THIS LIES WITH ME AND MY TEAM. WE RAN INTO A VARIETY OF QUALITY CONTROL ISSUES WITH THE AUDIO AND VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE ARTWORK, THEN WE GOT OBSESSIVE ABOUT GETTING IT RIGHT. AT SOME POINT THESE FUCKUPS STARTED TO ADD UP TO A SUBSTANTIAL DELAY THAT I WASN’T FULLY AWARE OF UNTIL RECENTLY.
AGAIN, I’M SORRY FOR THE DELAY HERE BUT THE INTENTION HAS BEEN TO GET THIS UNCOMPROMISINGLY RIGHT.
So, first of all: thumbs up to Trent Reznor for taking the time to break this one down for us. The shipping got screwed up, there were some quality control issues, Reznor had to unleash "an extraordinary amount of screaming" upon a few very unlucky individuals, but now it's all being worked out. Sure, we've gotta wait until June to collect the albums we ordered, but what's another month or two?
And besides, how could anyone be angry when the above was accompanied by this announcement:
QUESTION:
FINALLY, DID YOU KNOW THERE’S A NEW TOP-SECRET NINE INCH NAILS EP THAT WILL BE RELEASED BEFORE THE FIRST SHOWS WE DO THIS SUMMER? DID YOU KNOW NOT THE ACTUAL EVENTS WAS THE FIRST PART OF A TRILOGY OF RELATED EPS THAT WILL BE RELEASED ABOUT 6-8 MONTHS APART? NOW YOU DO.
MORE INFORMATION ON THIS SHORTLY…
Yes, you read that correctly: as it turns out, Not The Actual Events was just the first in a planned trilogy of new Nine Inch Nails EPs. The next one should be arriving shortly, ahead of the concert dates Reznor and company have lined up over the summer, and the final installment should arrive towards the end of the year. What a fantastic surprise!
In addition to that exciting bit of news and a pair of apologies, Reznor also announced that everyone with an outstanding vinyl order from the Nine Inch Nails website would soon be receiving a special discount code for 20% off their next purchase. This dude definitely understands how to get back in our good graces.
No word on when a full Nine Inch Nails tour might be announced or when Reznor (and longtime co-composer Atticus Ross) might return to score another film, but of course we'll keep you informed on both fronts as the updates roll in. Spend the interim celebrating in the comments below, Reznor fans.
(Note: Header image used with permission via Wikimedia Commons)The United Nations says the Takfiri ISIL terrorist group has been offering Syrian and Iraqi girls for sale by putting them on show “stripped naked” in “slave bazaars.”
Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zainab Bangura made the harrowing revelation on Thursday while briefing journalists on her “scoping mission” to Syria, Iraq and some other countries in the region in April.
“Girls are literally being stripped naked and examined in slave bazaars” of the ISIL, Bangura said, adding that the girls were “categorized and shipped naked off to Dohuk (Province) or Mosul or other locations to be distributed among ISIL leadership” and militants.
Bangura visited Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan from April 16 to 29 and interviewed girls and women who had escaped ISIL captivity and survived sexual violence.
“Women and girls are at risk and under assault at every point of their lives,” Bangura said, stressing that they are in danger at “every step of the way… in the midst of active conflict, in areas under control of armed actors, at check-points and border crossings, and in detention facilities.”
The file photo shows a displaced Izadi girl living in an unfinished building outside the town of Dohuk, in Iraq’s Kuridistan region.
The UN special representative went on to say that the Takfiri group utilizes sexual violence as a “tactic” to humiliate and demoralize those who are against the ISIL and to punish and displace dissenters.
“ISIL have institutionalized sexual violence and the brutalization of women as a central aspect of their ideology and operations, using it as a tactic of terrorism to advance their key strategic objectives,” she said.
Elaborating on the motives of the Takfiri group for advancing sexual violence, the UN official further said that ISIL uses the tactic to extract information for intelligence purposes and to dismantle social, familial and community structures.
Giving an example of the brutalities of the ISIL group against the girls and women, she noted that a certain girl was forced to marry Takfiri terrorists 20 times and was forced to undergo surgery to regain her virginity after each marriage.
Iraqi Izadi women who fled the ISIL terror group in the Iraqi town of Sinjar (file photo)
Bangura called on the UN Security Council to take measures to counter such crimes, expressing concerns about the children born of rape. She also said that such children create “a generation of stateless children” who could provide fertile ground for future extremism.
The ISIL militants have been accused of committing gross human rights violations and war crimes in Syria and Iraq, including rape, summary executions, mass kidnappings, and massacres.
IA/HJL/MHBReportedly, the 35-year-old star has confided in friends that he is exploring his options in the West
Fawad Khan has been readying himself lately for his upcoming venture with none other than Mahira Khan and Hamza Ali Abbasi for Bilal Lahsari-helmed Maula Jatt 2.
The actor after making buzz across the border in an unusual role, in Karan Johar’s Kapoor & Sons, decided to stick to his roots as he returned to the Pakistani film industry after arresting hearts much before his Bollywood debut – in Shoaib Mansoor’s critically acclaimed directorial Khuda Kay Liye.
However, looks like the actor is all set to mark his debut in Hollywood!
‘Thora Jee Le’ director Rafay Rashdi hopes to cast Fawad Khan in murder-mystery
A famous Indian film critic and entertainment journalist, Rajeev Masand said that the actor is currently looking for opportunities in Hollywood.
Writing in his column in Open Magazine, the writer alleged, “In light of the fact that there just haven’t been too many good enough film roles coming his way in Pakistan — not to mention any hopes of a promising career in Hindi films went up in smoke after the Ae Dil Hai Mushkil controversy last year — it appears Fawad Khan may be headed for the United States in pursuit of quality work.”
He went on to add, “Reportedly, the 35-year-old star has confided in friends and former collaborators in Mumbai that he is exploring his options in the West; he’s already signed on with an agent in Hollywood and has begun reading scripts.”
EP reunion: The boys still got it
“He is believed to have told friends that he doesn’t see much of a challenge in continuing to work in tele-serials back home, and will move to Los Angeles as soon as he’s zeroed in on his first project,” wrote Masand.
Well, if that is indeed the case, that’s exciting news for all Fawad Khan fans. Isn’t it?
And he shall undoubtedly slay in Hollywood!
The Express Tribune is currently waiting for a comment from the actor himself.
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Falcon countdown dress rehearsal a 'great success'
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: February 26, 2010
Taking advantage of a picturesque day in the Sunshine State, the privately-developed Falcon 9 rocket came to life Friday afternoon as engineers loaded 75,000 gallons of propellant aboard the vehicle during a simulated countdown.
The Falcon 9 vents liquid oxygen late Friday afternoon.
Friday's countdown wet dress rehearsal was "the smoothest test we have conducted to date," said Tim Buzza, the Falcon 9 launch director. The booster has spent the last week at Complex 40 after being assembled inside a hangar at the pad's southern perimeter. Stormy weather and high winds earlier this week pushed the countdown rehearsal to Friday. After powering up the 15-story rocket, the launch team verified all systems were functioning, performed engine purge checks and cleared workers from the launch pad. About 29 managers and engineers inside SpaceX's Launch Control Center oversaw the countdown, which began at the T-minus 2 hour, 30 minute point. The transporter/erector, also serving as an umbilical tower and strongback, was partially tilted away from the rocket around 1:30 p.m. EST. Liquid oxygen started flowing into the two-stage Falcon 9 launcher at about 3 p.m. EST. The super-cold oxidizer was loaded into the rocket until the first and second stage tanks were 98 percent full, then the launch team topped off the liquid oxygen to liftoff levels, where they remained throughout the countdown, according to SpaceX. The shining white rocket was coated in ice after liquid oxygen was placed on-board. The Falcon 9 was next filled with kerosene fuel, which powers Merlin engines on both stages of the rocket. In the final 10 minutes of the countdown, the Falcon 9's navigation system was aligned for launch, the rocket was transferred to internal power, the engine steering systems were checked out, and propellant tanks were pressurized at T-minus 40 seconds, according to Buzza. The countdown clock was stopped at T-minus 10 seconds around 5:15 p.m. EST using the pad abort system. After safing the rocket and launch pad, SpaceX drained the Falcon 9 of propellant and raised the strongback next to the launcher. "It was a good day," said Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO. Engineers will spend the next few days carefully reviewing data from Friday's test. If the results prove satisfactory, SpaceX plans to fuel the rocket again in the coming weeks for another countdown rehearsal that will end with a brief ignition of the Falcon's nine first stage engines for about three-and-a-half seconds. Unlike Friday's practice countdown, which was unannounced, the engine test will send an unmistakable roar across the Florida spaceport. The launch date for the inaugural Falcon 9 rocket mission remains unclear, but it is not expected to occur before March 22. The demonstration flight's launch window opens at 11 a.m. EDT each day. SpaceX is developing the Falcon 9 rocket and a spacecraft named Dragon under a NASA contract to deliver supplies to the International Space Station beginning next year. Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has launched the smaller Falcon 1 rocket five times, reaching orbit twice. The company is considered a frontfrunner among commercial firms competing for the job of carrying astronauts to the International Space Station under NASA's new emphasis on private human spaceflight.Vid + pic Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace has been showing off the latest addition to the International Space Station: an inflatable module that will be used as a lounge and test facility in orbit.
Youtube Video
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is a 13ft by 10ft inflatable capsule that will be lofted up to the ISS as part of a SpaceX resupply mission on September 2, weather permitting. The 3,000lb unit will be attached to the ISS for two years and give the crew somewhere new to stretch their legs.
The BEAM uses multiple layers of high-tech fabric to keep the air in and micrometeorites and other space debris out. By eschewing metal, the Bigelow module is much cheaper to get into orbit than a standard capsule, and the cloth walls have been extensively tested.
Bigelow launched its first bubble capsule into orbit in 2006, and a second one in 2007. They are both still in orbit, and the outer skin has survived longer than expected. The BA330, a 45ft by 22ft module that the firm wants to use as a habitat in space and on other planets (think space hotels), is entering production.
In 2012, NASA signed a $17.8m deal with Bigelow to provide a module for the ISS, and on Thursday Bigelow showed off the space-station-bound module to the press.
"NASA understands that the agency can generate more innovation and attract more investment in space by partnering with America’s commercial space industry and its entrepreneurs," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
"Our plans for exploration in the 21st century intentionally rely on American commercial partners in every aspect of what we do, whether it is rockets to get to space or new technologies such as the BEAM expandable habitat for living in space." ®A year ago, Sylvester Stallone had $106 in the bank. His wife was pregnant, his bull mastiff was starving and he couldn't pay the rent on his seedy Hollywood apartment. What to do?
Well, one answer was that Stallone, a sometime actor-turned-screenwriter, could sit down and in 3 1/2 days write a screenplay with a meaty starring role in it for himself, persuade someone to film it, and wind up a millionaire. Improbable? Pessimists might say so, and advise Stallone to try something more sure, like the Irish Sweepstakes. Impossible? Well, no, because you see, there's this new movie, called ''Rocky.''
That's Stallone up there as ''Rocky,'' Rocky Balboa, a tender-hearted, down-and-out Philadelphia club fighter known as ''The Italian Stallion,'' who almost becomes heavyweight champion of the world. And the words Stallone is mouthing on screen are the words he wrote in 3 1/2 days and sold to producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff on the condition that he would play ''Rocky,'' and not Burt Reynolds, or James Caan, or Ryan O'Neal, who were being mentioned for the part.
The film was shot in 28 days (''The gestation time for a water bug,'' Stallone says wryly), on a shoestring $1 million budget, and now, with critics split down the middle with some raving and other deploring, and United Artists predicting ''Rocky'' will gross more than $40 million, Stallone is finally smiling. You see, he has 10 percent of ''Rocky.''
That's enough to make anyone jubilant, and he is. In an interview the other day in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, the 30-year-old actor, known as ''Sly'' to his friends, laughed repeatedly, rolled off a steady stream of one-liners, snapped his fingers to recorded rock music, answered his constantly ringing telephone with the greeting, ''City Morgue,'' and said, gleefully, several times in his basso profundo voice, ''I am one of the great bull artists of all time!'' There is none of the brooding intensity of Al Pacino or Marlon Brando, with whom he is being compared. What Sylvester Stallone radiates is boyish mischief.
One of the few ways to make him get serious is to ask how his own life compares with Rocky's. ''There are certain parallels,'' he replied, chewing on a yellow pencil. ''Rocky had drive, and intelligence, and the talent to be a fighter, but nobody noticed him. Then when opportunity knocked, everybody said, 'Hey, there's Rocky, he's good.' That's what happened to me. The fact that we both went the distance when we were finally given the opportunity, that's the main parallel.''
''It's funny,'' he goes on, his big brown bassethound eyes growing sad, ''there's a great herd of people who were holding back compliments for years that are now coming forth and saying, 'I like you.' It happened to Rocky, too. I feel like saying to them, 'Where were you when I was living in Hotel Barf, eating hot and cold running disease?' They say, 'Oh, we were holding it back, Sly, because we didn't want you to get a swelled head.'''
All of a sudden, Stallone remembered he had forgotten to take his vitamin pills. He swallowed 44 of them, his nightly ration of the 113 he says he takes every day. As Stallone sees it, his body is a temple. He lifts weights regularly, which accounts for his muscular pumped-up upper body that is out of proportion with the rest of his body. He obviously likes people to notice his efforts: The snug black T-shirt he was wearing emphasized his 46-inch chest and his bulging, 16-inch biceps.
''You know,'' he said, returning to the subject of ''Rocky,'' ''if nothing else comes out of that film in the way of awards and accolades, it will still show that an unknown quantity, a totally unmarketable person, can produce a diamond in the rough, a gem. And there are a lot more people like me out there, too, people whose chosen profession denies them opportunity. When that happens, their creative energies begin to swirl around inside, and erode them, and they become envious, vindictive persons who turn to drink. I, myself, turned to fighting; I averaged a fight in New York City once every four or five weeks. Now when I reflect back on it, I know it was just a release for creative energy.''
Stallone, whose only leading role before ''Rocky'' was in a 1974 low budget flop called ''The Lords of Flatbush'' (he was also in ''Capone'' and ''Death Race 2000''), turned to screenwriting out of frustration at not being able to get good acting jobs. He was also influenced by his mother, who dabbled in astrology and predicted he'd make his first big success as a writer. Stallone sold a few scripts, mainly to television, before conceiving the idea of ''Rocky,'' which was inspired by an actual championship fight in 1975 between Chuck Wepner, know as ''The Bayonne Bleeder,'' and Muhammad Ali, the world champion.
''I was watching the fight in a movie theater,'' he said, ''and I said to myself, 'Let's talk about stifled ambition and broken dreams and people who sit on the curb looking at their dreams go down the drain.' I thought about it for a month. That's what I call my inspiration stage. Then I let it incubate for 10 months, the incubation stage. Then came the verification stage, when I wrote it in 3 1/2 days. I'd get up at 6 A.M. and write it by hand, with a Bic pen on lined notebook sheets of paper. Then my wife, Sasha, would type it. She kept saying, 'You've gotta do it, you've gotta do it. Push it, Sly, go for broke.'''
Actually, there were two more drafts of ''Rocky'' after the first one, during which Stallone hung ''muscle and skin'' on his characters. ''In the first draft, I always try for a skeletal structure,'' he said. ''Then I begin to inject humor and idiosyncrasies. You know, I just don't believe these guys who say it takes them 19 years to write something. I just force myself to put it down and get it done.''
From the beginning, Stallone intended to play ''Rocky.'' Although there was much interest in Hollywood for his script, the money men all wanted a name actor in the part. The bidding went up to $265,000, but Stallone refused to sell, unless he could play the lead.
''I never would have sold it,'' he says now. ''I told my wife that I'd rather bury it in the back yard and let the caterpillars play 'Rocky.' I would have hated myself for selling out, the way we hate most people for selling out. My wife agreed, and said she'd be willing to move to a trailer in the middle of a swamp if need be.''
Finally, Stallone got his way. He even wangled parts for members of his family. His father, Frank, a retired beautician and real estate dealer, plays the timekeeper in the fight scene; his 26-year-old brother, Frank, Jr., who recently signed a recording contract with RCA, plays a street corner singer; and his bull mastiff, Butkus, plays the dog. ''They work cheap,'' Stallone said, laughing. ''But I'm worried about Butkus - he'll always have problems with dialogue.''
The actor said that while he hadn't yet been able to fathom Butkus's creative process, he knew definitely that his own was not ''The Method.'' ''I think I'm an instinctual actor,'' he said. ''I don't understand terms like 'tuning your instrument.' I'm not an oboe or a bass fiddle. I'm a very rehearsed actor. I learn my lines ahead of time so that I know mine and everyone else's far in advance. That way I can give the illusion that I am ad libbing and be comfortable on the set. So many actors these days learn their lines at the last minute, or use cue cards. I just couldn't do that; I'd be too uncomfortable.''
The 5-foot-10-inch, 175-pound actor, who had never had any formal boxing instruction, went into training six hours a day for five months before ''Rocky'' began filming. He got up at dawn to run five miles on the beach, shadow-boxed around the apartment, and worked out at a gym, where he punched the punching bag, did pushups, and had a medicine ball thrown into his stomach. He was preparing for the film's climax, the championship fight, which he and director John Avildsen choreographed punch-for-punch. ''There were 14 pages of left, right, right, left, left hook,'' he said. ''What looked like haphazard throwing of punches was an exact ballet.''
Because of the rugged, he-man quality of his character in ''Rocky,'' Stallone has been hailed as the first leading man in a long time who projects the image of a Real |
20 homes destroyed and other buildings sustained considerable structural damage
More than 100 people homeless
Six people killed
Eighteen people treated for minor injuries
Three drowned and three killed by flying debris.
Remember that we decided that (e) and (d) were the most newsworthy key points because they best filled the four criteria for news:
Is it new?
Is it unusual?
Is it interesting or significant?
Is it about people?
Remember too that we decided to use key point (e) in preference to (g) because they were about the same fact but (e) was shorter for our intro.
The intro
By filling in just enough of the Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? to allow the intro to stand alone if necessary, we finally wrote the intro:
Six people were killed and more than 100 left homeless when Cyclone Victor hit the Solomon Islands yesterday.
Options
We have three choices at this point for writing the rest of the story. We could tell it chronologically - that means in the time order in which the events happened. Or we can tell it in descending order of importance of the key points, all the way down to the least newsworthy at the end. Or we can use a combination of these two approaches, i.e. we can begin by giving the key points in descending order then fill in the less important details in chronological order.
Whichever option we choose, there must be a clear logic behind the way the story is told. This will make it easy for the reader to follow and understand it. There are many ways in which you could show visitors around your village or town, some of which would be logical and some illogical.
You might show them the centre of the village first, then move to the outer buildings, and finish with the river and the food gardens. Or you might show everything to do with one family line first, then move to a second family line, and so on. Visitors could follow and understand either of these.
However, if you wander at random through the village, pointing out things as you happen to see them, your visitors will probably become confused.
So it is with writing the news story. You must choose a clear and simple sequence for telling the facts and giving relevant opinions. In this way your readers or listeners will not become confused.
To return to our Cyclone Victor example, let us choose to give the main key points in descending order of importance and then to tell the story in chronological order to give the minor details. This will demonstrate both of the other approaches.
Ranking the key points
We have already chosen (e) and (d) for our intro. In what order should we put the other key points?
Clearly the deaths need explaining if possible, as does the damage to people's homes. Because lives are more important than homes, let us take (g) as our next key point, followed by (f) which is about injuries:
Three men drowned when their car was blown off the road into a river. Two women and a man were killed by flying debris, and a further 18 people were treated in hospital for minor injuries.
Notice that we split key point (g) into two halves. This was partly to stop the paragraph from being too long and partly to emphasise the unusual nature of the deaths of the three men in the car. It is less unusual for people to be killed by flying debris in the middle of a cyclone, and we filled that paragraph out a bit by including details of the injured.
Now let us tell our readers or listeners more about the homeless:
More than 20 homes were destroyed and a number of other buildings were badly damaged.
Notice here that we changed the word "houses" to "homes", since "homes" are houses with people living in them. We also changed the phrase "sustained considerable structural damage" to "were badly damaged". As in the intro, you must avoid overloading any sentence in your story with unnecessary words - remember the canoe. The original phrase was just jargon. The rewritten phrase is shorter and simpler to understand.
Telling the rest of the story
We have so far used five of our key points in the first four paragraphs of our news story. The remaining two key points are facts about the cyclone itself - how it was spotted and how people were warned. There are clearly lots of details which can be given here.
It would be possible to write the rest of the story by choosing more key points from the information left, ranking them according to newsworthiness then writing them in order. This is, however, very complicated and may confuse your reader or listener. A much simpler alternative is to now go back to the beginning of the event and tell it in chronological order, as things happened.
Before we do this, we have tell our audience that we are going to change from the key points method of news writing to the chronological method, otherwise they might think that our next paragraph is our next key point (although our readers or listeners would not use that term). The easiest way of doing that is to provide a kind of summary to the first segment of our story with the paragraph:
The emergency services are still awaiting news from outlying districts but believe that Honiara has been the worst hit. This sentence also tells the reader or listener that we have given the most important news. Our next paragraph tells them that we are going back to the beginning of the story: Cyclone Victor was first detected at 2 a.m. yesterday by staff at the Nadi Weather Centre. They plotted it travelling south-west across the Pacific towards the Solomon Islands. An hour later, they contacted the Solomon Islands government to warn them of the cyclone's approach. Government officials put emergency plans into operation. They radioed ships in the area and broadcast warnings to Solomon Islanders over the radio. Police officers were sent out to warn people. By 10 a.m., winds in the capital, Honiara, were blowing at more than 140 kilometres per hour. Two hours later the centre of Cyclone Victor passed over Honiara before tracking into the Coral Sea, where it blew itself out. Mopping-up operations have now started in Honiara.
Now we have told the story of the cyclone, at the same time bringing our audience up to date with latest developments.
Checking the story
Before we hand this story in to our chief of staff or news editor, there are two more things we have to do to make sure that it is accurate; we must check for mistakes and we must check for missing details.
Inexperienced journalists are often so relieved that they have actually written a story that they forget to check it properly. You should make it a firm rule to read your story through several times before handing it in.
If you should find another mistake on any reading, correct it and then, because your reading has been interrupted by the correction, you should read the whole story through again from the beginning. Keep doing this until you can read it through from beginning to end without finding any errors. Only then can you hand it in.
Mistakes
We have to check back through our story to make sure that we have all the facts correct, the right spellings, the correct order of events, the proper punctuation. In short, is this how you want to see the story in your newspaper or hear it read out on air?
Missing details
We have to ask ourselves whether there are still any outstanding Who? What? Where? When? Why? or How? questions still to be answered
In our cyclone example, we do not give any specific details of who the dead and injured were, or how they were killed and hurt. Why did it take the Nadi Weather Centre an hour to alert the Solomon Islands government? What is the damage outside Honiara? What is going to happen to all the homeless people?
The amount of detail which we include in the story will depend on how much we feel our readers or listeners will want.
As we explained earlier, newspapers will give more details than radio or television bulletins. In particular, we shall want the names of the six people who have been killed to publish in a newspaper report; but not in a broadcast report.
There is still plenty of work to do, maybe in our next story.
The final version
The final version of our cyclone story, let us say for a newspaper, is now almost ready.
We check for mistakes, and are satisfied that we have made none.
We then check for missing details. We have not given the names of the dead and injured, so we might phone the police and the hospital. Both places tell us that names will not be released until the families have been informed. This must be included in our story.
There are no details yet of damage outside Honiara, and it may be difficult to get that information if telephone lines are down and roads flooded. This, too, should be added to the story.
Our finished version should now look like this:
Six people were killed and more than 100 left homeless when Cyclone Victor hit the Solomon Islands yesterday. Three men drowned when their car was blown off the road into a river, in the national capital, Honiara. Two women and a man were killed by flying debris, and a further 18 people are being treated in hospital for minor injuries. The names of the dead and injured are not being released until relatives have been informed. More than 20 homes were destroyed and a number of other buildings were badly damaged. The emergency services are still awaiting news from outlying districts. However, they believe that Honiara has been the worst hit. Communications between Honiara and other areas have been disrupted by the cyclone. Cyclone Victor was first detected at 2 a.m. yesterday by staff at the Nadi Weather Centre. They plotted it travelling south-west across the Pacific towards the Solomon Islands. An hour later, they contacted the Solomon Islands government to warn them of the cyclone's approach. Government officials put emergency plans into operation. They radioed ships in the area and broadcast warnings to Solomon Islanders over the radio. Police officers were sent out to warn people. By 10 a.m., winds in the capital, Honiara, were blowing at more than 140 kilometres per hour. Two hours later the centre of Cyclone Victor passed over Honiara before tracking into the Coral Sea, where it blew itself out. Mopping-up operations have now started in Honiara.
To summarise:
Remember to read your story through thoroughly before handing it in. If you find any errors, correct them - then read it through again.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Have you chosen the key points? Have you ranked them in order when writing your story?
Has your story answered the six questions Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?
Have you presented the facts in an orderly manner and provided links between different segments?
Have you read it through again?
This module is a one of six from The News Manual reproduced here with permission. Unlike other modules on this site, The News Manual modules are not covered by Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. If you want to reproduce any you will need to contact the editor.
Image by Cranky Pressman and released under Creative Commons
Return to the beginning of the articleAfter the kids were in bed, we sat down on the couch like we always did to watch an episode of Friends followed by the local news. I turned to my wife of thirteen years and asked her a question she did not see coming:
“Could you see yourself still being married to me if I were no longer a Christian?” I asked.
After a brief stunned silence, she replied: “Well, I don’t know how to answer that because that wouldn’t be you.”
Gulp. I ventured a little further. “Well, what if it were me? What if I weren’t a believer anymore? Could you still see us together?”
After a long thoughtful pause, she answered: “But that’s not the man I married. That wouldn’t be you.”
I tried pressing the issue a little further but it was late in the evening and tears soon made an appearance so I ended the conversation abruptly and thought of something lighter to discuss.
Hypersensitivity has always been a weakness of mine, and I would much rather shut up than make someone else cry. In fact, in response to my wife’s obvious pain, I shut down about this topic completely, effectively ending that conversation for the next year. I had wrestled with my own questions years before and had stuffed them deep inside for as long as I could. But now they had resurfaced and I wanted to test the waters to see if this was a conversation to which I could invite the person I needed most to join me. What I discovered that night frightened me and led me to shut her out of this journey I was on. I decided to search for answers on my own for fear that the process would completely alienate me from my life partner.
During my year of silent searching, I did what many do when they find themselves in a very different place from their spouses: I developed a double life. On the outside I continued going through the motions of Christian service. I even took on the responsibility of teaching an adult Sunday School class because that was so much more bearable than having to sit and listen to somebody else teach. On the inside, however, I had lost my religion, and the things people around me were saying were starting to make my skin crawl. I kept that to myself, and only shared it with one or two other people who I knew would be non-judgmental, and who would not feel personally threatened by my apostasy. At that time, I had not yet discovered any online communities for people like me, so I felt pretty alone. It was like having a secret life, except mostly in my own head. But the truth came out eventually (as it always does) and a year down the road I found myself standing on the other side of an apparently unbreachable gulf separating me from the woman to whom I had committed my life, and with whom I had helped bring four beautiful daughters into the world. At one point, our marriage had been the envy of others in our church, but now we were in serious need of crisis marriage counseling.
Because our faith had been so central to our lives, and because our common commitments were the very reason we were drawn to each other in the first place, we decided to see a Christian marriage counselor who was on staff at our local Baptist church. In retrospect, I see that this wasn’t exactly a brilliant decision. That’s not to say he’s not a terrific guy; on the contrary, I’ve known him for many years and have the utmost respect for him personally. But a Baptist minister isn’t the best choice to mediate between an atheist spouse and a Christian one. There’s a conflict of interest there because two of the three people in that scenario will necessarily see the third as broken and needing to come back to Jesus. Our complicated situation demanded compromise, but for Evangelicals, compromise is a dirty word. It represents a falling short of what God wants and therefore must be resisted. In a very short time we had developed some deeply painful problems (some of which were my doing) and we needed to find a religiously unbiased third party to help us navigate these very troubled waters. We didn’t do that, and after a year of weekly counseling and countless hours of intense conversation, in the end we decided to divorce.
It was a gut-wrenching decision for both of us and the financial and emotional toll has been pretty tough on us both. This experience has impressed upon me that nobody’s important life decisions can be made by someone else, so you shouldn’t even try. If you haven’t lived another person’s life, you don’t know all the reasons why they do what they do. But for us, we both came to realize that we were on completely different paths. While we share a common passion for the well-being of our children, so many other important trajectories have changed that we no longer live in the same ideological worlds. We continue to be partners in parenting, and I happen to think we still make a pretty good team. Our girls always come first, and they will never see us disrespecting or insulting each other because that’s not who we are. It’s not ideal, no. But we’re doing the best we can, and I think our girls have a pretty good life.
Cries for Help from the Unequally Yoked
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t receive a distress signal from someone who has left the Christian faith but is married to someone still very committed to it. Religious differences within marriage happen all the time but some are far more stressful than others. A Methodist married to a Presbyterian might sometimes fight over predestination, and a Baptist might fight with a Pentecostal over speaking in tongues. But at least all of these people believe in some basic core beliefs like Abrahamic monotheism and the divinity of Jesus. Imagine what it does to a relationship when one spouse doesn’t even subscribe to the very concept of divinity while the other one does. That’s pretty awkward, right? Even that is manageable though, if those differences were there from the start of the relationship. Incidentally, the amount of tension it produces also depends greatly on the exact character and strength of the beliefs over which they disagree. But when both spouses enter the marriage as devout Evangelicals and later one of them deconverts? That is a recipe for marital trouble.
The deconversion part is a key component of this conundrum. See, relationships depend on good communication and in order for communication to work there needs to be some mutual ability to empathize with the other person, to see the world through their eyes. If both partners began as non-believers and one of them later converts to Christianity, the new Christian is less likely to misunderstand the perspective of the non-Christian because she was once one herself. But when both partners grow up thoroughly submerged in a tradition which vilifies unbelievers and then one of them expatriates into that camp, this move will likely make no sense to the still-Christian because he has never been anything else. If the Christian is an Evangelical, in a way the deconvert has now become the enemy (albeit unwittingly) because that tradition views skepticism as a malady to be overcome and it sees non-belief as a fundamental threat. The kind of liberal Christianity you find in mainline denominations (Catholic, Anglican, etc) is less obsessed with “faith” than Evangelical Christianity, so you won’t likely see them display as much angst over whether or not both spouses believe the same things. Liberal Christians care less if your beliefs are all “right” and more about how you conduct yourself in the world. But Evangelical Christianity stresses right belief first and foremost (believing that all else flows from this font), so when one partner quits believing the right things, we now have a major relationship crisis. It compounds the problem that the lifelong Christian cannot possibly conceive of how or why the deconverted spouse would ever stop believing in a religion which has been their frame of reference for everything since the time they were old enough to tie their own shoes. This inability to empathize becomes a source of constant misunderstanding so that communication breaks down every time conversation gets even a little bit deep.
I suspect this happens a lot more now than it used to. Years ago, our world was “smaller” so that you mainly interacted with the people of your own local community. This effectively insulated you from the myriad alternative worldviews and belief systems “out there” in the world. Back then it was a lot easier to spend your whole life in one way of thinking because everyone else around you probably thought the same way about the most important life questions. But today we live in an increasingly globalized world, with opposite cultures connecting to each other wirelessly, mixing and mingling so that you can easily get exposure to people who see the world very differently from you. Thanks to the built-in selectivity of social networking, you can still choose to shut unwanted voices out if you must, but it takes some effort. We also live in an information age in which our knowledge base grows daily and is accessible at the click of a button. With that kind of regular exposure to new ideas and world-shifting paradigms it’s inevitable that some people will change their minds about really important, big-picture issues. And that’s a good thing. Growth is good because everything that’s alive grows. When something stops growing, it’s beginning to die. The only problem here is that a healthy marriage depends on both partners growing together in the same general direction. If one grows out of something which the other sees no need to “grow out of,” now we’ve got a problem.
I’ve seen this go several different ways now. Over the last three years, I’ve interacted with quite a few couples who navigated the treacherous waters of an “unequally yoked” marriage with varying levels of success. I’ve seen couples grow cold toward one another and go their separate ways and I’ve seen couples agree to disagree and get along just fine. I’ve even seen a few couples who transitioned together out of their religious worldview and their marriages are as strong and healthy now as they’ve ever been (incidentally, more often than not, they report a notable improvement in their sex life). I love being around those people because they give me hope. I’d like to believe that most marriages could make this work if they are willing to lay aside some of their differences and find common ground. Divorce always hurts, and I’ll never look back fondly at mine, even if in the end it was the only thing left for us to do. But I will continue to hope for better things for my friends in similar situations. It can work, if both spouses can manage to respect one another as equally responsible agents of their marriage’s success. It takes a lot of patience, a great deal of implicit respect, and some very open and honest conversation. I for one feel highly unqualified to tell anyone else how to successfully navigate this minefield of potential misunderstandings. But I have friends who are working hard at finding solutions and providing advice on how to best approach these emotionally-charged differences.
Sometimes there is no fix — that has to be said firmly. But more often than not, if there is a genuine mutual love and determination to make it work, these nine best practices can make the difference: 1. Never try to convert or de-convert your partner. This is the biggest red flag for tension and conflict and often leads to divorce. 2. Talk about your differences of belief as early as possible in the relationship. 3. Work out agreements for all shared practices, including churchgoing, parenting, and family religious identity, by defining your negotiables and non-negotiables. (This is one of the most important for practical purposes. Some things matter more than others, and many couples find out that some of the things that would have been huge sticking points don’t matter at all to the other person.) 4. Focus on shared values more than different beliefs. 5. Make personal respect non-negotiable, even as you question and challenge each other’s ideas. 6. Engage in and learn about each other’s worldviews — and that must be a two-way street. 7. Remember that the opinions of believers are not always the same as the doctrines of their churches, just as believers must remember that the opinions of nonbelievers are not always the same as those of prominent atheists. 8. Raise children with the freedom to choose their own religious or nonreligious identity. Expose them to many traditions, beliefs, and practices. 9. Support and protect each other from mistreatment or disrespect, especially by those who share your worldview, including extended family.
Dale McGowan (author of) has spent the last four years researching mismatched marriages in order to find out what has helped those who made it through these challenges successfully. I cannot tell you how eagerly I have anticipated this book, due out in August of this year. It is entitled, and if you or someone you love is working through a religiously mismatched marriage, I highly recommend you purchase this book in advance. It is the only book of its kind that I am aware of, and I wish it had been written four years earlier. In it, Dale will address some of the things that helped those whose marriages have held together. I didn’t get an advance copy or anything (ahem) but he was gracious enough to forward along a response to a question I had. I asked what advice he has gleaned for couples who find themselves in mismatched marriages and this is what he said:
In talking with friends of mine who have weathered this storm successfully thus far, their advice to me matches Dale’s “best practices” list very closely. Most emphasize a need for open communication and as much honesty as can be managed without hurting or insulting the other person. Wrestling with religious doubts can be an intensely private matter since you have to figure out for yourself what you believe without allowing others to unduly influence your ability to think for yourself. But if you keep it entirely to yourself, you are keeping a major part of who you are from your spouse and thus prevent him or her from ever wrestling with those issues for himself or herself. If I had my own deconversion to do over again, I would have expressed more of my own thoughts to my wife as I was working through them. I let my own fear of upsetting her shut me down, and that led to problems which greatly contributed to our undoing. It’s impossible to say whether more openness from me would have prevented our marriage’s demise. As Dale said above, sometimes there is no fix. Sometimes the ideologies of each person are just too divergent to sustain a healthy ongoing relationship. But you might as well give it all you’ve got and try to find a way to understand one another. Mutual respect and honest communication are your best weapons for this battle.
A Personal Word of Caution
Now I’m going to offer one caveat from my own experience and from my observations of several couples who have handled their differences better than I think I did. How best to handle being “unequally yoked” will depend largely on the personalities of the people involved. If you are the deconvert and you are a naturally pushy, arrogant type, then my strongest word to you is to chill out and realize that you’re only going to make things worse if you act like you know it all and your spouse is a nitwit. That’s a surefire way to mess things up. If you know you naturally lean in that direction, please do yourself and everyone else a favor and temper your own self-confidence and force yourself to listen to others, taking in their viewpoint so that maybe you’ll do a better job of communicating with them instead of lecturing them.
But sometimes the deconvert is just the opposite type. Sometimes when you’re the only person you know who has come to think the way you do, you are deeply unsure of yourself, and you almost wish you could shut off what you think entirely just so you can live in peace with your surrounding environment. You feel no need to impose your unbelief on those around you, and if anything you’re more likely to let others take advantage of your minority status. Perhaps you think being sacrificial and giving up who you’ve become is the more loving way to move forward. Well, I’ve got news for ya. It doesn’t really work that way. You can’t just shut off who you’re becoming; it’s not that easy. At some point, you’re going to have to start standing up for who you’ve become or else the relationship is going to tank anyway, because becoming a doormat is no solution—it only will make matters worse. If you live in a culture which privileges the still-Christian’s viewpoint, you will most likely find yourself and your own emotional and mental needs sidelined in order to maintain the status quo. This may seem at first like a fair concession to make because, hey, you two started out on a Christian foundation, right? Surely it makes sense to keep that going as long as you can, and to keep that as your mutual frame of reference for everything, right? No, that’s not really going to work as well as it sounds. In fact, it’s likely going to backfire and produce deep resentment in the person whose needs and changing identity are being squelched and forced back into the closet.
I don’t think I could put it better than my friend, Captain Cassidy, who blogs over at Roll to Disbelieve. She has an entire series on being “unequally yoked” and if you’ve got some time I’d recommend moseying on over there to check out what she’s got to say about this. For my purposes today, I want to leave you with her exhortation about standing up for who you are. I wish I had read this post back when I myself first deconverted. I would have approached a number of things so differently. Here’s what she has to say:
…a dominant faction does not willingly give up its power or peel back its own privilege…make no mistake: these marginalized and downtrodden people have to force progress to happen. If we wait until the dominant faction is damned well good and ready to give up its power and peel back its own privilege, we will be waiting a very, very long time. It takes being uppity and being absolutely positive of one thing and one thing only: that we are worthy of these same considerations…everybody deserves a home where they can feel safe and welcome. May I respectfully submit the following? A need that can only be fulfilled if one’s mate sacrifices some integral dignity and sense of self-respect is not a need that is legitimate or one that deserves fulfilling. There is simply nothing in a marriage that is worth sacrificing one’s dignity and self-respect. There is nothing anybody could ever want that should ever be achieved only on someone else’s reluctant back. There is nothing that could be asked legitimately that would require someone to live a lie or to deny some essential feature of his or her life or personality. If someone needs something like that, chances are that person needs to step back and really look at what is being demanded here. I refuse to believe that love–true love, real honest-to-goodness Buttercup-and-Westley love–would ever want to hurt its target. I refuse to believe that real love would ever be content making someone else live a lie or sacrifice so much of themselves just to make someone else happy… The house is for everybody, be that house our society or our personal homes. It shouldn’t just be one person’s personal playground at the exclusion and at the expense of the other people in the house. They get to have a house to relax in too. They get to have a house that feels like home to them too. They get a place where they can feel safe and welcome too. We all deserve that. And ex-Christians deserve that as well in their own personal homes.
Well said. I’ll leave you with that.
_______
For more Godless in Dixie, take The Godless Tour.This tutorial is going to cover how to set up Eclipse, IntelliJ and NetBeans for Java 9 which has been released.
1. Prerequisites
Java 9 is installed in your environment. You can download it from the official website or follow instructions from below tutorials to install it.
2. Set Up Eclipse For Java 9
2.1. Prerequisites
You need Oxygen (4.7 or above) Eclipse SDK.
Install Java 9 Support for Oxygen for Eclipse from Eclipse Marketplace.
The Eclipse Java™ 9 Support contains the following:
Ability to add JRE and JDK 9 as installed JRE.
Support for JavaSE-9 execution environment.
Ability to create Java and Plug-in projects that use a JRE or JDK 9.
Ability to compile modules that are part of a Java project.
2.2. Download and Install Eclipse
You can obtain an appropriate version of Eclipse Oxygen at the Eclipse download page and get it installed by simply extracting the compressed file.
Notice that if you install Java 9 and use it to run Eclipse, then you may get the following error when you start Eclipse:
To fix this error, you will need to specify the use of your Java 9 VM by adding the following lines after the –launcher.appendVmargs line to the eclipse.ini file.
-vm C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-9\bin\javaw.exe 1 2 - vm C : \ Program Files \ Java \ jdk - 9 \ bin \ javaw. exe
In addition, we will need to add the following vmargs to eclipse.ini:
--add-modules=ALL-SYSTEM 1 -- add - modules = ALL - SYSTEM
So, the eclipse.ini should contain the following lines:
--launcher.appendVmargs -vm C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-9\bin\javaw.exe -vmargs -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.8 --add-modules=ALL-SYSTEM 1 2 3 4 5 6 -- launcher. appendVmargs - vm C : \ Program Files \ Java \ jdk - 9 \ bin \ javaw. exe - vmargs - Dosgi. requiredJavaVersion = 1.8 -- add - modules = ALL - SYSTEM
2.3. Install Java 9 Support for Oxygen for Eclipse
As mentioned in above link, to install the Eclipse Java™ 9 Support, there are two possible ways:All eyes are on the Oct. 1 EMV liability shift deadline – but where does the U.S. really stand and what can the payments ecosystem expect to see over the course of the coming years? Stephanie Ericksen, VP of Global Risk Products at Visa Inc., sat down with MPD CEO Karen Webster to discuss Visa’s take on the lay of the EMV land.
KW: Give us your perspective on the EMV migration in the U.S. At this point in our migration – and compared to other countries around the world – how would you grade us – and why?
SE: We are really encouraged by what we’ve seen.
When you take into consideration the complexity of the U.S. ecosystem with more than 10,000 financial institutions and many millions of merchants locations, where we are at this point in time leading up to the liability shift date we are very much where we expected to be.
From a Visa perspective, as of the end of August we had roughly 142 million Visa chip cards in market, marking a huge growth compared to September of 2014, when we had about 20 million. Seeing the jump from 20 million chip cards this time last year to over 140 million chip cards in one year is a significant amount of progress. On the merchant enablement side, this time last year we had 55,000 merchant locations ready to take chip transactions – at the end of August 2015 we had over 300,000 merchants EMV chip ready. There will also be even more merchants turning on throughout September and October. So, not only is this a massive amount of progress over the last year, there’s a great deal of momentum that’s been built up heading into the month and years following the liability shift date (October 1st).
It is important to understand that this process takes time. From what we’ve seen from other markets around the world, we know that it takes a few years after the liability shift date to reach significant levels of adoption of chip cards being used at chip terminals. Based on experience from the Australia, Brazil and Canada and considering their implementations of EMV chip, it took about two to three years after the liability shift date to get to roughly 60 to 70 percent of their domestic payment volume being chip-on-chip. Ultimately it took nearly four to five years after the liability shift date for those same markets to reach greater than 90 percent chip-on-chip adoption.
KW: What has done better than you thought? What could have gone better – and why didn’t it?
SE: Over the last few months a lot of the major retailers have been really fine-tuning their acceptance process for implementing chip in their lanes, particularly at the multi-lane retailers. It has also been encouraging to see an increase in the training of the sales associates, who have proven to be very well-trained on how to process a chip transaction and very much aware of how to recognize a chip card during the transaction testing we have done. These associates are also capable of teaching consumers how to do a chip transaction, so it’s great to see that the retailers and merchants really understand how chip technology works once they turn it on and they’ve done a great job of training their staff, too.
There’s been similar progress on the issuing side, with many issuers being ahead of the game in terms of getting chip cards enabled, training cardholders and sending out improved materials that indicate to a cardholder what’s different about a chip card and how to use it at the point of sale (POS). Overall, there has been great industry collaboration when it comes to EMV education and awareness through the various websites and materials being distributed.
But what will still be a challenge is debit.
The U.S. certainly has a complex debit environment, so it’s no surprise that debit is something that’s taken a little bit longer to get up and running. However, there’s been some great momentum in debit chip card issuance over the last several months as well as debit enablement via the Common AID acceptance at merchant locations. While it was a bit slow in the earlier days of the EMV migration journey, we’ve seen much progress in recent months.
KW: Everywhere in the world that there has been the shift to EMV, it has taken years. Some say that it might take the better part of the next decade to make the total switch to chip cards in the U.S. How do you see the next 5 to 7 years evolving? What will Visa be focused on to continue the momentum and why?
SE: Visa is doing a lot to educate the key stakeholders. Our goal is to make sure consumers, merchants – and small business merchants in particular – as well as the broader industry as a whole are well aware of how the migration is going.
Everyone who has been discussing chip within the industry is well aware that security is a multi-layered approach and that there is also a need to go beyond EMV chip to end-to-end encryption, tokenization, sharing data across the ecosystem and investing in predictive analytics fraud scoring models to help prevent, detect and drive down fraud in all channels. Those are things we have and will continue to educate people about, because chip is not a silver bullet. While we’ve seen tremendous progress with respect to EMV, and expect that to continue, we know that we still need to invest and proliferate other technologies, particularly in other channels.
[bctt tweet=”Payments security is a multi-layered approach, @VisaNews explains why EMV chip is not a silver bullet”]
So, over the course of the next few years I expect to see the ecosystem continuing the momentum of chip as well as more contactless enablement. Many of the terminals that are going out now are accepting not only EMV contact chip cards but also contactless, whether it’s for mobile acceptance or also potentially for contactless cards.
Some issuers are talking about getting through this first wave of card issuance and then potentially looking at dual interface and contactless enabled cards – in addition to EMV – for increased speed and convenience. This would allow consumers and retailers and issuers all to take advantage of some of the mobile acceptance infrastructure that’s beginning to grow. Continued development on the acceptance side of new technologies, particularly for mobile, is something we can |
seating will bring some much needed green to the six corners intersection. Free wifi will also be provided to the community, to make this a productive space as well.
What makes this a green People Spot?
Inspired by the successful Parklet initiative in San Francisco, green People Spots include an emphasis on plant life in order to recreate the environment of an actual park. This serves two main purposes. It beautifies our neighborhood while simultaneously providing a means of recycling storm water. When it rains, water falling onto a hardscape (say, asphalt) funnels through the city's drainpipes and out of Chicago entirely. But when asphalt is replaced with greenery, the water can be absorbed and maintained within our environment, making it's way back to our main water source of Lake Michigan.
We've done our homework!
Moss Design, the firm behind Chicago's first People Spot in Andersonville last year, created the design for the Wicker Park People Spot. They also have extensive experience working with the City of Chicago CDOT to ensure that our project has all the necessary permits. With the support of The Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce on our side and partial funding from WPB Special Service Area #33, we've also rallied support from neighbors, adjacent businesses, and residents in the area to ensure that this project will be executed successfully once our funding goals are reached.
We are also very excited to announce that our project has been selected to Seed Chicago, the City of Chicago's new curated Kickstarter page, created to support projects that focus on job creation and growth in Chicago's neighborhoods. Further, if you help us reach our goal, Miller Coors will provide matching funds for up to $5,000 to help provide additional funding that will bring this project to fruition.
This Project Belongs to our Neighborhood
Though the crew at Dimo's is very excited to sponsor and care for this People Spot, it truly belongs to the people of Wicker Park. This space is an investment in our neighborhood, for our community, and toward a more sustainable Chicago. It's a symbol for how we can take back our space and reinvigorate our land. And in the longterm, it's a small but prolific step towards a greener urban landscape.
How will we spend the money?
When our project is funded, we will use the money we've raised to purchase necessary materials to build the People Spot. The picture above illustrates an example of steel platform that will transform the street into a safe, sturdy and easy to disassemble seating area and green space. The planters, benches and wall will all be crafted with care, using reclaimed materials with the help of Chicago non-profit, The Rebuilding Exchange. The funding will also subsidize the cost of securing our craftsmen, gardeners, and artists who will bring our design to fruition.
Want to know more about Dimo's Pizza?
Dimo's Pizza is a local pizza restaurant looking to shake up traditional small business philosophy. Our product offerings are unconventional, and our business practices are innovative. Following a servant leadership approach, we empower our employees to grow, learn, and help us build our company from the dough up. Our structure is powered by the triple bottom line: people, the planet and profit, and we do all that we can to maintain a balance of these three initiatives in our day to day practices. Our second location in Wicker Park will also be home to our rooftop garden which helps supplement fresh ingredients on our pizzas and salads.
Have questions?
We have answers! As part of our continued efforts to maintain an open dialogue with our community, supporters, crustomers, and neighbors, we're always available to chat. Please feel free to send us your questions or set up a time to talk with our team in person via email at sixcorners@dimospizza.com.Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence.
This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.Ahead of the release of SPECTRE this autumn, the Bond Reloaded series takes a weekly look back at each film in the iconic James Bond franchise. This week, Timothy Dalton continues his tenure as Bond takes on the war on drugs in the shockingly violent Licence to Kill.
In his first film as James Bond, Timothy Dalton took the character that had become campy under Roger Moore and gave him the darker edge that creator Ian Fleming initially wrote. For his second outing, Licence to Kill, Dalton and director John Glen went one step forward and had Bond go rogue in the dark, murky world of the drug trade, fuelled by fiery personal issues.
Cost issues led the Bond crew to move away from London and Pinewood in order to shoot Licence to Kill on location in Mexico. Capitalising on Dalton’s gritty turn as the British super spy, writing duo Richard Maibaum and Michael G Wilson, began working on a darker entry in the series. The finished film would become the first in the franchise to earn a 15 certificate from the BBFC, having been cut from a version that would have scored a restrictive 18 rating.
Originally titled Licence Revoked in line with the central storyline before undergoing a change with the US market in mind, Licence to Kill marked a major shift towards darkness in Bond’s tone almost two decades before Daniel Craig made it cool with Casino Royale.
Say hello to Bond’s little friend
In the first unusual Bond move, the opening sequence of Licence to Kill does bear relevance to the rest of the film. Felix Leiter (David Hedison, returning for the first time since Live and Let Die) interrupts his wedding for a chance at capturing ruthless drug lord Sanchez (Robert Davi). They make it in the nick of time, as the credits begin. Soon after the film proper kicks into gear, Leiter is maimed and his wife murdered by Sanchez, sending Bond on a revenge mission with ex-CIA agent Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) at his side. M (Robert Brown) is not happy with Bond’s emotionally-charged mission and revokes his 00 status.
Licence to Kill immediately sets itself apart from other Bond films as a result of its highly personal edge. The driving force of the narrative is not a mission from M or a criminal investigation – it’s a personal vendetta as Bond attempts to avenge the brutal shark attack on Felix Leiter and the murder of his wife, which echoed Bond’s own marital tragedy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This gives the story a fresh and potent impetus, powered by Dalton’s intense, passionate performance, delivered with few words.
"Nobody saw you come in, so nobody has to see you go out."
Equally strong is Robert Davi as Scarface-esque villain Sanchez, who thinks nothing of requesting a man’s heart be torn from him or brutally gunning down his own henchman in a fit of frustration. Davi is tremendous, wandering through the film looking like a psychotic Derek Zoolander. He exudes menace and has the air of a man completely in control of his situation. Benicio del Toro, in one of his earliest screen roles, provides ample support as Sanchez’s brutal young buck of a henchman.
Considering its villain’s remarkable bloodlust, it’s only natural that Licence to Kill features rather more bloodletting than its franchise predecessors. Whether it’s exploding heads inside a diving chamber or bodies being minced by industrial shredders, there’s very little held back on the violence. Crucially, though, none of it ever feels gratuitous – merely an organic part of an unusually dark Bond story.
The harder incarnation of Bond fits Dalton like a glove, particularly in the sense that it utilises his snarling intensity rather than forcing him to deliver ill-fitting quips. Dalton’s Bond chooses his words very carefully indeed and prefers to let others do all of the talking, which is just how the character should be in a darker story with personal stakes like this one. Dalton is convincing as a man fighting to avenge his friend and it’s baffling that he never seems to get the credit he deserves – even from Bond devotees.
Senorita in the shade
For all of its positives, Licence to Kill is a film that focuses on macho posturing over its female characters. Talisa Soto, as Sanchez’s girlfriend, is merely a cipher to let Bond into places he shouldn’t be whilst occasionally being mentally and physically abused by her partner. She’s a depressingly underused character who exists almost solely to fall into Bond’s arms whenever there’s a lull in the narrative momentum.
Thankfully, there’s Carey Lowell faring slightly better. She arrives on the scene as a badass, besting Bond in a thrilling bar fight against Sanchez’s henchmen with the help of an impressive shotgun. It’s not all plain sailing, as the character does have a brief fumble with Bond before resuming her duties as an actual representation of a human being. Lowell’s performance is solid throughout, spunky and defiant rather than a glorified scream queen.
"I’ll do anything for a woman with a knife."
In fact, Lowell’s character really gets her moment in the sun as part of Licence to Kill’s all-action climax, set on a treacherous mountain road. The entire sequence is a marvel of stunt work, taking in terrific vehicular mayhem, a variety of different weapons and a hugely satisfying emotional pay-off for Bond’s revenge arc. The carnage on show in the sequence is genuinely jaw-dropping and remains among the best action in Bond history even given the technological advances that would occur after 1989. Given that the mountain road on which the crew filmed these scenes was also supposedly haunted, it’s easy to see where the palpable sense of tension comes from – everyone involved was terrified.
The freedom of the 15 rating in terms of violence allows all of the action sequences in Licence to Kill to push the boundaries far more than usual. There’s never a sense that the film is holding back in order to snare a family audience, with violent scenes that would be commonplace in a mainstream blockbuster nowadays, but then were a big stretch on the format.
More than just about any of the 80s Bond films, Licence to Kill is a tremendous action movie and one that sees Bond survive on the strength of his wits and ability as a top secret agent. Aspects of this strategy would continue into the Brosnan films six years later, but Dalton was a singular lead actor and Licence to Kill was a taste of what a longer reign with him at the top of the franchise could have yielded for Bond.
Rejuvenating the franchise?
Licence to Kill debuted in June 1989 to decent box office takings on this side of the Atlantic, particularly given the limitations imposed on cinemagoers by the 15 certificate. However, the film died on its arse with the crucial American audience and, adjusted for inflation, it’s still the least successful Bond film of all time in that market. Admittedly, the box office competition from the likes of Batman, Indiana Jones and Lethal Weapon 2 was stiff, but the yield was still a disappointing one for Eon.
Reviews were broadly rather positive, although there was a noticeable sense of skepticism around the darker tone. For every review that, like Derek Malcolm’s in The Guardian, praised the “harder edge” of the film, there was one like Hilary Mantel’s in The Spectator that dismissed Licence to Kill as “weary and repetitive”. If anything, reviews have become more negative over time, with the film regularly landing near the bottom spot on ranked Bond lists online. In 2006, Entertainment Weekly even listed it as the second worst of all of the released Bond films.
"You took the words right out of my mouth."
Despite its lack of critical esteem, Licence to Kill certainly stands out amongst the campy Bond films that made up most of the 1980s releases. The action is stellar, the performances strong and the villain genuinely memorable as a slimy piece of work. The female characters aren’t up to much and there are moments of narrative sag, but the film is mostly a tight action thriller with a refreshing and devastating mean streak.
Next time, Bond returns after a six year hiatus in the form of new lead Pierce Brosnan for GoldenEye.
What do you think of Licence to Kill? Does the harder edge suit Bond? Let me know in the comments section.
You can read my look back at The Living Daylights here and find other Bond Reloaded articles here.McCutchen gives his batting gloves to adorable fans
Carl Jung once wrote in "The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man:"
"The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night..."
If you ever wanted to see what exactly that inner sanctum looks like, all you need to do is watch these two young Pirates fans at the end of the Pirates' 5-2 victory against the Padres on Saturday. After cheering for Andrew McCutchen all game, the All-Star center fielder rewarded them with his batting gloves/magical totems of Major League success, overloading their little minds with a burst of happiness-inducing endorphins in the process.
If a large smile didn't creep across your face as the camera reveals the boy on the left shouting, "I love you!" while pumping his fist, well, sir or madam, it's time to go see a doctor because you have no heart.
UPDATE: This now gets all the better as the boys' father, Roger McCreary, has first-person video of McCutchen's fist bump. And some pretty great "Raise the Jolly Roger" celebrating, too.
Game time... And a meeting with Andrew McCutchen Posted by Roger McCreary on Sunday, May 31, 2015
Michael Clair writes about baseball for Cut4. He believes stirrup socks are an integral part of every formal outfit and Adam Dunn's pitching performance was baseball's greatest moment.Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER - Canada inched closer to a much-anticipated return to peacekeeping on Wednesday as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered the UN badly needed soldiers, equipment and a fresh feminist perspective on peace missions.
But while UN officials were effusive in their praise for Canada's commitments and leadership, two key questions remained: When and where will Canadian peacekeepers be deployed?
Trudeau unveiled the package of measures and commitments during an address to hundreds of foreign dignitaries and military officials on the second day of a major peacekeeping summit hosted by Canada.
The package represented Canada's most tangible step back into peacekeeping since the Liberals promised last year to provide up to 600 troops and 150 police officers to the UN.
Canada is specifically offering up to six helicopters and two transport aircraft, plus their associated pilots and support personnel, as well as a 200-strong quick reaction force to the UN.
It has also pledged $21 million to help double the number of women deployed on peacekeeping operations around the world, which Trudeau emphasized as critical to bringing peace and stability to conflict-ridden areas.
"Women bring a unique and valuable perspective to conflict resolution," Trudeau said.
"They look beyond the interests of warring parties, bring the wider community to the table and focus on root causes. Including women and girls in peace operations is a smart, practical pathway to lasting peace."
Canada is also planning to make dozens of trainers available to the UN and other countries to help professionalize militaries from developing countries that are often involved in peacekeeping.
Some of those trainers will be deployed to UN centres in Africa, such as Kenya, Ghana and Uganda. But officials say up to 50 could also be sent to other countries and may even deploy on missions with their students.
"Six-hundred Canadian armed forces personnel is significant for Canada as a commitment, but let's remember that there are close to 100,000 peacekeepers deployed around the world," Trudeau said.
"So we have to focus on how Canada can best help. What we will do is step up and make the contributions we are uniquely able to provide."
The government's plan was warmly welcomed by the UN's top peacekeeping official, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, who asserted that the values that guide peacekeeping are the same espoused by "this great nation of Canada."
"And with Canada on our side, we feel stronger," Lacroix said. "We feel more empowered to confront the many challenges that peacekeeping is facing."
Yet when it came to timelines and specific locations, especially for the deployment of Canadian troops and military equipment, Trudeau remained vague.
That is because Canada has offered them without dictating when and where they must be used, which is what the UN has asked countries to start doing so it has flexibility in filling critical gaps in different missions.
Canada is looking at basing a transport plane in Entebbe, Uganda, that will help ferry UN personnel, equipment and supplies for seven different peacekeeping missions.
"They are exactly consistent with the critical needs that we have in terms of capability, but also the flexibility in which these offers have been made," Lacroix said of Canada's pledges.
But government officials told reporters on background that Canada and the UN have only just started what could be six to nine months of discussions about when and where any of those capabilities will be deployed.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said the discussions aren't just about the UN finding the right fit for Canada's troops and equipment, but also making sure they have the right support and rules of engagement.
"They'll do that proper assessment," Sajjan said of Canadian military officials during a news conference marking the end of the summit.
"I can't put a timeline to that, but one thing is sure: we're going to move as rapidly as possible to make sure when we provide those resources, it's going to have the impact the (UN) needs."
The lack of detail nonetheless sparked criticism from some observers and foreign dignitaries, who questioned why Canada was only now starting discussions with the UN about where to send military equipment.
They noted, for example, that the UN has told member states for years that it needs helicopters, while the number of Canadian peacekeepers in the field reached a new low last month.
Canada had 62 military personnel and police officers deployed on different missions in October, which was down from 68 in September and 112 in August 2016.
"The Vancouver conference provided an excellent opportunity for Canada to live up to (its) promise," Royal Military College professor Walter Dorn, one of Canada's top experts on peacekeeping, said in a statement.
"But Canada has not done so. The delaying and dithering continues."
Trudeau refused to confirm during a news conference shortly after his address whether the government was still interested in sending helicopters or troops to Mali, as has been widely expected since last year.
The prime minister also sidestepped questions about what level of risk the government is willing to accept when it comes to deciding on a mission, saying that would be only one factor taken into consideration.
"We will always look at the impact that we can have along with the risk profile," he said.
"What Canadians expect is that we will engage in ways that will make a positive difference around the world, and we will do so in a way that minimizes risks to Canadians."Police occupy Rio de Janeiro slums BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Police have occupied a group of adjacent favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the latest slum "pacification" aimed at driving out drug traffickers and improving security in the coastal city. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/police-occupy-rio-de-janeiro-slums-29638422.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article29638421.ece/5c9a8/AUTOCROP/h342/PANews%20BT_25482f17-8c54-4eb2-bee8-d5183c1169db_I1.jpg
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Police have occupied a group of adjacent favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the latest slum "pacification" aimed at driving out drug traffickers and improving security in the coastal city.
Colonel Luis Castro Menezes, commander of the military police in Rio, says not a single shot was fired during the 50-minute operation today involving 590 police officers and 180 military troops in the Lins de Vasconcelos slums in the city's north.
The slums include 12 communities with about 15,000 inhabitants.
Authorities plan to install two permanent police stations in the slums as part of the city's "pacification" programme.
Television images showed the zone's commercial section opening today without incident and inhabitants going about their regular business.
With the two new stations, Rio now has 36 Police Pacification Units in its slums.
APA senior UN official warned Wednesday that the lack of available funds for the reconstruction of Gaza and the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas militants could lead to a renewal of hostilities in the coastal enclave.
During a Security Council briefing on the Middle East, Jeffery Feltman, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, also expressed “alarm” at reports of Hamas efforts to re-arm. He called the terror group’s test-firing of rockets, and its attempts to smuggle in materials for potential weapons use, “dangerous developments.”
Feltman said that the failure of world donors to deliver the billions of dollars in aid pledged to Gaza’s reconstruction, together with Israel’s withholding of PA tax revenues, was creating a dire humanitarian situation that threatened to reignite the conflict.
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The under-secretary-general told the council that the countries who pledged some $5.4 billion to rebuild Gaza four months ago in Cairo had “yet to fulfill the vast majority of their pledges.”
“This is frankly unacceptable, and cannot continue if we hope to avoid another escalation in Gaza,” he told the 15-member council. Feltman warned that the fiscal challenge was putting “an almost unbearable strain on an already highly fractious environment.”
Feltman also condemned Israel’s withholding of $200 million of PA tax revenues in retaliation for the Palestinian Authority’s move to join the International Criminal Court. As a result, he said, the PA had been forced to borrow money to pay salaries, an approach he called “neither sufficient nor sustainable.” He called for Israel to reverse its decision immediately.
During the briefing, Feltman described the situation in Gaza as “increasingly worrisome,” and pointed to an International Monetary Fund study that found that, in 2014, the Palestinian economy contracted for the first time since 2006.
Almost six months after the war that devastated the Strip and left 100,000 Gazans homeless, Feltman said that only 75,000 residents had been cleared to receive construction materials, of whom 47,000 had been able to obtain the materials.
Israel and Egypt controls the border crossings into Gaza — including the delivery of construction materials — and seek to prevent the influx of materials that can be used to manufacture rockets or to build tunnels into Israel.
Gazan terrorists used the tunnels for several attacks during the summer war, sometimes penetrating deep into Israeli territory. Five soldiers were killed in one attack on an IDF post near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and 11 soldiers died in all in the tunnel attacks.
Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in 2007 and is avowedly committed to destroying Israel, fired over 4,500 rockets at Israel during the 50-day conflict.
Unnamed security sources have said recently that Hamas is working to rebuild its tunnel infrastructure as well as rearm its depleted rocket arsenal.
In October, a Vanity Fair report confirmed rumors that before the summer’s war, Hamas was planning to insert hundreds of terrorists into Israel via underground tunnels, to kidnap and kill a large number of Israelis.
In a sign of growing impatience with the pace of reconstruction efforts, dozens of protesters forced their way into a UN office in Gaza on January 28, after the world body announced it was suspending an aid program to support home repairs and refugee shelter assistance.
Justin Jalil and AFP contributed to this report.About This Game
Dandelion ~ Wishes brought to you
Genre : Dating Simulation Game
Platform : PC/Online
Rated : E10+
Voice supported : Partly supported(Korean).
Release Date : 2012. 08. 27. in South Korea. * English version in December, 2012.
Story
Dandelion -Wishes brought to you- is a female-oriented game developed by Cheritz. The game was released in South Korea in August, 2012.The English translation for Dandelion was released on Nov, 2012. Dandelion is known as a unique dating simulation with a sensational storyline and charming characters. You will notice fantastic art work, beautiful music, and you will experience dramatic emotions throughout the game.( CAST : Mira Yoo, Kyungmyung Lim, Nakyoon Choi, Seongil Lee, Myungjun Kim, Kyungtae Lee, Nayoung Kim, Minjae Gang etc. )Heejung Kim moved out from her mom's house, who is obsessed with her education. Heejung tries to find her real dream life. Having the impression that everything would go well, she has been living a life obsessed with grades.Majoring in business administration, average language skills, not that popular, decent school grades.The only thing she is interested in is the Art Club.As graduation approaches, she starts to worry about her future...One day, Heejung wakes up to animal sounds.....?After she finds these mysterious animals her story begins....THE first bus equipped with free Wi-Fi for commuters has been unveiled as part of a 12 month trial.
Using 3G technology, the Wi-Fi can reach download speeds of up to 1.7mbs (megabytes per second).
The cost of the service will be covered by advertising and commercial sponsorships of each bus and tram.
The entire tram fleet, and an additional 19 buses, will have Wi-Fi on board by January.
Transport Services Minister Chloe Fox announced the trial ahead of the rollout of the new smart card ticketing system next month. The trial will target 18-24 year-olds who make up almost half of Adelaide Metro commuters.
"These initiatives are about providing our commuters with a better public transport system," Ms Fox said.
"Many of these commuters are students, so by providing free Wi-Fi they will be able to catch up on study and download data at no cost to them.
"For other commuters, it will provide the perfect opportunity to catch up on the latest news or check emails, all before they get to work or reach their destination."
Ms Fox said Wi-Fi would be rolled out across the entire Adelaide Metro fleet, including on trains, if the trial was successful.
Originally published as Free Wi-Fi trial on Adelaide busPresident Trump took a break from his “working vacation” Saturday by surprising a handful of wedding guests at Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey.
Dressed in golf attire and a “Make America Great Again” hat, Trump asked, “Everyone having a good time?” while taking a moment to smile for a selfie with a supporter, before walking back to a golf cart at his Bedminster resort.
TRUMP SET TO EMBARK ON FIRST VACATION SINCE INAUGURATION
Trump has been known to “crash” weddings before. In June, the president surprised newlyweds at his New Jersey club, reportedly giving the bride a “hug and a kiss.”
The president is currently taking a 17-day “working” vacation at his Bedminster country club while the West Wing undergoes ventilation renovations, a trip away from the White House that the president insisted on Twitter is “not a vacation.”
A White House official told Fox News that Trump will be having meetings with new Chief of Staff John Kelly, White House advisers and lawmakers during his vacation throughout the next two weeks.
Fox News' Wes Barrett contributed to this report.The politics over the presence of Rohingyas — a persecuted Muslim ethnic group from Myanmar — in Jammu and Kashmir is heating up, as the National Conference and other regional parties have asked the BJP to oust this ethnic minority from Jammu division.
The BJP MLAs from Jammu division were the first to rake up the issue of Rohingyas and Bangladeshi migrants in the recently held budget session of the J&K assembly. But the state government said that the issue of Rohingyas was a “humanitarian one” and it was not “appropriate” for the government to expel them from the state.
On Sunday, the principle opposition party in Jammu and Kashmir, National Conference, lashed out at BJP for hoodwinking public opinion over the issue of Rohingya and Bangladeshis migrants in Jammu, saying instead of acting against the illegal settlers, its leaders were playing to the galleries to hog the headlines.
“Who is stopping BJP led NDA at the Centre and PDP-BJP Government in Jammu and Kashmir to tackle Rohingyas and Bangladeshis”, National Conference spokesperson, Madan Mantoo asked, adding that his party has many times sought deportation of the illegal settlers as per Foreigners Act from Jammu and Kashmir. “It is a deliberate attempt to vitiate the atmosphere in the state.”
The Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) recently put hoardings across the city threatening the Rohingya and Bangladeshis migrants to immediately leave the Jammu or face the consequences.
JKNPP chairman, Harshdev Singh, told Firstpost last week that “if the state government does not throw them out, we will do that.” The hoardings — which came up in and around Jammu city, asking Rohingya and Bangladeshi Muslims to leave the area — said, “let us all Jammuities unite to save History, Culture and Identity of Dogras”.
Rohingyas were first denied citizenship in 1982 by General Ne Win’s government in the erstwhile Burma. Since then, this Muslim minority group (in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar) largely lives in the troubled state of Rakhine. In 2012 riots, more than 735,000 Rohingyas were forced to flee from Burma to live in ghettos and refugee camps in neighbouring countries, including India. New Delhi had allowed more than 25,000 Rohingya Muslims to settle in different parts of the country in camps.
Rightwing groups like Shiv Sena too expressed deep concern over the increasing number of population of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis in Jammu, asking them to leave the city. Dimpy Kohli, state president of Shiv Sena, made an appeal to people of Jammu, especially Hindus, to “wake up” and “unite” to thrown the migrants out of the Jammu.
The Jammu and Kashmir government recently said that more than 1,200 Rohingya families, comprising of 6,000 people, have been living in different parts of Jammu for the last six years. They are registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and also with the Union Home Ministry. But now, they are at the crossroads of a fierce political debate raging in this winter capital, whether they should be allowed, at all, to live in the state.
Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti recently stated that 5,743 Burmese (Rohingyas) are staying in the state and no instance of radicalisation has been reported among them so far. “No Rohingya has been found involved in militancy-related incidents. However, 17 FIRs have been registered against 38 Rohingyas for various offences,” Mehbooba, who holds the charge of the Home Department also, had said in a written reply to a question of BJP MLA Sat Sharma in the Legislative Assembly.
Now the opposition parties are bracing up for a showdown with Mehbooba Mufti government over settling Rohingya Muslims in Jammu division. Leading the charge is National Conference which has challenged the government to act against the Rohingya and Bangladeshis from Jammu.
Almost all political groups, expect PDP and BJP, and including Congress, have been demanding the expulsion of both Bangladeshis and Rohingyas. The past few days have also witnessed demonstrations in Jammu over the issue.
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.Hennig Inc. and its sister company, Advanced Machine & Engineering Co. (AME) are expanding multiple facilities in a multimillion-dollar effort that is expected to add as many as 100 jobs to the Rockford, Illinois, area. The expansion involves three facilities between Hennig’s location in Machesney Park and AME’s location in Rockford.
Hennig is adding a total of 28,000 square feet of manufacturing space onto its existing buildings to accommodate increased customer demand and to grow business. AME’s expansion will increase capacity for several of its product lines including Amrok workholding products and Amsaw sawing systems.
“The expansion will not only increase our top line revenue and overall profitability, but more importantly, it will also allow us to grow our market share in our backup power generation business (Genset) that we started 10 years ago,” says AME/Hennig president and CEO Dietmar Goellner. “Within the next two years, we plan to add as many as 100 employees once the construction is complete: 50 in Rockford and 50 in Machesney Park.”
All three expansions are expected to be complete by June 2018.
Hennig designs and manufactures machine protection and coolant/chip management systems. AME manufactures machine tool components and metalcutting machines.
Both companies have invested heavily in new equipment to place in the new additions. Hennig acquired two large fiver laser cutting machines and a large press brake, while AME acquired its second large Toyoda HMC with complete automation for its workholding manufacturing.Fritzing is an open-source hardware initiative that makes electronics accessible as a creative material for anyone. We offer a software tool, a community website and services in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, fostering a creative ecosystem that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and layout and manufacture professional pcbs.
Download and Start
Download our latest version 0.9.3b released on June 2, 2016 and start right away.
Produce your own board
With Fritzing Fab you can easily and inexpensively turn your circuit into a real, custom-made PCB. Try it out now!
Participate
Fritzing can only act as a creative platform if many people are using it as a means of sharing and learning. Let us know how it fits your needs and how it doesn't, show it to your friends, and share your projects..: The Greatest Speech Against the Special Edition was from George Lucas
In 1988, the American motion picture industry went through a legal upheaval that went all the way to Congress. Ted Turner had purchased the rights to studio libraries, such as MGM and RKO, and was releasing classic films in colourized versions, to surprising success. Many of the directors of these films were still alive and protested this bastardization--but alas, they had no legal case. This inspired Hollywood to go to Washington. Directors like Steven Spielberg, James Stewart, Woody Allen, John Huston and George Lucas testified before Congress in order to enact legislation that would protect artists from having their work defaced as well as ensuring the public had access to classic films--their cultural heritage--in the original form. This was sought through entering the Berne Convention for the issue of Moral Rights, a law which exists in many European countries. The United States did eventually recognize the Berne treaty, but this wasn't extended to motion pictures because of their complex and collaborative nature. Hollywood had failed. Which is why George Lucas today gets away with altering the Star Wars films and suppressing their original forms--there was no law passed that would have stopped people like him.
His younger self, however, fought against the very things his future self would do, not even a decade later. In 1988, Lucas issued a statement before Congress. In it, he gives a very heartfelt and passionate speech about the importance of cinematic preservation, with a level of verve and anger that the reserved Lucas could have only found within himself through a prepared statement. He rails on copyright owners for distorting and altering films, and he highlights, more than once, that films belong to the public. Copyright owners are merely custodians, he argues, and it is to the public that cinematic heritage belongs. He urges Congress to enact law in order to protect American cultural heritage and preserve films as they were.
In August of this year, I wrote a lengthy article on the dearth of American film preservation law--I should have just let George Lucas write it!
He also offers an eerily prophetic warning: that technologies were on their way that would allow copyright owners to insert younger actors, alter the music and colour, and change scenes to suit the philosophic tastes of the moment, as well as making new digital negatives at the expense of the original version materials. In short, everything that Lucas would later do with the Special Editions, from the new musical sequence in Jedi, youthful Hayden Christensen replacing old Sebastian Shaw in the same film, Greedo shooting first out of political correctness, to the totally different colour scheme implemented in 2004. It also prefigures making the new Special Edition negative by cutting up the original negative, and then not releasing the original version except for the Laserdisc master from 1993. He saw all of this coming.
Other filmmakers offered compelling witness to Congress as well. "I do know this," stated screenwriter Bo Goldman. "I want my children and their children to see my movies the way they were written. When the Indian finally speaks in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', I want him to say 'Juicy Fruit' and not 'diet bubble gum.' On the long shot of the ward, I want to see the old hallucinator dancing in the back, and on the pan I don't want it to stop before it reaches the poor, lobotomized soul behind the cage." He continued: "Remember the first time you went with your parents to 'Snow White', with your girl to 'Singing in the Rain,' with your |
23, 2017
https://twitter.com/josh_burlingame/status/844686150837157890
https://twitter.com/SharonMcCutchan/status/845036839174098944
Chelsea Clinton Blames Diabetes On Climate Change…
So it’s not diet and heredity? Gotta love Chelsea, always good for a little bit of crazy. — Jeffrey D. Dickson (@jddickson) March 23, 2017
https://twitter.com/ShaneAParent/status/845093296267575296
One Twitter user wondered: If warm weather causes diabetes, why isn’t everyone in the tropics diabetic?
https://twitter.com/TomCordina/status/845129897831911424
How fat do you have to be to blame it on the weather? https://t.co/0mHpvxOmH5 — Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 23, 2017
Some wondered why Chelsea didn’t just blame the Russians for the global rise in diabetes.“The End of (Monetary) History”
Erinç Yeldan
As we are about to wrap up 2014, it may prove worthwhile to celebrate the 70th anniversary of one of the most innovative and exciting episodes of homo economicus: The Bretton Woods Monetary Conference. Convened in 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, the conference established the World Bank and the IMF (later referred to as the “Bretton Woods Institutions”) and set the gold standard at $35.00 an ounce with fixed rates of exchange to the U.S. dollar.
Based on John Maynard Keynes’s famous dictum, “let finance be a national matter,” and on the productivity advances of Fordist technology and institutional structures, the global economy expanded at a fast rate over the postwar era, from 1950 to the mid-1970s. Per capita global output increased by 2.9% per year over this period, which later came to be referred to as the “Golden Age of capitalism.” (In contrast, the average rate of per capita growth over the whole century has been estimated at 1.6%.)
The conditions that created the Golden Age were exhausted by the late 1960s, however, as industrial profit rates started to decline in the United States and continental Europe due to increased competition, particularly from the Asian “tigers” or “dragons” (Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). In the meantime, Western banks were severely constrained in their ability to recycle the massive petro-dollar funds and the domestic savings of the newly emerging baby-boomer generation. Trumpets for the “end financial repression” intensified with the so-called McKinnon-Shaw-Fama hypotheses of financial deregulation and efficient markets. A global process of financialization was commenced, lifting its logic of short-termism, liquidity, flexibility, and immense capital mobility over objectives of long-term industrialization, sustainable development, and poverty alleviation with social-welfare driven states.
A number of researchers (e.g., Acemoglu 2009; Stiglitz 2011; Epstein 2005) and a series of reports set from UNCTAD had long warned against the dangers of excessive financialization and deregulation.
Under the new financialized capitalism, loanable funds are increasingly diverted away from the real sphere of the economic activity and towards speculative finance. The global economy has grown too slowly and allocated too small a portion of its scarce savings into physical fixed investments that would enhance employment and generate incomes for the working poor. An ever-increasing portion of global profits are now generated from speculative finance, rather than productive activities. According to ILO’s estimates in the World of Labor Reports, financial profits currently constitute almost 50% of aggregate profits. This ratio was only a quarter in the early 1980s. As accumulation patterns diverged away from industry towards speculative finance, employment faltered and the global economy entered a phase of “casino capitalism” with international productivity gaps being maintained due to structurally persistent differences in physical infrastructure and human capital.
We know where this story led. As the speculative bubbles of finance erupted in 2008, a real-sector crisis developed that would lead to what has been called the Great Recession. Output declined in 2009, for the world as a whole, for the first time since the 1930 crash. Some 20 million people were added to the reserve army of the unemployed, bringing the total to above 200 million, or 7% of the global labor force.
The main policy intervention in response to the crisis—monetary expansion—was again based on the conventional recipes of the Bretton Woods system. Under a policy referred to for public relations reasons by the esoteric name of “quantitative easing,” the U.S. Federal Reserve (the “Fed”) amassed a total of $3 trillion worth of assets from the finance markets. This equaled roughly 20% of U.S. GDP. In turn, interest rates fell all around the globe to virtually zero; yet unemployment barely fell to the pre-recession levels despite the fact that labor-force participation rate was reduced sharply to its 1970s level
These large monetary interventions barely made a dent in the real sector, with GDP in U.S. and elsewhere remaining stagnant throughout the Great Recession. The figure below summarizes these developments.
Source: US. Bureau of Economic Analysis
The figure illustrates, vividly, the most decisive example of the “end of history”—monetary history, that is. The dramatic expansion of the monetary base and the equally dramatic collapse of interest rates are clear. Everything works in textbook fashion up to that point. But the effect in terms of real output is overwhelmed by the conditions of the Great Recession. In the absence of an effective real rise of investment demand, the expansion of monetary base and the collapse of the interest rates have had a negligible effect on GDP. That means that the instruments of monetary policy are virtually powerless.
What a nightmare for a central banker!
References
Acemoglu, D. (2009) “The Crisis of 2008: Structural Lessons for and from Economics” CEPR Policy Insight No 28, London: CEPR
Epstein, G. (ed) (2005) Financialization and the World Economy, Edward Elgar Press.
Stiglitz, J. (2011) “Rethinking Macroeconomics: What failed, and how the repair it” Journal of European Economic Association 9(4): 591-645.
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Triple Crisis is published byIllustration by Oliver Munday for TIME
I hate meetings like this!" illinois Congressman Joe Walsh shouted in frustration. A small-business man named Ted Kozlowski, a defense contractor, was explaining how he'd had to lay off nearly half his workforce because funding for one of his products, a machine-gun cradle, had been mysteriously suspended in February. "It's ridiculous what Washington is doing to you," Walsh went on to say. "They change the rules of the road every six months." A small problem here, though: Walsh, one of the more flagrant members of the Tea Party caucus, lives at ground zero of the congressional mess. He has proudly opposed every attempt at a budget compromise that would clarify the status of Kozlowski's funding. He told me he would continue to vote against any deal that raises tax rates. If he is re-elected.
That could be a problem too. After he was elected in 2010, Walsh embraced the notion that he was a poster boy for the Tea Party, and there was a fair amount of truth to that: he had won a shocking victory over a Democratic incumbent in the Chicago suburbs, in the heart of blue-state Illinois. He proceeded to make a lot of noise, with an untoward candor that was less outrageous than that of another Tea Party poster child, Representative Allen West of Florida (who is also in trouble this year) but still offensive enough to women, homosexuals and Muslims to make national headlines. The question is, Will Walsh be a Tea Party exemplar of a different sort this year? If he and West and some other high-profile Tea Partyers lose, will the Republican Party take a moderating lesson from that--even if, as is likely, it retains control of the House?
The deck is certainly stacked against Walsh. His district has been redrawn by the heavily Democratic Illinois legislature. It now includes a significant minority population. And he has a formidable opponent: Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq-war veteran who lost both her legs when the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Walsh has continued to make a fool of himself during the campaign, at one point saying Duckworth wasn't a "true hero" because she talked about her service all the time and real heroes don't do that. He also warned that Muslim terrorists were in the district--he specified three towns--looking to kill Americans. He told me he was talking about a national problem, but there were several attacks on local Muslim sites in the days after he made his comments. "When you say radical things," Duckworth says, "radical things can happen."
Walsh does have a few advantages, though. He has become a superstar of super PACs in this race, four of which have put up ads supporting him, and together they are outspending Duckworth significantly. He's also a natural politician, fearless and gregarious, with the courage of his extreme convictions--and a few policy surprises. He told me, for example, that while he would oppose any budget deal that raises tax rates, he does support the complete elimination of such popular tax loopholes as the mortgage-interest and charity deductions. He has also favored cutting the Pentagon budget and wants an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan. "He's a very charismatic and appealing guy," Duckworth told me.If you’re confused about salt, I’m not surprised. There’s been a steady back-and-forth on claims that reducing dietary sodium (which represents 40 percent of the salt molecule) is crucial to our well-being, countered by claims that following this advice can sometimes be a health hazard.
While some studies have concluded that only people with hypertension on high-salt diets need to reduce salt intake, the overwhelming strength of scientific findings bolsters advice from major health organizations that most Americans should cut back on sodium for the sake of their health. Excess sodium is responsible for most cases of hypertension in Western societies, and hypertension is a leading risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure.
Because salt added to our foods by processors and restaurants, not that from our saltshakers, is the main source of sodium in our diets, protecting the health of the most vulnerable requires a society-wide reduction in sodium.
The recommended daily intake for healthy American adults — 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day, or the amount in about 1⅛ teaspoons of salt — will be reflected in the new nutrition facts label, scheduled to take effect, depending on the size of the companies, beginning in mid-2018 until January 2021. Currently, the average American consumes more than 3,400 milligrams a day, an amount often found in a single restaurant meal. A lunch of soup and a sandwich can easily add up to a day’s worth of sodium.I was hoping that I would be The One. My experience would be different. My hopes weren't high, but I still hoped. I was wrong to do so, and you should turn back before it's too late. The purchase itself was easy, but whomever is working in whatever warehouse you have needs to be fired. My box looked busted and there were remnants of sticks left on the front. The one important sticker that should have said "Glow In the Dark" looked as if someone tried to remove it and failed...miserably. There was a yellow stock sticker left on the box as well as the box being a little smushed. If you're going to have an item (that isn't in stock in ANY of your stores and you have to order online) then one would THINK that you would take better care it - and of your customers (by getting it IN STORE so I don't have to deal with ordering online and having this kind of debacle).
Read more"The AMC Javelin's got everything we look for in a car!"
--Richard Dreyfuss in 1968 car commercial
This week, when asked to pick a Secret Service codename, Mitt Romney settled on an inanimate object: Javelin. Mitt's aides insisted that the new moniker referred not to an Olympic projectile, but the '67 "Javelin" muscle-car manufactured by American Motors Corp. So, get it straight... the esteemed candidate from the Automaton Party didn't name himself after a tool. He named himself after a machine. Bravo.
Put aside the fact that Romney's alias evokes an auto industry he would have gladly let fail (sorta like if Rick Santorum chose the codename "Trojan Condom"). And, granted, a codename is just a codename. Yet I can't help but think it's always been a tale of two javelins for Willard Mitt; that the term's alternative connotations happen to capture the best and worst facets of Romney's candidacy.
Romney has thus far navigated the primary calendar by employing what one might call (and I will call) the "car approach." He's pitched himself as a vehicle to the Republican base -- a sterling, customized sedan, which voters in the Florida panhandle and rural Midwest can toss their ideologies into, and ride to victory over the president. Social values in the trunk; tax cuts in the back; and everyone hangs onto their hunting hats as they breathe in the new leather. Romney's swerved the direction he's been asked to swerve, and done so with perfect, power-steering. True, the MittMobile lacks an animating life force of its own, but who cares -- it's complete with front-seat customization, state-of-the-art-responsiveness, and handles like a dream!
So goes the sales pitch. And yet this relentless urge to pander -- to accommodate every passenger and market demographic -- has rendered Romney's product phony and awkward. We find him drawling about cheesy grits in Mississippi, like a demented Mr. Rogers doing a Mark Twain imitation; and his sons tweeting photos of him doing laundry all by himself (Check out dad working the bleach! Man of the people!). We all remember the famous Baha Men Fiasco of 2008, when Mitt posed for a picture with a few African-American kids, and abruptly shouted "Who let the dogs out! Hoo-hoohoo!"
But conservatives aren't just petrified that Mitt's a lifeless machine; they're petrified that he's a lifeless machine that's also a Transformer. Like the sedans, SUVs and trucks of the Michael Bay killer-robot movie franchise, Romney might rearrange his parts at any moment and wreak havoc upon right-wing values. (Compare the "Javelin" model to the hysterically similar 'Bumblebee' character from the films.) The only question is what type of Transformer the MittMobile is going to morph into -- Autobot? Decepticon? There's no telling! Only two things are certain to voters: first, that Romney will metamorphose into whatever shape he thinks we'll like at that moment, and second, that he's probably friends with the film's financiers.
Even if Romney can't divorce himself completely from the Transformer stigma before November, he can certainly do something. To elude the also-rans and beat Obama, he will, at some point, have to level with the American public on what he is, and what he's not.
And so I submit that Team Mittens got it backwards. Screw the AMC Javelin -- it's time for the real deal. The Olympic breed cuts straight to the candidate's core. It is straight-edged. Uninteresting. One-dimensional. A featureless instrument that is ruthlessly efficient at its purpose. So too with Romney. He is a deadly boring personality with no passionate ideology coloring his every decision. He campaigns in prose, and would govern like an encyclopedia. But he may well be exactly the type of dully competent, managerial technocrat to take on the country's unemployment and debt crises. Now that he's on his way to the nomination, Romney should set aside all the camouflage gear and embrace his inner Mittness. That doesn't mean he has to run with the Monopoly man on the ticket, but he does have to cease imitating something he's not.
I'm reminded of another iconic Olympian who followed a similar trajectory with great success. Bill Simmons writes in The Book of Basketball how Lakers great and recovering awkward-holic Kobe Bryant used to be chronically uncomfortable in his own skin. Having grown up in cushy parts of Italy and the more affluent suburbs of Philly, Kobe felt out of place in NBA locker rooms. He tried to be as funny as his teammate Shaquille O'Neal at press podiums; he tried to mimic Michael Jordan's charisma; he changed haircuts and swapped jersey numbers and cut hellaciously terrible rap albums. (Watch this, if you dare.) In Simmons's harsh words, he was a "contrived, unlikeable, socially awkward fraud of a human being." (Sound familiar?)
And then, a ray of inspiration: Kobe stopped trying to win everyone over. He dispensed with the peculiar, manufactured personalities, and simply played lethal basketball that made his team superior. Nowadays, nobody cares that Kobe's a surly, uninteresting creature. People fear and respect success.
The great paradox of Mitt Romney is that he has never tried being himself. If he finally stopped marketing, and targeting, and transforming, and pitching what he's selling, perhaps he would become compelling to us. People will tolerate dullness when unemployment's at 8%. They will not tolerate fraud.I know I went a bit mushroom crazy on my last post and today I’m bringing you, oh yes, more mushrooms, but I can’t resist them – and judging by the reaction to my collection of vegetarian mushroom recipes, neither can you. So I’m hoping you don’t mind more! These aren’t just any old stuffed mushrooms. They’re little packets of melty, creamy, gooey Boursin encased in earthy roasted mushrooms, in a buttery chilli and garlic sauce. When the Boursin heats up it melts and soaks right into the mushrooms. These are seriously little bites of heaven. And I know that all of that sounds completely over the top, but honestly. So goooood.
You could serve these mushrooms as an appetiser with some salad (in which case you might prefer to use larger mushrooms), but I think they’re best served as a canapé with a pile of cocktail sticks to spear them with – they’re delicious even after they’ve cooled a bit, so there’s no rush to get them out. I guarantee that the most popular person at your party will be that guy who walks around with the tray of canapés, if you’re the type to throw a party with actual staff. If not, everyone will just crowd around the food table. So actually, if you want to get a look in, you might be better off just making these for yourself, party be damned. Just in case you’re not familiar with Boursin, it’s a garlic and herb flavoured soft cheese that works perfectly in this dish. There are a few other flavours too, but I think the original one’s the best. It makes a great stuffing for these mushrooms because the fact that it’s already flavoured means that you don’t have to faff around with too many other ingredients. Now, obviously these mushrooms will need testing before you serve them at a party, you know, just in case you needed an excuse to make them right away…The movie marks the first time that Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington have appeared together on the big screen; "The Smurfs 2" grosses $4.3 million Thursday, tying with "The Wolverine" for No. 1.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur's 2 Guns earned $1.3 million as it began rolling out Thursday night in North America, hoping to gross north of $20 million for the weekend.
The action comedy -- pairing Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington for the first time -- is the latest summer film to tie its fortunes primarily to males. It's also expected to appeal to African-American moviegoers.
Universal, which is distributing the movie in the U.S., is predicting a North American debut in the low-$20 million range (Entertainment One is handling distribution in Canada); more bullish box-office observers believe it could hit $30 million. At those numbers, 2 Guns would debut in line with other genre pics the two actors have appeared in.
STORY: Hollywood's New Box Office Problem: Fall's Prestige Movie Pileup
The R-rated action pic, infused with a heavy dose of humor, cost between $80 million and $90 million to produce, although the net budget was $61 million after tax incentives. Emmett/Furla Films financed and produced the film, with Foresight Unlimited handling international rights. The film project generated huge interest among foreign distributors, with Sony Worldwide Acquisitions Group buying rights to much of the world.
2 Guns revolves around a DEA agent (Washington) and Naval intelligence officer (Wahlberg) who must work together after they are set up by the CIA.
Wahlberg and Kormakur first worked together on action pic Contraband, which debuted to $24.3 million in January 2012.
It remains to be seen whether 2 Guns can beat Sony's The Smurfs 2 for the three-day weekend at the domestic box office. Smurfs 2, rolling out on Wednesday, all but tied with The Wolverine for the No. 1 spot on Thursday as each film took in $4.3 million.
Smurfs 2, which has earned $9.5 million in its first two days, is anticipating a five-day debut in the $30 million range and a three-day gross north of $20 million as Hollywood continues to suffer a glut of family product.
Two weeks ago, Turbo opened to $5.6 million on its way to a softish five-day debut of $31 million. One advantage Smurfs 2 has is that megahit Despicable Me 2 is further into its run. The movie also should be helped by an A- CinemaScore.
But it remains to be seen whether Smurfs 2 can match the $35.6 million earned by The Smurfs in its first three days when it opened in late July 2011. Either way, Sony is counting more on the sequel's international prospects considering the first film took in a stunning $421.1 million from overseas (75 percent of the film's global haul of $563.7 million).
STORY: '2 Guns' Premiere: Mark Wahlberg, Writer, Director on Making Deals and Action Movies
Based on the comic book series created by the Belgian artist Peyo, Smurfs 2 is the second title in a planned trilogy (The Smurfs 3 is set for summer 2015). The sequel sees all of the main cast returning, with Neil Patrick Harris and Hank Azaria reprising their live-action roles. Jonathan Winters, who died this spring, and Katy Perry lead the voice cast, while Raja Gosnell returns to the director's chair.
Hollywood has never opened so many family films in a single summer. This season boasts Epic, Monsters University, Despicable 2, Turbo, Smurfs 2 and Planes, which hits theaters in two weeks (there's also the Percy Jackson sequel, although that will skew older).Control Chip
Control Chip
Advanced Control Chip
Control Chip > Used to tame captured animals. (Req: Science 1)
Advanced Control Chip > Used to tame captured creatures. (Req: Science 3)
Animal Friend > Tame captured animals by speaking to them.
Wasteland Whisperer > Tame captured creatures by speaking to them.
I want to tame ALL the creatures!
Can I have more than 1 creature companion at a time?
Second creature is an animal, and you have Animal Friend 3
Second creature is a creature, and you have Wasteland Whisperer 3
You have a Control Signal Ampifier in your inventory (crafted with Science 4)
Take them with you on your adventures!
Beast Master uses a brand-new companion system that won't conflict with any other companion mods. Best of all, this means that you can have a human companion (or Dogmeat) AND a creature companion!
Give them a new name!
There are 4 name categories each with 10 different names, for a whopping total of 40 unique names to choose from.
Get them to love you by increasing their Happiness!
Like the Affinity system for human companions, your creature companions will react to how you treat them. Keep them happy by treating them well, and reap the benefits.
Feed them treats!
Cook up special animal treats at any cooking pot for your pets. Animal treats confer small benefits to your creatures, and make them happy.
Equip them with saddlebags!
Certain types of creatures can use saddlebags to increase their carrying capacity. Saddlebags can even by dyed to match your favorite faction.
Dress them up with accessories!
Certain types of creatures can be equipped with bandanas or collars. Your pets will be happier when dressed to the nines.
Paint them with body paint!
Creatures with scales or shells can be given a makeover with different painted designs. Like accessories, body paint also increases Happiness.
Check their stats!
Check in with your pet to see their level, health, carry weight, and happiness.
Get them to scavenge for items!
Occasionally, your creature companion will find items as they travel with you, and will give them to you when you check in. Happier creatures are more likely to scavenge for you. The type of items they find depend upon their race; Mirelurks in particular are attracted to shiny trinkets...
Mark them on your map!
Enable or disable the Control Chip's built-in tracking device so that you'll always know where to find your creature companion.
Teach them tricks!
Pets can be asked to perform a special trick, although they may ignore you if they are unhappy with you.
Change their combat style!
Set how your pet will react in combat - how eager they are to attack, and how cautious they will be during a fight.
Inject them with Mutating Serums!
New types of Syringer ammo called Mutating Serums can be used on your pets to confer powerful abilities for a short time. But the side-effects will make your pets unhappy....
Click on the spoiler to see a visual walk-through of some of the dialogue options!
Show
Spoiler:
Benefits of Happiness:
Increased defenses and resistance to energy weapons, poison, and radiation
Increased speed
Increased damage in combat
Higher chance to find items
Ways to increase Happiness:
Spend time with your pet as your companion
Feed your pet special animal treats
Dress up your pet with accessories
Give your pet a makeover with custom body paint
Ways to decrease Happiness:
Shoot your pet outside of combat (you monster!)
Use a Mutating Serum on your pet
The following names can be given to your pets:
"Cool" > Scamp, Trouble, Max, Ace, Echo, Lucky, Zigzag, Hero, Blitz, 007
" Tough " > Brutus, Killer, Tank, Spike, Remington, Atlas, Rambo, Warlord, Demon, Bullet
"Cute" > Fluffy, Cupcake, Lulu, Sweetpea, Cuddles, Boo, Diva, Sunshine, Mocha, Bonkers
"Wacky" > Corvenga, Nuka Cola, Sugar Bomb, Freeway, Jangles, Lexington, Concord, Atom Cat, Trash, Megaton
Creature Bling
Accessories
Currently, your pets can be equipped with the following items.
All bandanas
Chain collars
Saddlebags
Body Paint
NEW!
Treats
Animal Treats:
Crispy Bits Treat > +30% HP regen for 5 min. Slightly increases happiness.
Meat Cake Treat > +25 HP for 5 min. Slightly increases happiness.
Spazz Out Treat > +15% speed for 5 min. Slightly increases happiness.
Mutating Serum
Mutating Serums:
Mutating Serum: Super Strength > The target deals 2x damage for 5 minutes. Decreases happiness.
Mutating Serum: Venom Claws > The target's attacks do poison damage for 5 minutes. Decreases happiness.
Mutating Serum: Atom's Glow > The target becomes highly radioactive for 5 minutes. Decreases happiness.
Tranquilizer Darts
Wasteland Workshop DLC
A brain
Download Install with NMM Place Beast Master LAST in your load order (nothing should overwrite it) Play
Dismiss your current creature companion Save Install Beast Master with NMM (Let Beast Master overwrite all the old Beast Whisperer files) Place Beast Master LAST in your load order (nothing should overwrite it) Load the game In any settlement where you have tamed creatures, open and close the workshop. This will reset the background scripts. Re-hire your creature companion Play
Q:
When I try to talk to one of my pets, it doesn't respond! Help!
A:
Q: I don't have the option to use a control chip...the prompt never appears.
A:
animals
Q: Help! I don't have the option to paint my creatures...
A:
Creature Bling
NOTHING
Q: Are my creatures immortal? I don't want them to die...
A:
Q: Will my creatures level with me?
A:
Q:
Does the "Inspirational" perk work on my creature companions?
A:
Q:
Is this compatible with x companion mod?
A:
Update:
Beast Master is compatible with UCF, but ONLY if you use "Quick Recruit"!
Q: Can I use Beast Master to tame the creatures from Far Harbor? I really want a wolf companion.
A:
Q: Will you port this to console?
A:
My Fallout 4 mods:
Ever find yourself wishing that you could have a Deathclaw or Radstag as your loyal companion? Disappointed by the creature "taming" mechanic introduced by Wasteland Workshop?Beast Master is exactly what you've been hoping for.Beast Master provides a stream-lined, immersive method for taming, commanding, and interacting with the creatures of the Wasteland. But more than that, Beast Master introduces a brand-new creature companion framework, built from the ground up to give you the type of satisfying companionship you thought you could only get from a vanilla companion.Interested? Read on.Beast Master allows you to tame the creatures caught through Wasteland Workshop through use of a new item called the. Creatures implanted with a Control Chip will gain enhanced intelligence and be able to understand human speech, allowing you to talk to them, give them commands, even recruit them as a companion.Both theand thecan be crafted at the chemistry workbench under "Utility". Simply approach the creature you wish to tame with a Control Chip in hand and choose the option "Inject Control Chip" to get things started.Animals and creatures can now be tamed with the power of your voice alone, if you have the following perks:*Animals include: Dogs, brahmin, radstags, etc.*Creatures include: Deathclaws, mirelurks, radscorpions, etc.Not so fast! You can ONLY tame creatures caught with Wasteland Workshop cages, or on Brahmin or Junkyard dogs brought to your settlement. Cats and Raiders/Gunners cannot be tamed. **NOTICE! For version 1.1+, you will need to catch NEW creatures in order for all the features to work!!**As of version 1.3.5, the answer is YES! With 1.3.5, you can have up to 2 creature companions at the same time. To recruit a second creature companion, at least ONE of the following conditions must be met:Your new pets will come to love you (or hate you) based on how you treat them. All newly-tamed pets will be tolerant of you, but no more. But as you spend them with them, feed them treats, and spruce up their appearance, their Happiness will increase. The happier your pet is, the stronger and faster it will be in combat. Pets that love you dearly will even sometimes bring you "gifts" that they find as the two of you wander the Wasteland. But beware! Those who mistreat their pets will find that they become less effective in combat. Pets that despise you even have a chance to turn on you and attack!Once a creature has been tamed with a Control Chip, you can give it a brand new name by talking to it and choosing "Give new name." If you aren't happy with your decision, you can change your pet's name at any time.Need a way to distinguish YOUR deathclaw from that other deathclaw that wants to evicerate you? Or just want to play dress-up with your new wasteland pet? If so, Beast Master adds several different ways for you to give your pet some serious bling.Due to the wide variety of shapes and sizes that wasteland creatures come in, not every type of pet can use every type of bling. So! To help you figure out what your pet can (or can't) use, check out this handychart:Various articles of clothing that you find around the Commonwealth can now be used by more than just Dogmeat. Many of the most common creature types can be equipped with them. Like body paint, these items will provide a boost to your pet's Happiness.More are likely to be added in future updates.(See the Creature Bling chart for a breakdown of what types of creatures can be given gear.)Need an extra hand lugging around all that junk? Equip your pet with a saddlebag to increase their carrying capacity! Saddlebags can be crafted at the chemistry station under "Utility". Once crafted, saddlebags can be dyed at the armor workbench to match the color of your favorite faction: Brotherhood of Steel, Institute, Railroad, or Minutemen. (A Children Of Atom dye-job is available with the Exotic Creatures patch).(See the Creature Bling chart for a breakdown of what types of creatures can be equipped with saddlebags.)Red, yellow, green, or blue paint can be used on pets with shells or scales to give them a brand new look and increase their happiness. If you get tired of your pet's body paint, you can scrub it off with Turpentine.To paint your pet, you first need to find Yellow Paint, Blue Paint, Green Paint, or a Blood Can. Then, talk to them and choose "Check In". Now in the check-in menu, you will see the option "Apply Paint". "Remove Paint" will appear instead if the creature is already painted and you have some turpentine in your inventory.If you have the Exotic Creatures patch, you can paint your pet with a new Child of Atom design! Requires Glowing Paint, which can be crafted at the chemistry station if you are allied with the Children of Atom.(See the Creature Bling chart for a breakdown of what types of creatures can be painted.)Animal treats can be created at the cooking pot and given to your pets by talking with them, choosing "Check in", and then selecting "Feed Treat". Each treat will give your pet a small temporary boost and slightly increase their happiness. You can't just stuff your pet with treats to make them love you, however - your pet will get full after 3 treats, and you will need to wait a while before they get hungry again.Harness the power of radiation by crafting Mutating Serum syringer ammo at the chemistry station. Creatures shot with a Mutating Serum round will become juggernauts in combat for a short time, but at the cost of decreasing their happiness.Having trouble getting close enough to that raging Deathclaw to use an Advanced Control Chip? Pacify it with a Tranquilizer round from your Syringer! Tranquilizer rounds can be crafted at the chemistry station with other types of Syringer ammo, and will calm any bug or animal for 60 seconds.1) Look away from the creature, then look back and talk to them again. Sometimes the dialogue won't trigger the first time. 2) Some creatures, Deathclaws particularly, are finicky about where your cursor needs to be to make the dialogue wheel appear. There is nothing I can do about this - just get up in their face and keep trying.Did you catch the creature in a cage? Only cage-caught creatures (and junkyard dogs and brahmin) can be tamed.Are you using the right type of control chip? Regular control chips will only work on; advanced control chips will only work on creatures.Did you catch the creature before installing Beast Master version 1.1 or later? If so, you will need to catch a new creature.Check your load order. NOTHING should be overriding Beast Master, except the Exotic Creatures patch.First, check to make sure that your creature CAN be painted. Refer to the handy-dandychart I so helpfully made for you.Next, you need to have "Yellow Paint", "Blue Paint", or "Blood Can" in your inventory. If you still don't see the option to "Apply Paint" after selecting "Check in", then you need to do 2 things: Update to the latest version of Beast Master, and check your load order.And finally, if you are using Beast Master v1.1 or newer, you will need to catch NEW creatures! The old creatures will not be able to painted.SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. MAKE SUREIS OVERRIDING BEAST MASTER EXCEPT THE PATCH. CHECK YOUR LOAD ORDER.Yes. While a creature is traveling with you as your companion, it's set as 'essential', so it can't be killed. At any other time, tamed creatures are set as 'protected', which means that only YOU can kill them.Yes! New in version 1.2, your faithful creature companions will now level with you. NOTE: If your creature was caught before version 1.1, you will need to catch a new creature. Old creatures just don't have all the benefits introduced in the newer versions. No, there's no way to 'fix' that.Yes! With version 1.2, your creatures will now get the full benefits of the "Inspirational" perk. NOTE: If you caught your creature in an earlier version, you need to dismiss and re-recruit them!That depends. If x adds a new companion, then yes. HOWEVER, changes to the vanilla follower system won't carry over to your creature companions, because Beast Master uses a custom follower framework. (That's a good thing - it means that you won't have other mods interfering with your pets, and you can have both a normal companion and a creature companion at the same time.)I'm glad you asked that question! It just so happens that I created a complimentary mod, Exotic Creatures - Far |
1: Examples of data sharing platforms INDEPTH Network—An investigator led network of 49 health and demographic surveillance sites in 20 low and middle income countries. Core data from each site are standardised and made available to other researchers through a web based platform. Based in Accra, Ghana (http://www.indepth-network.org/) WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network—An investigator led network of 260 collaborators, most performing clinical trials related to malaria drug efficacy and resistance in endemic countries. Data are standardised by platform staff and shared in order to answer specific research questions, with the approval of data contributors. Based at Oxford University, UK. (http://www.wwarn.org/) Clinical Study Data Request—An online repository of clinical trial data contributed to by 13 major drug companies. Data are not standardised; individual study data are made available to researchers on request, after research proposals are approved by an independent data access panel (https://clinicalstudydatarequest.com/) West Africa Network of Excellence for TB, AIDS, and Malaria—A regional collaboration between research institutions that aims to build skills and structures to generate shareable clinical research data through use of common protocols for research, analysis and data management. Coordinated from Dakar, Senegal (http://orlysoft.com/sites/wanetam/) Yale University Open Data Access—A platform for access to patient level data from clinical trials, currently mostly industry sponsored. Platform staff provide some standardisation and curation services. Data are made available to researchers on request, after research proposals are approved by an independent data access panel. Based at Yale University, USA (http://yoda.yale.edu/) Figshare—A repository that allows individual researchers to upload datasets in any format at no charge. Datasets are assigned a citable doi. Though minimal metadata must be supplied, data are not standardised or quality assured. Data published on Figshare are reuseable by anyone with internet access under Creative Commons CC0 licence. Based in London, UK (https://figshare.com/) Infectious Diseases Data Observatory—A collection of data sharing platforms focused on emerging and infectious diseases. Centralised data curation and standardisation produce pooled databases from clinical trials, surveillance and/or treatment records. Data are accessible to requestors through an independent data access committee. The expanding portfolio of disease platforms currently includes Ebola, malaria, and visceral leishmaniasis. Based at the University of Oxford, UK (https://www.iddo.org/) We also identified areas where the failure to share data has disrupted efforts to respond rapidly to outbreaks or foreclosed more detailed evaluation of interventions that may be harmful.21 22 In these cases, not sharing data has been bad for science and almost certainly bad for health. In the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa some researchers made genomic data immediately available for further study, confirming that the virus had spread from Guinea to Sierra Leone, that it was sustained by human-to-human transmission, and that it was mutating rapidly in certain areas. However, the researchers subsequently reported that “What followed was three months of stasis, during which no new virus sequence information was made public [even though] thousands of samples were transferred to researchers' freezers across the world.”23 They called for greater data sharing through collaborative networks. Our investigations suggest that in lower income settings such networks account for most of the examples in which new knowledge was derived from shared data. These networks are characterised by substantial investment in the sometimes difficult work of building trust and relationships between investigators and in developing institutional capacity, as well as in managing and standardising data.24 In discussing data sharing policies, we propose classifying shared data as accessible, useable, or useful, as shown in table 1⇓. Table 1 Benefits and costs of different levels of data sharing View this table: Developing and maintaining curated platforms for “useful” sharing of data tends to be expensive. Data from different sources, often collected in different formats using different protocols and endpoints, must be quality controlled and standardised so that analysis can be performed across studies.25 The upfront costs of developing community standards and networks of collaboration can be high. However, once these investments have been made, the time and effort required by potential users is relatively low, and the potential for data to be reused in ways that benefit public health is high, making the investments cost effective. Currently, most efforts to standardise clinical data in this way occur within consortiums or networks of people with similar interests who work together to formulate new questions and to answer them in contextually appropriate ways. Data shared in these networks may thus not always meet the transparency criteria increasingly required by journals to allow for independent reanalysis of individual datasets. Replicate analyses have been done with useable datasets, and their open availability promotes transparency in research. Drug companies have recently taken a lead in making data from individual clinical trials available in increasingly useable forms.26 27 The first evaluation of prominent platforms for sharing clinical trial data found that, although individual patient data from more than 3000 trials had been made available to investigators over the past two years, only 15.5% of the trial datasets had ever been requested.28 Most proposals focused on subgroups or predictors of response not prespecified in the original analysis rather than validation of study results, and only one of the proposals examined had led to a published pooled analysis and contributed to public scientific discourse.29 This is probably because the hard work of harmonising datasets lies with the secondary analyst, who may be reluctant to invest heavily in data management because secondary analysis is widely perceived to be difficult to publish. These repositories are only recently established, however, and data requests are on the rise.30
Power of technology Datasets and even data repositories have multiplied so rapidly and chaotically that one of our group likened them to an asteroid field. Better technology and metadata standards—especially common search portals, improved discoverability, and tools for reliable anonymisation and standardisation of heterogeneous data—could begin to reshape the asteroid field into an organised solar system. Developing that solar system and keeping the planets in orbit will require substantial long term investment. In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has expanded efforts in data transparency through platforms such as clinicalstudydatarequest.com and has begun the process of transforming useable data into something more useful through data standardisation and curation in fields such as oncology. In some cases it is outsourcing this work to academic institutions—for example, the YODA platform held at Yale. There is scope to expand these public-private partnerships using fees from well resourced diseases to subsidise curation of data for conditions with less commercial appeal. Realistically, however, grants from development institutions are likely to remain a key source of funding for data platforms for neglected diseases. Currently, few such institutions provide long term funding for data infrastructure and curation. In addition, the groups best connected to those funding sources tend to be academic, and academic researchers may not be best placed to design or build the data solar system. Initiatives such as the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium are crowdsourcing metadata standards from scientists, but we need to draw on data management expertise from the vast data industry outside academia to develop data sharing platforms most efficiently, not least in order to reduce unnecessary reinvention and duplication.
Do no harm Concerns that patient confidentiality and consent may be breached are often cited by researchers as a reason for not sharing data.13 Several of us have been sharing data for a decade or more, including around illicit behaviours and stigmatised diseases.31 Between us we could find few examples of harm—certainly far fewer than examples of benefits—partly because we have worked hard to develop strong governance structures. We have also consulted with patients and communities about sharing the information they provide to us, because we believe that efforts to expand data sharing can succeed only with broad social support.32 While governance structures for secondary analysis should be simplified so that they are proportionate to the often more limited risks of data reuse, they must remain robust. These governance protocols should be shared more widely as we gain experience in how to maximise useful sharing while minimising risks. Collaboration around governance also reduces the hurdles to contributing data to repositories for pooled analyses.
Equity in research: the threat of data parasites A common generalisation in discussions of data sharing is that it undermines the career prospects for researchers, especially in low and middle income countries, exposing them to “research parasites” who will ingest their data into far-off computers and beget papers for high impact journals.33 34 We could find no evidence for this. It is difficult to pick poorly documented data out of scattered repositories and make coherent, publishable sense of it. When well documented data are shared usefully in professional networks, our experience is that sharing has increased our work's visibility and expanded our collaborations.13 35 Investigator led networks in which secondary users work collaboratively with the researchers collecting the data to define and answer questions are an important start in moving towards a “fair trade” culture in health research, though it is still only a start. In journal publications of secondary analyses, first and last authors are still most often from wealthier countries. Conducting clinical trials and other health research in low and middle income countries is time consuming, challenging, and often financially insecure. It leaves investigators with little time to build up, let alone exercise the skills needed for large scale secondary analysis of pooled datasets.8 Data sharing collaborations have the potential to introduce greater equity in global health research, but that will require long term investments in both skills and career pathways for researchers from countries with high disease burden. Changing the incentive system to reward the publication of quality assured datasets with standardised metadata in the same way that we reward the publication of research papers in high impact journals would go a long way to damping down the panic about data parasites.
Towards a data sharing solar system In our experience sharing data from demographic surveillance and health research, including clinical trial data at the individual patient level, can lead to advances in knowledge that wouldn't have been possible without bringing those data together. To that extent, data sharing is good for health. But knowledge improves health only if it leads to changes in policy and practice; one of the most important determinants of the translation of research results into health policy in low and middle income settings is collaboration between local researchers and policy makers in shaping research questions and interpreting results.36 Most examples of policy change based on analysis of shared data in low and middle income settings involve compendiums of datasets that are quality controlled, standardised, and otherwise highly curated.15-20 In general, the analyses are performed in collaborations between global disease experts and local researchers who know their contexts well and who help formulate questions and answer them. These researchers can also act as a bridge to national policy makers, ultimately delivering changes that benefit the populations from which data were collected. This sort of sharing requires far more effort than simply uploading a dataset to an online repository. Useful scientific collaborations are expensive to develop and require a shift in attitudes, incentives, and investment patterns. A degree of technical and economic efficiency may have to be sacrificed in the interests of fostering collaboration and equity—for example, by investing in building skills in high disease burden countries rather than simply using skills already available in universities in industrialised countries. The peer reviewed research results paper must lose its supremacy as the major metric of scientific productivity; and funders must commit to long term investments in both technical and human infrastructure if they want to promote data sharing that is useful, used, and likely to change policies for the greater benefit of patients. This cannot happen for all diseases or all types of data at once—it is just too expensive. The alternative is not, however, to downgrade to a useable (but not used) or accessible (and not useable) model of data sharing. Rather, we must think in fresh ways about how existing structures can be made more useful to maximise health gains. We need to figure out which platforms and technological structures can be shared across diseases and which diseases would most benefit from the sort of pooled analysis that has already proved useful. Obvious candidates include neglected tropical diseases and other infectious diseases in poor regions with only sparse data and small sample sizes; emerging infections about which little is known; and diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria that face changes in disease burden and spreading drug resistance. The value of investing in a platform is also likely to be affected by many other factors, including the potential for data standardisation, the institutional politics in which the disease is embedded, and the degree to which research is financed by public or charitable bodies. We need to stop thinking of data sharing as an afterword to the scientific enterprise: it is relevant to every stage of the research cycle. Depositing decontextualised results into a growing asteroid field may tick a transparency box, but it is otherwise wasteful. To be useful in the low and middle income settings which shoulder high burdens of disease and a legacy of under-investment in research infrastructure, data sharing must be treated as an integral part of the larger scientific solar system. We favour sharing data, certainly, but only as one part of a research collaboration that also fairly shares models of governance and the tools, technology, and analytical skills that turn shared data into better health. Key messages Simple accessibility of data is enough to promote research transparency, but public health gains require more complex models
Meaningful and equitable collaboration with local researchers and policy makers in low and middle income countries is needed to ensure the right research questions get asked and research results are used
Useful data sharing requires long term investment in infrastructure, networks, and scientific careers, including in the data sciences
It is not enough to share data: we need to share governance structures, scientific questions and ideas, and interpretationGood news for uniform style aficionados and Oakland A's fans alike today, as The Logos Asylum reports:
On July 8, the A's will be throwing back to the Oakland Oaks of the PCL, when hosting the Seattle Mariners. I'm assuming, although I haven't found confirmation, the Mariners will be wearing throwbacks as well.
In case you haven't brushed up on your baseball history, the Oakland Oaks were charter members of the Pacific Coast League, joining the Los Angeles Angels, Portland Beavers, Sacramento Solons, San Francisco Seals, and and Seattle Indians to form the premiere baseball league on the west coast in 1903. The Oaks played in the PCL for over five decades, until 1955, when they were sold to officials in Vancouver, British Columbia, where they moved and were renamed as the Vancouver Mounties. Check out a photo of the throwbacks after the jump.
via logoasylum.files.wordpress.com
For all news and information regarding the Oakland A's, please visit Athletics Nation.India's Internet speeds are among the slowest in Asia, clocking in at a lethargic 1.7 Megabits per second, according to Akamai's latest quarterly “State of the Internet” report. Among the 14 South-East Asian countries in the report, India stood last, with an average Internet speed 14 times slower than that of South Korea's.
The global average internet speed currently stands at 3.9 Mbps and according to the report should hit and hopefully exceed the 4 Mbps mark in the second quarter of the current financial year. India in comparison has a long way to go in catching up with the global average, let alone surpass it.
Even China far outpaces India with Internet speeds clocking in at 3.2 Mbps. Moreover, it doesn't seem likely that India will catch up with its neighbors anytime soon as the country's average speed has increased by just 8 percent from a year ago, while most other countries in Asia saw speeds jumping by nearly 20%.
[See also: Broadband Connectivity As Basic As Education: New Policy]
All hope isn't lost though, as the Indian government's is currently working on framing a National Broadband Policy. If the legislation does get passed, high-speed Internet will be treated as a basic necessity similar to healthcare and education.
The National Telecom Policy 2012 has set a target of 175 million broadband connections by 2017, and 600 million 2020 at minimum 2 Mbps download speed and making available higher speeds of at least 100 Mbps on demand.
TAGS: Internet, Broadband, India, high-speed Internet, Department of TelecomThe Deadly Crash at Crush
On September 15, 1896, two massive steam locomotives raced toward each other at full throttle on a single track 15 miles north of Waco. The trains’ planned rendezvous point was the temporary town of Crush, created for a single day to host a bizarre publicity stunt staged by the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, commonly known as the Katy.
More than 40,000 people crowded the slopes above the crash site, pushing forward anxiously to get a good view of the collision between the locomotives—each pulling six boxcars. Roaring downhill at estimated speeds of 45 to 60 mph, steam whistles screaming, the trains collided with a shattering boom punctuated by rending timbers and billowing black smoke. By some accounts, the locomotives reared up against each other like battling beasts, and then fell over on their sides. Silence fell for an instant, and then the boilers of both engines simultaneously exploded, launching missiles of metal through the air and into the crowd.
In the blink of an eye, what was supposed to be a safe publicity stunt turned deadly: Three people were killed, including teenager Ernest Darnall, who watched the spectacle from his perch in a mesquite tree and died instantly when a heavy hook on the end of a wrecking chain hit him between the eyes and split his skull. Several dozen people were injured, including those scalded by steam and burned by jagged, hot shrapnel. A flying bolt ripped out the right eye of official event photographer Jervis Deane, who was on a stand less than 100 feet from the track.
Injured spectators sprawled on the ground in pain and bewilderment—they had been assured that the engines’ boilers would not explode.
The train wreck was the brainchild of William George Crush, passenger agent for the Katy, who convinced his superiors that a staged train wreck would generate much-needed publicity for the railroad during a time of national economic downturn. Crush was right. Newspapers from all over wrote about the impending event, and the Katy arranged for 33 excursion trains to pick up onlookers from around the state and deliver them for the price of a $2 round-trip ticket.
Two 35-ton engines (1870s vintage) were chosen as the participants. Old No. 999 was painted bright green and No. 1001 blood red. Each was outfitted with six boxcars plastered with advertising posters. Crush, a friend of showman P.T. Barnum, threw himself into the preparations with theatrical gusto, setting up a restaurant inside a borrowed Ringling Brothers circus tent.
Excitement reached fever pitch around 4 p.m. as the two trains steamed slowly together and touched cowcatchers, the locomotive equivalent of the dueling handshake. Then each engine backed up one mile. The track lay in a shallow valley among three hills, creating a natural amphitheater and affording the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd a fine view. Crews onboard the locomotives had their instructions: Open the throttles all the way, tie the whistle cords down and JUMP. Crush, conspicuous on a prancing white horse, rode back and forth before the crowd, which pressed ever forward, beyond the roped-off safety zone. When all was ready, Crush threw his hat into the air, and the trains began to move.
After the crash and explosion, the crowd momentarily stood stunned as groans and cries from the injured filled the air. Those wounded were collected, some from as far as half a mile away, and treated by doctors who had closed their offices to witness the event. The uninjured rushed forward to snatch souvenirs from the smoking ruins.
Before nightfall, Agent Crush was summarily fired, but it only took a few days for railroad officials to discover that the crash at Crush had accomplished its purpose: Overnight, the story made headlines around the world. Everyone was talking about the Katy, business boomed, and Crush was quietly rehired. Scott Joplin, the great ragtime composer who was rumored to be at the event, wrote a musical tribute called “The Great Crush Collision March” later that year.
Katy officials financially compensated the injured and the families of the deceased. Deane accepted a $10,000 settlement and a lifetime pass on the Katy. A few months after the crash, he put this notice in a Waco newspaper: “Having gotten all the loose screws and other hardware out of my head, am now ready for all photographic business.”
The crash of the locomotives achieved its publicity purpose, but, not surprisingly, no railroad has ever elected to repeat it.
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Martha Deeringer is a frequent contributor.The Justice Department is suing a telecommunications company for challenging a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for customer information — despite the fact that the law authorizing the request explicitly permits such challenges.
According to documents provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing the telecom, the company (whose name is one of the many redacted details in the documents) received a national security letter (NSL) in 2011. An NSL is essentially a self-issued search warrant whereby the FBI bypasses the Fourth Amendment and demands information about an individual without bothering to obtain a judge’s consent — and forces the recipient of the letter to keep mum about it because disclosure would allegedly harm national security. NSLs were employed somewhat sparingly prior to 2001 but became widely used — and abused, as the Justice Department’s inspector general reported in 2007 — after the misnamed Patriot Act loosened the requirements for issuing them.
The telecom chose to fight not just the gag order, as a handful of other companies have done, but also the NSL and the law authorizing it. This, EFF says, is allowed under a 2006 amendment to the law, which gives a company receiving an NSL the right to oppose the gag order and force the FBI to prove in court that disclosure of the NSL would harm national security. “Since Feb. 2009,” writes Wired, “NSLs must include express notification to recipients that they have a right to challenge the built-in gag order that prevents them from disclosing to anyone that the government is seeking customer records.”
The company is challenging the law on constitutional grounds. First, it argues that that “the nondisclosure provisions of the NSL statute constitute unconstitutional prior restraint” on free speech. Second, it maintains that the entire law “violates the anonymous speech and associational rights of Americans.” Moreover, it says, “even if the statute survives constitutional scrutiny, the government must meet its heavy burden to demonstrate, rather than simply assert, that its request is relevant to an authorized investigation of the type listed, that disclosure would risk an enumerated harm and that the investigation is not solely based on activities protected by the First Amendment.”
Meanwhile, the telecom is withholding the requested information until a court orders its production, a course of action both the law and the courts permit.
Previously the government has responded to NSL challenges by filing a motion to compel compliance in which it demonstrates to the court why the NSL must be kept secret. However, those challenges were only to the gag order, not the NSL or the law authorizing it. And they were extremely rare: Of about 300,000 NSLs issued since 2001 — one-sixth of them since the 2006 amendment went into effect — only five are known to have been challenged.
Clearly the Justice Department is unaccustomed to having to defend its attempts to obtain customer data on its own say-so; and it isn’t taking this fight lying down. Instead of simply filing the motion to compel as it had done in previous cases, the department filed a civil suit against the telecom on the basis that refusing to comply with the NSL and withholding the requested information until ordered by a court was “interfer[ing] with the United States’ vindication of its sovereign interests in law enforcement, counterintelligence, and protecting national security” and therefore illegal.
The government argues that the telecom cannot challenge the law’s constitutionality under the 2006 amendment but only under the Constitution. Then it argues that even if such a challenge were brought, the court would not be permitted to rule on the law’s constitutionality because of “sovereign immunity”: No one can sue the government without its consent.
But, writes the Wall Street Journal:
Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former computer-crime attorney at the Justice Department, said sovereign immunity usually is applied in lawsuits against the government that seek monetary damages, not in cases disputing the constitutionality of a law.
“I would say this is a puzzling argument,” he said. “There has to be a way to challenge the constitutionality of the law.”
Not if the government has anything to say about it. While it has in the interim “agreed to stay the civil suit and let the telecom’s challenge play out in court,” according to Wired, and has filed the typical motion to compel, it hasn’t completely dropped the civil suit.
“So there’s still this live complaint that they have refused to drop saying that our client was in violation of the law,” EFF’s Matt Zimmerman told Wired, “presumably in the event that they lose, or something goes bad with the [challenge case].”
According to the Journal, the NSL in the current case is fairly limited, seeking only “the name, address, and length of service associated with one or more accounts.” But as Zimmerman told Wired, NSLs can request “the numbers and identities of anyone who has communicated with” a particular person or telephone number. “They’re asking for association information — who do you hang out with, who do you communicate with, [in order] to get information about previously unknown people.”
“That’s the fatal flaw with this [law],” he said. “Once the FBI is able to do this snooping, to find out who Americans are communicating with and associating with, there’s no remedy that makes them whole after the fact. So there needs to be some process in place so the court has the ability ahead of time to step in [on behalf of Americans].”
Better still, the law authorizing NSLs ought to be repealed — something that isn’t likely to happen under President Barack Obama, who has actually sought expanded NSL authority.
The telecom fighting the NSL, which the Journal believes is a small, San Francisco-based company called Credo, deserves enormous credit for standing up to the feds — something far too few NSL recipients have been willing to do, and none to this extent. A court finding that the NSL law is unconstitutional would go a long way toward restoring “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Photo: telecommunications towers into the clouds via ShutterstockSee also:
-13 Phoenix Bands You Need to Hear in 2013 -Jason P. Woodbury's 10 Best Things I Heard in 2012 -Top 10 Reissues and Compilations of 2012 -Top Five 2012 Heavy Releases In Phoenix -That Was 2012 Wrapup
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Sareena Dominguez, Moonbeams
The acoustic guitar-wielding female singer-songwriter persona is a little worn out (thanks, Lisa Loeb), but some chanteuses continue to command attention by setting themselves apart from the crowd. Gilbert's Sareena Dominguez, who released her debut album, Moonbeams on River Jones Music Label earlier this year, is a prime example.
Moonbeams shares the typical tropes of a singer/songwriter's album: it's a personal and revealing glimpse into the artist's life and past relationships. But Dominguez stands out thanks to the sheer beauty of the album. Her wispy vocals are the perfect complement to the melodic guitar and violin and subdued drumbeats. The additional instrumentation is what propels Moonbeams; Dominguez isn't just the lead singer, she's a crucial part of the band.
"Fickle Forest" and "Fourteen" look back on the high school romances we may (or may not) remember fondly with a sense of warm and familiar nostalgia, but also the oh-so comforting sense of growing older and wiser. These themes are fitting for a debut album, which finds the singer mature for her age. Moonbeams shows promise for Sareena Dominguez's future career, which is sure to be full of more life experiences and above all else, beauty. -- Melissa Fossum
See also:
Sareena Dominguez Gets Her Groove on With Moonbeams Sareena Dominguez: "I Wouldn't Say I'm 'Super Folk'"
IAMWE, Run Wild
Over a year ago, Phoenix-based indie rockers IAMWE sent over a preview track of their upcoming single, "So They Say." At the time I was working on a feature about the guys, who somehow booked an opening gig for Neon Trees. Whether you like Neon Trees or not, they were a popular act at the time. The problem was that IAMWE had a scant resume for such a prominent booking. A YouTube video here and a track or two there, it was curious how these guys snagged the show.
Until I met them, that is. Physically, they looked like they were a well-established band, but I got the impression that there was something lying beneath the raw, and truthfully rough talent I initially heard online. "So They Say" just proved it. The track had a hint of Local Natives, a bit of British shoegaze and a whole lot of focus that I didn't hear from their previous work. Rife with tribal drumsbeats and a chorus of determined voices, the song made me excited to hear what IAMWE would do in the future.
Their debut full-length, She's a Solider, was initially due in late 2011, but was delayed as the band refined their focus. Be glad they did. The result is the cohesive, glammed out space rock extravaganza renamed Run Wild, featuring vocalist Tim Maiden's howl meshed with electronic elements that surprise and stun with each new track. In a year the band did what's often impossible for a young act -- they stepped back, assessed their weaknesses, worked with them, and churned a record that's solid by local or national standards. -- Christina Caldwell
See also:
IAMWE Soldiers on With a Newly Completed Album and Upcoming Tour With Anberlin IAMWE's "So They Say," as Explained by the Band
Vial of Sound, VOS
If you ever meet me in person, don't be fooled by my stout exterior and lack of fashion sense -- I just wanna dance. I was never really good at it, but back in the day you could find me on the dance floor at parties, clubs, weddings, baptisms, quinceañeras; pretty much anywhere with low lighting and loud music. As I've gotten older my dancing excursions have become few-and-far-between, but just know that in the back of my head, that little ball of light manning all of the controls is constantly bobbing its head, just waiting for a beat.
That being said I can say, without hesitation, that the best local album of 2012 belongs to Tempe electronic group Vial of Sound with their debut EP, VOS. Released on June 24 as a five-track downloadable album on the band's Bandcamp site, VOS quickly made an impression on me with its expertly crafted synth sounds, retro beeps and bouncy dance beats. The release was produced, engineered, and mixed by Bob Hoag and recorded at Flying Blanket Recording in Mesa, where the staff knows a thing or two about vintage gear. "We wanted to go through [Hoag] because he records analog with vintage gear and tape, [and] tape sounds fatter than just recording digitally through a computer," Josh Gooday told New Times back in July. For a group that features an all-analog synth setup consisting of a Mini-Moog, Oberheim OB-8, and an Arp 2600, a fat sound is precisely what the instruments called for.
Clocking in at just under 22-minutes, VOS wastes no time in setting the tone, jumping off with a grooving beat and enough laser ray sounds to make Debbie Deb smile on the opening track, "Pop the Beat." The tempo picks up with some smartly-tracked drums and an all-out dance pace in the ensuing "Thumper." "Do You Want Me," comes out more aggressively and features prominent vocoder encased vocals, marking probably my favorite track of the release. In all it's just a creative and unique use of instruments that have been long retired. -- Anthony Sandoval
See also:
Tempe Band Vial of Sound Is Obsessed With Analog
Bogan Via, Wait Up
One of the most common complaints you'll hear when trying to share an album with someone is that "All the songs sound the same." My kneejerk response has always been, "Well no shit. It's the same band members with the same instruments in the same studio. The difference is subtle, you mongoloid. Jeez." But that doesn't usually help my case.
That's not a problem with Bogan Via, the North Phoenix couple-slash-dream-pop-duo, that recently released their debut EP Wait Up on Common Wall Media. Mixed and recorded by Bob Hoag (also known for his work with Gospel Claws, The Ataris, and Black Carl), Bogan Via has the buoyant, cutesy indie polish down pat, but the ambiguous lyrics on tracks like "Copy and Paste" and the members' shyness to explain the meaning behind them suggest there's more to it.
For a six-song record, Wait Up shows surprising diversity, but most of all, it shows balance. The album goes in an on-off pattern, one song focused on acoustic guitar, the next track focused on synth. Bret Bender and Madeleine Miller also swap vocal duties; so on songs like "TES" or the titular opener, there's a mature equilibrium that keeps things from growing stale. It's that fine line between being sickly sweet and conceited and Bogan Via ride that groove perfectly, providing an album that is perfect for repeat listening. -- Troy Farah
See also:
Indie Pop Duo Bogan Via Started a Band and Fell in Love Download: Bogan Via's Sparkling, Pulsing "Kanye"
Local Wizards, The Signal
Not only do I think The Signal by Local Wizards was the most interesting album to come out of Phoenix in 2012, but it also accurately conveyed a distinctly Arizonan experience: bored youth, deep heat, blurry nights, and vague dread. The second full-length solo venture of ASU student Kendall Hunter, The Signal cycles his effusive vocals through a series of hazy Deerhunter textures, heavily processed guitar, and empty freeway beats.
Opener "Sticks and Leaves" has the jangly tempo and languid guitar of fellow blithe suburban rockers Real Estate, but lines like "I'm facedown and floating in my swimming pool" flip the Jersey band's trademark nostalgia into early-twenties angst. The title track uses a deceptively funky handclap rhythm to offset the bone-dry heartbreak and loss of the lyrics. Even The Signal's more straightforward offerings have dark matter lurking underneath. "Thomas Kinkade" is the most blatant rock song of the bunch, a mid-tempo ripper built around a distorted keyboard motif, yet the lyrics narrate a Lynchian house party with women throwing works by the famed schlock artist into a fire while mixing drinks in a garbage disposal.
It's laptop-glow Ambien rock, it's QuikTrip Garagebandcore, and it couldn't have been made anywhere but the suburban desert. --Chase Kamp
See also:
Local Wizards: Songwriter Makes "Based Garagebandcore;" We Interview Via Twitter Local Wizards' The Signal Blends Every Internet-Spawned Genre You Can Think Of (And It Rules)
Lauren Farrah, Great Expectations
Lauren Farrah was a rising force in 2012, and her debut EP, Great Expectations, ensures that her presence will only continue to be praised. The five tracks on the album display impressive passion and playful emotion, ranging from vulnerable and haunting to commanding and assertive.
It's an album that you can sip easily like a glass of Glenlivet, consuming mouthwatering swirl after swirl, growing warmer and cozier as the album moves on. Farrah's velvety alto vocals smolder, and her thoughtful songwriting and often-wondrous puzzlement is delightful. The songs have a type of nouveau-Americana style, accented with a poppy edge, sometimes gravitating towards soft rock ("Head vs. Heart"), sometimes towards country ("Great Expectations"), and sometimes towards whimsical blues ("I Was Wrong"). Which makes sense, since Farrah cites such influences as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and works side-by-side with many artists who are tinged with folksy rock and country.
Her lyrics search through her soul, giving a glimpse of how she has gone through her life, spending time as a CTI (cryptologic technician interpretive) in the Navy before signing to River Jones Music. Farrah isn't afraid to explore her disorders, but she retains a kind of reassuring faith. The beauty's not always in the destination; sometimes it's all about the journey. -- Lauren Wise
See also:
Lauren Farrah Is "Queen of Odd Jobs" But Finds Songwriting to Be Her Calling
Gospel Claws, Put Your Sunshine Away
"Is there anything I can do? Oh anything I can do? To win, win back our love," Gospel Claws singer Joel Marquard sings on "Anything I Can Do," his voice drenched in reverb, pleading like a lovesick Walker Brother. When the band comes in, swelling like a forgotten bandstand unit, you can practically see the couples take the dance floor in flannel suits and patterned skirts.
It's a moment of pure retro escapism, but Gospel Claws second LP, Put Your Sunshine Away, doesn't live in the past so much as it retrofits it. Garage rock, Motown shuffles, doo-wop swoops, R&B grind -- each style is appropriated into the band's distinctive rock 'n' roll framework over the record's nine songs. "I Want It All" struts on a flailing groove; "Teenage Kicks" stutter steps with earnest romanticism (sounding nothing like the Undertones song it shares a title with); "Hambone" jitters with Latin-tinged percussion and a swooning chorus your grandparents might slow-dance to.
Put Your Sunshine Away isn't afraid to sound familiar, but in the best way. You feel like you've heard all these songs before, but you can't quite place the time and place. It's a record that shows off its dusty, crate-digging-stained fingerprints, a love letter to pop music at its purest. -- Jason P. Woodbury
See also:
Download: Gospel Claws, "I Want It All" Joel Marquard of Gospel Claws Takes on Testicular Cancer (With His Friends)
Filardo, Slow
When I first heard about Tom Filardo's (formerly of Asleep in the Sea) project, simply dubbed "Filardo," it was billed in a Facebook |
deliberately pitched also to encourage British officials to go the extra yards in the final hours.
The government does not like to use the word veto, but Tusk’s remarks suggest that veto it is.
At the same time, Dublin has been sending out signals that the form of words given by the British need not explicitly spell out the status of Northern Ireland vis-à-vis the single market and customs union.
There is sufficient realism that Theresa May will not be able to sign up to a bald declaration that there be "regulatory convergence" on both sides of the border.
Senior sources in Brussels insist that the DUP factor is not their main concern; rather it is the hardline Conservatives in her own party who are viscerally attached to the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
But the Irish Government will accept nothing less than something solid, credible and binding that somehow pushes regulatory alignment to the deepest possible extent, within the quantum of political realities.
It is fair to say that, in a worst case scenario, a summit conclusion that falls far short of Ireland’s demands would be a disaster for the EU 27, which has so far professed unity and solidarity to the enth degree.
These, then, are the stakes.The State of the Church before the Reformation Writers
Alister McGrath
“We are talking about the gospel being able to bring new life, new hope to ordinary people, connecting the gospel to people, helping them to discover what the gospel could mean in their lives.”
Why was there a Reformation? What was the church like just before the Reformation took place? Why did the Reformation have to happen? By looking at these questions we can begin to gain some understanding of our own situation today. One of the reasons why the Reformation happened is that there was a rediscovery of the attractiveness of the gospel. A new generation arose, who by reading the New Testament firsthand began to discover for themselves that here was something exciting, something life changing, which was like new wine, which just couldn’t...The Defense Department has released a list of ten now former Guantanamo detainees who were transferred to Oman earlier this week. One of them is Mohammed Al Ansi, a Yemeni who was captured in northern Pakistan in late 2001 and transferred to the detention facility in Cuba in Jan. 2002.
US authorities repeatedly found that Ansi (seen on the right) may have been selected to take part in an aborted part of the 9/11 hijackings.
Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) concluded in a leaked threat assessment, dated May 17, 2008, that Ansi “swore bayat (oath of allegiance) to” Osama bin Laden “and received specialized close combat training for his role as a suicide operative in an aborted component of the 11 September 2001 al Qaeda attacks.”
Another version of the allegation was included in a summary prepared by the Obama administration for the Periodic Review Board (PRB) process at Guantanamo.
“Judging from other detainee statements and corroborating information,” the Oct. 14, 2015 summary reads, Ansi “participated in advanced combat training and may have met with al Qaeda external operations chief Khalid Shaykh Mohammed … in Karachi and been considered for participation in a suicide attack or deployment in the West.”
Al Qaeda originally considered hijacking US airliners leaving from airports in Southeast Asia as part of the 9/11 plot. But bin Laden reportedly canceled this part of the operation because he thought it would be difficult to coordinate the additional hijackings.
According to the US government’s files, one of the ringleaders for the canceled 9/11 hijackings was Walid Bin Attash, a senior al Qaeda operative who helped plot the Oct. 2000 USS Cole bombing. Bin Attash allegedly performed surveillance on American airliners operating in Southeast Asia. After his part of the plot was called off, Bin Attash turned his attention to other al Qaeda plans.
Bin Attash, who is currently held at Guantanamo, fingered Ansi and three other detainees as would-be participants in the airliner plot. Leaked threat assessments prepared by JTF-GTMO, as well as files prepared for the detainees’ PRB hearings, link all four of them to the initial plan. Two of them were previously transferred by the Obama administration. Abdul Rahman Shalabi, a Saudi, was transferred to his home country on Sept. 22, 2015. Abd al Malik Abd al Wahab, a Yemeni, was transferred to Montenegro on June 22, 2016.
Only the fourth detainee identified by Bin Attash as being part of the plot, a Yemeni named Zuhail Abdo Anam Said al Sharabi, remains in US custody at Guantanamo. A summary prepared for Sharabi’s PRB hearing notes that he traveled to Malaysia, where he stayed with Bin Attash and two of the 9/11 hijackers. Sharabi apparently denied this allegation during questioning, but also described the pair of 9/11 hijackers as “martyrs.” JTF-GTMO’s analysts found that Sharabi’s trip to Malaysia with Bin Attash was ordered by Osama bin Laden himself as “part of the pre-planning for the hijacking plot.” The pair stayed at the home of Hambali, a notorious al Qaeda leader in Southeast Asia who is also still detained at Guantanamo.
Bin Attash told authorities that, just two months prior to 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) took the four (including Ansi), as well as two others, “to Karachi to teach them English language and American culture.”
Bodyguards for Osama bin Laden
Ansi, Shalabi, and Wahab were all captured on Dec. 15, 2001, as they crossed the Afghan border into Pakistan. All three were assessed to be bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. They were captured after allegedly fleeing the Battle of Tora Bora. The group they belonged to was dubbed the “Dirty 30” by US intelligence. Its most infamous member is Mohammed al Qahtani, who was slated to take part in the 9/11 hijackings, but was denied entry into the US in the summer of 2001.
JTF-GTMO found that Sharabi was also a bodyguard for bin Laden, but he was detained separately during a raid in Karachi in Feb. 2002. A senior al Qaeda facilitator and more than one dozen other al Qaeda fighters were captured alongside him.
Deemed “high” risks and denied transfer for years
JTF-GTMO deemed all four of the conspirators, including Ansi, “high” risks to the US, its interests and allies. As of 2008, JTF-GTMO also recommended that they remain in continued detention.
President Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force, which finished its work in Jan. 2010, agreed with JTF-GTMO’s recommendations. The task force concluded that Ansi, Shalabi, and Wahab should remain in US custody under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), because they were too dangerous to transfer but prosecution was considered infeasible. Sharabi was referred for prosecution, but he still hasn’t been tried seven years later.
Ansi, Shalabi, and Wahab were eventually approved for transfer during the PRB process, which was established by President Obama in 2011. But the decision to transfer them does not mean that they were suddenly deemed innocent, or that the PRB considered them to be risk-free.
In fact, the PRB even ruled against Ansi less than one year ago.
In its Mar. 23, 2016 decision, the PRB determined that “continued law of war detention of the detainee [Ansi] remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”
“In making this determination,” the decision continued, “the Board considered the significant derogatory information regarding the detainee’s past activities in Afghanistan.” The PRB “noted” Ansi’s “lack of candor resulting in an inability to assess the detainee’s credibility and therefore his further intentions.”
The PRB left the door open for Ansi to win approval for transfer just several months later. “The Board looks forward to reviewing the detainee’s file in six months and encourages the detainee to continue to be compliant, continue taking advantage of educational opportunities and continue working with the doctors to maintain his health,” the PRB wrote. “The Board encourages the detainee to be increasingly forthcoming in communications with the Board.”
Less than nine months later, on Dec. 9. 2016, the PRB reversed its previous decision, finding that Ansi’s detention “is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” In March, Ansi lacked candor. But by December Ansi had suddenly “demonstrated candor and provided details of his pre-detention activities and mindset.” He also supposedly did “not appear to be driven to reengage by extremist ideology,” the PRB wrote.
The PRB still did not say that Ansi could be outright released. Instead, the board stated that the “threat” Ansi “presents can be adequately mitigated,” as long as he was transferred to a country with a “strong rehabilitation and reintegration program” and “appropriate security assurances” were put in place. The PRB previously issued similar rulings for both Shalabi and Wahab.
Just over one month after the PRB’s revised decision, Ansi was transferred along with nine others to Oman.
Of the four detainees identified by Bin Attash as participants in the aborted 9/11 plot, only Sharabi has been denied transfer by the PRB. The review board cited Sharabi’s “possible participation in KSM’s plot to conduct 9/11-style attacks in Southeast Asia.”
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.From a Tibetan colony in central India to a luxe leopard safari camp, here are 10 new places in the country for your travel bragging rights:
Amadubi, Jharkhand
In one line: Make a day trip from Jamshedpur to watch artists at work
Though India is known for its rich art forms, the concept of Pyatkar painting is not so widely known. Chitrakars in Jharkhand paint on scrolls made from leaves and barks as they relate ancient legends through a series of pictures. Just 65km from Jamshedpur, Amadubi is home to these artists and presents a wonderful opportunity to watch the pictorial storytellers at work. Experience village tourism in rustic huts at a newly designed tourist complex while dining on local delicacies such as ud-pitha (steamed rice dumpling with lentils), gud-pitha (with jaggery) or zil-pitha (non-vegetarian). The akhara (open stage) showcases traditional dances linked to agricultural practices during colourful festivals such as Tusu parab (Jan–Feb), Sarhul/Baha (Feb–Mar), Dansai (Oct–Nov) and Sohrai (Nov–Dec). The nearest railway station Dhalbhumgarh, 9km from the village, has historic sites such as Rajbari, the palace of the Raja of Dhalbhum, besides the Trivineshwar and Dasbhuj temples. Samples of Pyatkar paintings, dokra craft, Mithila hand-painted saris and the region’s rich crafts can be bought at Biponi Handicrafts in Jamshedpur, which also organises trips to Amadubi. Website
Parule and Bhogwe, Maharashtra
In one line: An authentic farmstay experience, complete with plantation walks and Malvani cuisine
The Konkani settlement of Parule was once Parulya gramam, built around a Surya temple where the rays of the setting sun touched the idol before disappearing over the horizon. The temple’s renovation may have eclipsed this phenomenon, but the magic of the region is intact. Stay with the Samants at Maachli while enjoying life on a farm—milk a cow, get a fish spa treatment in a natural stream, go on a plantation walk and learn how to use a laath (the traditional method of drawing water for irrigation) as you relish delicious Malvani cuisine. Go on a morning nature trail to a shepherd’s temple or a longer sunset trek to the beach. Nearby, Bhogwe, lying in the shadow of Tarkarli, has remained unnoticed by travellers. But the rustic eco cottages made of bamboo, cane and thatch offer stunning coastal views and an enriching experience. Visit a devrai (sacred grove) or cashew-processing units, go bird-watching in serene mangroves in country crafts, and enjoy sunsets at Kille Nivti fort before taking a boat ride to Golden Rocks. Stop by at Chiva, designer George Oomen’s store near Kudal for innovative bamboo products. Bhogwe: +91 94230 52022; a.samant4530@gmail.com
Hankon, Karnataka
This river literally took my breath away #kalinadhi #karwar #hankon #westcoast #mangrooves A post shared by Adarsh Naik (@adarsh_naik) on Nov 21, 2014 at 12:25pm PST
Damro, Arunachal Pradesh
For the eco-conscious adventuristA 12km diversion from Karwar towards Dandeli on SH-95 leads past agricultural fields, railway crossings and Asnoti village, till finally, you reach the riverside hamlet of Hankon. Spread over five acres by the gently flowing River Kali, Riveredge Paradise is an eco-adventure camp that offers a range of water-sports right on the property! Try kayaking, canoeing, rafting, tubing and river crossing, or go rock-climbing and rappelling 4km away at Pata. For white-water rafting, banana0boat rides and other aqua adventures, head to Kali River Lodge at Dandeli or Devbagh Beach Resort, on an island off Karwar. Stay in wooden cabins or comfortable tents, with a river-facing restaurant serving fresh seafood. Solar-lit pathways, solar-heated water supply and the wastewater-treatment plant enhance the eco-experience. +91-8382266742, +91-9845588439
In one line: Visit the original village of the Adi Padam tribe and witness their age-old customs
The longest hanging bridge in Arunachal Pradesh at Damro sways gently over a silvery slash of River Yamne as Adi Padam herders head to the forests with their mithun. A domesticated form of the gaur (Indian bison), these semi-feral bovines recognise their master’s call and lumber forth for salt. Just above the woods, surrounded by terraced fields, is Yamne Abor, a cluster of thatched bamboo houses in a clearing. Run by Tsange Tsering Thungon and Oken Tayeng, the country home is a great base to explore this hidden back route between Pasighat and Yingkiong. Visit Damro, the original village of the Adi Padam tribe, and get an insight into their unusual Donyi-Polo culture, centred on the worship of the sun and the moon. Try the local staple of smoked pork, lai (leaves), raja chilli chutney and apong (rice beer). Watch men wield daos (machetes) with practiced ease as women carry firewood or harvested crops in cane baskets called beyen. For stay at Yamne Abor or longer explorations in the Northeast, contact Abor Country Travels & Expeditions.
Neduncheri T Puthur, Tamil Nadu
In one line: Marvel at the rich Chola tradition and get your fortune read by a parrot
Just 12km from Chidambaram and 2km east of Veeranam Lake, Lakshmi Vilas is a heritage hotel run by the Saradharam group at Neduncheri, housed in a traditional 1927 pannaiyar bangla (landlord’s bungalow) on Sivankoil Street. Replicating Chola architecture and showcasing rich Tamil traditions and cultural heritage, the heritage bungalow has an ethnic charm. The sprawling 4½-acre property has 20 heritage rooms and a restaurant in a coconut grove. Visit the adjacent Shiva temple, get your fortune read by a parrot (Kili jyotisam) and play traditional games such as Pallankuzhi (board game played with seeds), Adu Puli (tiger-hunt board game), Goli Gundu (marble-stone balls), Pambaram (spinning a top with thread) and Uri Adithal, where blindfolded participants break a clay pot hung above their heads. Lakshmi Vilas is a great base for birding at Veeranam Lake or the mangrove forest at Pichavaram.
Garamur, Majuli, Assam
In one line: Visit now, before Majuli gains world-heritage status and the tourists arrive
At Garamur satra, a gigantic yellow sculpture of Garuda broods in solitude as the still air is broken by the sound of adolescent storks clattering their beaks in the trees above. One of the largest riverine islands in the world, Majuli’s geographic isolation and serene atmosphere drew Vaishnava saint Srimant Shankardev (1449–1568), who set up Majuli’s first satra (monastic centre) at Belguri. Patronised by Ahom kings, music, dance, theatre and the arts prospered at the various satras. Over the years, the River Brahmaputra has shrunk the 1,200sqkm island to its present size of 460sqkm. Its fragile environment and unique cultural landscape make Majuli an aspirant for the UNESCO World Heritage tag. Stay in bamboo cottages such as La Maison de Ananda (House of Joy), Me:Po Okum (House of Happiness) and Do:Ni Polo (named after Sun–Moon, the Mishing gods) modelled after a Chang ghar, an ethnic hut of the Mishing tribe. Feast on Mishing cuisine such as fish, duck and bamboo shoots and catch blazing sunsets at Luit Ghat. On riverside walks to tribal settlements, watch young girls catch fish in swamps as women clatter away on looms to weave mirizim (ethnic shawl) and homespun textiles. The raas festival in Oct–Nov is a great time to visit. La Maison de Ananda: +91-9957186356 (Manjeet), danny002in@yahoo.com. Me:Po Okum: +91-9435203165
Poppalwadi, Goa
In one line: An eco-camp so remote that you’re picked up from a more accessible location
With no electricity, phones or roads, Off The Grid is a unique homestay experience in the Western Ghats run by white-water specialist John Pollard and his wife Sylvia Kerkar, a pottery artist. Eco-friendly, small, organic, rustic and ultra-low impact, the camp has adapted well to its remote environment. Located 600m above sea level on the Goa–Karnataka border, it has a wonderful climate all year round. Solar-powered LED lights provide lighting, and the use of cool materials and maximised ventilation offsets the lack of fans. Water is tapped from a waterfall above the property. Stay in teepee tents with attached bathrooms, or airy rooftop rooms with sit-outs. In the absence of nearby shops, the camp grows as much food as they can. Oven-fired pizzas, homemade breads, and barbecues, with a smattering of Japanese, Indian and Italian dishes, provide enough culinary variety. Go on guided walks to a private waterfall, nature treks, night safaris, and off-road drives to Dudhsagar waterfall. Being a remote property, guests are brought from the pick-up point at Castle Rock.
Jawai, Rajasthan
In one line: India’s coolest leopard-spotting destination
Equidistant from Udaipur and Jodhpur, and an hour’s drive away from the Jain temple at Ranakpur and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Kumbhalgarh Fort, is Jawai Leopard Camp. It is located upstream of Jawai Bandh, one of western Rajasthan’s largest reservoirs, which is abuzz with flamingos, geese, cranes and other migratory birds. However, leopards are Jawai’s main attraction and the camp is virtually enclosed by leopard country. Stay in luxurious tents, with a private deck offering an uninterrupted view of the wilderness and the dramatic landscape of granite formations, scrub and sandy riverbeds. Experienced guides help you track the elusive big cats in customised 4×4 safari jeeps. Wildlife trails may also reveal the Indian wolf, sloth bear, antelope and smaller game, which all coexist with vibrant Rabari herdsmen.
Mainpat, Chhattisgarh
In one line: Because not many have yet heard of a Tibetan settlement in the hills of central India
You may have visited the gompas of Dharamsala, Sikkim or Ladakh and even the gilded monasteries of Bylakuppe in Karnataka, but a Tibetan settlement in the hills of central India? Now that’s a find! After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1960s, one group of Tibetan refugees working in road construction at Sitapur arrived at Mainpat (now in central Chhattisgarh). Amazed by its cool climes, the Tibetan delegation surveyed the land, and nearly 3,000 acres of wild tract was allocated to them with the consent of the Home Ministry.
Today, the group of 62 plateaus perched at 3,200ft wears a different look, with prayer flags fluttering in the breeze. A 30km ascent from the base of the hill through forests of sal and bauxite mines leads to Mainpat. Divided into seven camps that support a 2,000-strong population, the key attraction is the Thakpo Shedupling Monastery. Built in 1970, it houses old thangkas, wall murals, and a solar heater that boils water and cooks rice in just 30 minutes. Stay in Swiss tents at Mercury Resort & Restaurant, with Tibetan food and bamboo décor. Head to scenic viewpoints such as Mehta Point, Tiger Point and Jaljali, or visit farms of potato and tau (buckwheat)—good for controlling blood pressure and cholesterol. Website
Urakam, Kerala
Learn pottery from the masters in God’s own countryThrissur is the undisputed centre of Keralan art and culture. But there’s more to it than the Guruvayoor School of Art, Kerala Kalamandalam, and Pooram, the majestic festival of caparisoned elephants. A 10km drive from town takes you to Urakam, where Clayfingers Pottery teaches you to shape earth into things of beauty. Set in peaceful rustic surroundings by a river, this multidisciplinary 15,000sqft pottery studio is a resurrected brick-and-tile factory that was built in the 1950s. Offering artist in residence programmes and internship courses, Clayfingers allows you to discover or hone your skills at clay modelling and glazing from national and international experts. Visit the pottery village Kumbhara gramam at Cheruthuruthy to watch traditional potters practising a craft that has withstood the onslaught of time for generations.The other day I was reading an review of the Nokia 520/521 Windows Phone 8 by Paul Thurrott. The case he makes about this affordable mid-range smartphone is that it can be used as a quality portable media device – and he’s right. I bought the Nokia Lumia 520 for $99 on Amazon. Yes, that’s correct, the prepaid smartphone is only $99. The only difference with the Lumia 521 is it’s on the T-mobile carrier and costs about $20 more for some reason.
Nokia Lumia 520 Portable Media
For music and video it has everything you could need, and more. It includes Xbox Music & Video (which syncs with your collection btw) and Nokia Music plus you can download apps for music, video, and podcasts. Apps like VEVO, Pandora, Nokia Music, plenty of unofficial YouTube apps and of course — Netflix. It also includes an FM radio which works if you have headphones plugged in. The radio definitely reminds me of the Zune HD when I owned one. Not to mention there are some really nice games on Windows Phone 8.
Is it the best model Nokia’s Lumia Lineup? No, that would be its 1020 model. But the point here is, while it’s a decent phone for kids or budget conscious users, it’s also an incredible portable media device on its own.
It’s prepaid and you’re not even required to pop in the SIM card to start using it. Most of the apps and services work fine over WiFi. However, if you want to us Nokia’s HERE maps and AT&T apps, you do need to pop in the SIM. You’ll also need that to activate the phone. But you don’t need to pay for a voice and data plan if you’re just going to use it as a media device over WiFi.
More Features, Lower Price than iPod touch
Think of it this way. The cheapest iPod touch you can buy at the time of this writing is for $229 for its new 16 GB model. The Lumia 520 comes with 8 GB of storage and lets you stick in a 64 GB MicroSD card which you can find on Amazon for about $50. So there you’re still saving $80 and getting more storage.
If you were to buy the 64 GB iPod touch, it will set you back $399. Oh, and the Lumia 520 is an actual phone too, where the iPod touch is not.
This phone completes my ecosystem of Microsoft devices and software. And at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, it fits in perfectly, just like an iPhone does in an Apple ecosystem. I just sign in with my Microsoft Account and everything is there on the phone. My contacts, email, SkyDrive files, Xbox gamer tag, music collect…etc. I’m also a subscriber of Office 365, and the Office apps work much better on Windows Phone than Android or iPhone, so that just another mark in the win category.
It’s a perfect mid-range pre-paid phone. I’ve always been a prepaid guy anyway. You can save a lot of money going prepaid. In fact, check out Austin’s article: How Much You Can Save by Switching to Prepaid.
Sure it’s not the top-of-the-line 1020, but it’s solid and perfect for my needs and allows me to get my music and other entertainment fix when I need it.
If you’re contract is coming up, I would recommend trying out a Windows Phone — especially if you’re leaving BlackBerry. I know most people who have an iPhone or Android are already loyal to their platform, but even so, you might want to give Windows Phone a try. There aren’t 5 Trillion apps like the other top two platforms, but the essential basic apps are there, or if official versions aren’t in the store, chances are there’s a decent third-party version.
As I get rolling with this phone over the next few days and weeks, expect to see several How To articles on WP8 and how to integrate it in with a full Microsoft ecosystem, including interesting things you can do with it, Xbox, and Windows 8.1.
What do you think about Windows Phone and / or the recent news of Microsoft buying Nokia? Leave us a comment and let us know your opinions!The NFL did not see the St. Louis Rams the way Washington's Robert Griffin III saw them in Week 2.
Jo-Lonn Dunbar, Quintin Mikell, Robert Quinn, William Hayes, Cortland Finnegan, Kendall Langford and Craig Dahl were among the Rams players taking shots at Griffin during a 31-28 Rams victory. All seven escaped NFL fines for the hits I outlined during a play-by-play accounting of the game. That means the NFL saw their tactics as within the rules.
The league did hand down fines for players on both teams. But none of the fines appeared to concern plays involving hits the Rams put on Griffin.
The NFL fined Rams defensive end Quinn in the amount of $7,875 for striking a Redskins offensive lineman in the head. Teammate Janoris Jenkins received a $15,750 fine for hitting the Redskins' Fred Davis. Rams guard Quinn Ojinnaka received two fines, each for $7,875 and each for hitting an opponent late.
The Redskins' Josh Morgan received a $7,875 fine for unsportsmanlike conduct. His teammate, Lorenzo Alexander, received a $15,750 fine for a horse-collar tackle.
The apparent absence of Griffin-related fines seems to validate the Rams' approach to defense in this game. There's still room for a team to play with an edge. Looks like Griffin, not the Rams, is the one needing to adapt.×
A shortage of wireless spectrum will mean slower speeds at peak times for users. What’s causing the pending crisis, and what are the possibilities for averting it?
Demand for wireless bandwidth continues to grow by leaps and bounds as more people use smartphones and other devices on wireless networks. But the supply of the wireless spectrum is relatively constrained. The result is a looming shortage of spectrum capacity.
For users, a spectrum shortage is like a traffic jam. They can expect wireless “rush hours” to be characterized by failed attempts to connect, and more instances of dropped calls or frozen Web browsing. Both 3G and 4G speeds will be considerably slower than expected and, at worst, video streaming won’t be possible.
What can governments and carriers do to alleviate the shortage’s effects? Unfortunately, efforts to improve spectrum availability and efficiency may not occur fast enough to keep up with demand. For example, governments use auctions to allocate or reallocate frequency bands to operators, but auctions can take years or even decades to occur. And LTE technology has substantially improved spectral efficiency, but the increase in wireless traffic has far outpaced the efficiency gains.
One way to allocate this scarce resource is for carriers to charge higher prices for higher speeds at peak times. Accelerating and streamlining processes for allocating spectrum and approving new cell towers may also be effective ways to relieve the congestion.
In this TMT Predictions video, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited researchers Duncan Stewart and Paul Lee explore the looming crisis and some possible solutions.Ever wonder why shower curtains blow inward when taking a nice hot shower? So do scientists. Many have tried to figure out how and why this happens, but no one has ever proven their theories conclusively. Who would have thought that the simple mechanics of a shower curtain blowing inwards would stump so many scientists?
Multiple Theories
There are currently 4 theories which attempt to explain how the shower curtain effect works. The first is called the Buoyancy theory. The buoyancy theory says that as the hot air rises, and replaces the cold air, it creates a Coandă effect which is similar to a small vortex (or tornado) of air which sucks the curtain inwards.
The second is the Bernoulli effect. This states that the air matches the velocity of the water coming out of the shower-head and lowers the air pressure inside the shower and against the inside of the shower curtain. This results in the shower curtain being pulled inward. This effect can be seen every time you fly in a plane. It’s what occurs on an aircraft’s wings which give it lift.
The third is a combination of the first two. It’s called the Horizontal vortex theory. A computer model showed that the water coming out of the shower-head can create a horizontal vortex (sideways tornado) which causes a pressure drop and pulls in the shower curtain.
The fourth and final explanation is simple condensation. A hot shower produces steam that will condenses on the shower side of the curtain and lowering the pressure there. The condensation will be continually replaced causing a temperature fluctuation which results in times where net steam production is negative.
So there you have it. Who would have thought such a simple thing still remains partially unproven and under contention.
Bonus fact: David Schmidt of University of Massachusetts was awarded the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for his partial solution (horizontal vortex theory) to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards. The Ig Nobel Prize is more for fun than prestige, but it honors those who first make people laugh, then make them think. The organization (made up of actual Nobel laureates) exist to celebrate the unusual and imaginative. That sounds like it’s right up our alley.
References:
Experimental Investigation of the Influence of the Relative Position of the Scattering Layer on Image Quality: the Shower Curtain Effect
NPR: Why does the shower curtain attack me?Take your combat skills to the next level with the Microsoft Xbox One Elite Wireless Controller. Designed in collaboration with pro-level players, this Elite version controller continues the precision and comfort of standard Xbox One controller, and introduces an array of new features for improved experience. The rubberized diamond grip and soft-touch finish on the top case deliver improved comfort and control. Interchangeable thumbsticks (stand, tall, domed) and D-pads (faceted, standard) offer you customized fit. Four paddles, which attach to the back of the gamepad, put more control at your fingertips. With the Hair Trigger Locks, you can limit the trigger button travel range for rapid firing. An Xbox Accessories App allows you to adjust settings, reassign buttons, and store the profile on the cloud for access anytime, anywhere. Plus, a durable travel case is included, thus you can keep the gamepad and interchangeable components neatly organized, and conveniently carry them all to places where battles take place.
Improve Your Performance and Fit
Swap between a variety of metal thumbsticks and D-pads for personalized control and ergonomics. Discover configurations that can improve accuracy, speed, and reach with thumbsticks of different shapes and sizes. The Xbox Elite controller adapts to your hand size and play style. You’ll experience better control whether you play FPS, racing, fighting, or other genres. The new, faceted D-pad enables easier and more reliable combo execution, while the traditional D-pad provides precise control to change weapons or call in a strike.
Control, Combinations, and Confidence
The Xbox Elite Wireless Controller has four slots for interchangeable paddles. Easily attach and remove them without any tools. Choose to attach some or all of the paddles, and configure the controller to what’s best for you.
The paddles give your fingers more control, so you can execute devastating moves and experience more efficient control. Now you don’t have to take your thumbs off the thumbstick to execute intricate jump, aim, and shoot combinations. With the app*, you can assign a wide range of inputs to each paddle.
*App available on Xbox One and Windows 10
Fire Faster with Hair Trigger Locks
With the flip of the Hair Trigger Locks, you can fire more quickly and save valuable time with each trigger pull. Hair Trigger Locks stop the trigger movement after the shot and get you ready for the next one. Simply flip the switch again to get back to full-range trigger motion. Each trigger has its own Hair Trigger Lock for independent control. Within the app, you can further fine-tune trigger settings.
Infinite Freedom and Flexibility
Customize your experience even further with an easy-to-use app*. Adjust trigger min/max values, thumbstick sensitivities, button assignments, and more, so the controls are exactly the way you want them. Assign any of 14 inputs to the ABXY buttons, paddles, D-pad, triggers, and thumbstick clicks.
Create as many controller profiles as you like in the app and have tailored settings for any game. Load two profiles on the controller and instantly change between them with the built-in Profile Switch. The possibilities are virtually limitless.
*App available on Xbox One and Windows 10
This is What Performance Feels Like
Every surface and detail is designed to meet the rigorous demands of competitive gamers.
Stainless steel thumbstick shafts, D-pads, and paddles are built to last. Low-friction, reinforced rings around each thumbstick minimize wear and provide buttery-smooth action.
Rubberized diamond grip gives the controller a more substantial feel while providing more stability. The enhanced grip also allows you to hold the controller with less effort, so you can play longer and more comfortably. The soft-touch finish on the top case provides a luxurious feel and nonslip control.
Be Ready for Anything, Anywhere
Each profile you create in the app* is stored in the cloud, and 2 profiles can be saved onto the controller itself. So no matter where you game, your profiles can always be with you.
The Xbox Elite Wireless Controller comes with a carrying case and variety of interchangeable components. In the box, you’ll find:
Xbox Elite Wireless Controller
Carrying case
Set of 4 paddles
Set of 6 thumbsticks: standard (2), tall (2), and domed (2)
Set of 2 D-pads: faceted and standard
USB cable
AA batteries
Quick Setup Guide and Product Manual
*App available on Xbox One and Windows 10
Specifications
System requirements: For use with Xbox One systems and PCs running Windows 7 or later. PC use requires included USB cable or Wireless Adapter (available Holiday 2015). Drivers available at xbox.com/xboxone/PC-controller.
Xbox Accessories App requirements: Available on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs.
Audio: Includes 3.5mm stereo headset jack. Also compatible with the Xbox One Stereo Headset Adapter and all other 1st party Xbox One controller accessories.
Haptic feedback: Features Impulse Triggers (in supported games) and rumble motors. Motor control can be adjusted in the App.
Weight: 348g (+/- 15g) when using with 4 paddles, faceted D-pad, AA batteries and standard thumbsticks attached.
Connectivity: Wireless, or wired using included 9’ USB cable. Data transfers through the USB cable when connected to the controller and console/PC.
Batteries: (2) AA (included). Compatible with Xbox One Play & Charge Kit (sold separately).
Assignable inputs:The police officer spied the five-liter Ford Mustang peeling down the Ontario highway, some 80 kilometers over the limit, and gave chase with his siren blaring. Expecting some speed-thirsty punk behind the wheel, the officer instead found an embarrassed 19-year-old, who quickly offered an excuse for his haste. “I’m really sorry, officer,” blurted Gary Roberts. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to race back to play in |
megadonors aren’t pitching a conniption because the GOP has failed to serve their interests — they are throwing a fit because the party has spoiled them rotten. Back in the day, revanchist plutocrats would have been grateful to see the United States slouching towards oligarchy. Today’s mollycoddled generation expects it to have arrived there months ago.Today we launch a new series on the site. It’s called The Warrior Ethos. Here’s a short intro, in case you missed it. The series is intended for our young men and women in uniform, but I hope that other warriors in other walks of life will give it a chance too. Posts will appear every Monday. After this week, Writing Wednesdays will resume.
Let’s plunge right in. Here’s the introduction to The Warrior Ethos and the first two chapters. (The photo above is from Khalidiyah, Iraq, 2008—the men of Company F, 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines. Thanks to Lance Corporal Albert F. Hunt.)
THE WARRIOR ETHOS
Part One: Academies of War
“The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy, but where are they.”
Plutarch, Sayings of the Spartans
INTRODUCTION
Writing About War
I am a writer. I write about war—external wars and internal wars, wars ancient and modern, real wars out of history and imagined wars that exist only in speculation. Why? I don’t even know myself.
My newest book is called The Profession. It’s set a generation into the future. The Profession posits a world in which combatants, serving for hire, have been cut loose from the traditional rules of war and are no longer bound by the standards of honor that have governed Western armies since Troy and before. This was new territory for me. Questions of right and wrong arose that I had never considered. The subject forced me to do some hard thinking.
Does a fighting man require a flag or a cause to claim a code of honor? Or does a warrior ethos arise spontaneously, called forth by necessity and the needs of the human heart? Is honor encoded into our genes? What does honor consist of—in an age when the concept seems almost abandoned by society at large, at least in the West?
What is the Warrior Ethos? Where did it come from? What form does it take today?
This volume is my attempt to address these questions. The book makes no claim to provide an ultimate, definitive answer. It’s just one man’s thoughts and observations on the subject.
The Warrior Ethos was written for our men and women in uniform, but its utility, I hope, will not be limited to the sphere of literal armed conflict. We all fight wars—in our work, within our families, and abroad in the wider world. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
We are all warriors. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives?
CHAPTER 1: TOUGH MOTHERS
Three stories from ancient Sparta:
A messenger returned to Sparta from a battle. The women clustered around. To one, the messenger said, “Mother, I bring sad news: your son was killed facing the enemy.” The mother said, “He is my son.” “Your other son is alive and unhurt,” said the messenger. “He fled from the enemy.” The mother said, “He is not my son.” A different messenger returned from a battle and was hailed by a Spartan mother: “How fares our country, herald?” The messenger burst into tears. “Mother, I pity you,” he said. “All five of your sons have been killed facing the enemy.” “You fool!” said the woman. “I did not ask of my sons. I asked whether Sparta was victorious!” “Indeed, Mother, our warriors have prevailed.” “Then I am happy,” said the mother, and she turned and walked home. Two warriors, brothers, were fleeing from the enemy back toward the city. Their mother happened to be on the road and saw them running toward her. She lifted her skirts above her waist. “Where do you two think you’re running? Back here from whence you came?”
The most famous Spartan mother story is also the shortest:
A Spartan mother handed her son his shield as he prepared to march off to battle. She said, “Come back with this or on it.”
That’s a warrior culture. That’s the Warrior Ethos.
A Spartan colonel, a man in his fifties, was accused of accepting bribes in an overseas command. When his mother back home learned of this, she wrote him the following letter: “Either quit your thieving or quit breathing.”
The Warrior Ethos embodies certain virtues—courage, honor, loyalty, integrity, selflessness and others—that most warrior societies believe must be inculcated from birth. In Sparta, every newborn boy was brought before the magistrates to be examined for physical hardiness. If a child was judged unfit, he was taken to a wild gorge on Mount Taygetos, the mountain overlooking the city, and left for the wolves.
We have no reports of a mother weeping or protesting.
CHAPTER 2: WOMEN FIRST
One scene in my book Gates of Fire has elicited more passionate feedback than any other. It’s the one where the Spartan king Leonidas explains what criteria he employed to select the specific 300 warriors that he chose to march off with him and die defending the pass at Thermopylae. The scene is fiction. There’s no evidence that anything like it happened in real life. But something about the moment seems to ring so true that it has produced a torrent of letters and e-mails.
Leonidas picked the men he did, he explains, not for their warrior prowess as individuals or collectively. He could as easily have selected 300 others, or twenty groups of 300 others, and they all would have fought bravely and to the death. That was what Spartans were raised to do. Such an act was the apex, to them, of warrior honor.
But the king didn’t pick his 300 champions for that quality. He picked them instead, he says, for the courage of their women. He chose these specific warriors for the strength of their wives and mothers to bear up under their loss.
Leonidas knew that to defend Thermopylae was certain death. No force could stand against the overwhelming numbers of the Persian invaders. Leonidas also knew that ultimate victory would be brought about (if indeed it could be brought about) in subsequent battles, fought not by this initial band of defenders but by the united armies of the Greek city-states in the coming months and years.
What would inspire these latter warriors? What would steel their will to resist—and prevent them from offering the tokens of surrender that the Persian king Xerxes demanded of them?
Leonidas knew that the 300 Spartans would die. The bigger question was, How would Sparta herself react to their deaths? If Sparta fell apart, all of Greece would collapse with her. But who would the Spartans themselves look to in the decisive hour? They would look to the women—to the wives and mothers of the fallen.
If these women gave way, if they fell to weeping and despair, then all the women of Sparta would give way too. Sparta herself would buckle and, with her, all of Greece.
But the Spartan women didn’t break, and they didn’t give way. The year after Thermopylae, the Greek fleet and army threw back the Persian multitudes at Salamis and Plataea. The West survived then, in no small measure because of her women.
The lioness hunts. The alpha female defends the wolf pack. The Warrior Ethos is not, at bottom, a manifestation only of male aggression or of the masculine will to dominance. Its foundation is society-wide. It rests on the will and resolve of mothers and wives and daughters—and, in no few instances, of female warriors as well—to defend their children, their home soil and the values of their culture.
[To be continued next Monday.]Oppose state repression of British youth
By Socialist Equality Party (UK)
11 August 2011
The elemental eruption of social anger that has swept London and other British cities in recent days has exposed the entrenched poverty, discrimination and police brutality faced daily by many working class youth.
The response of the entire political establishment and the media is to exclude any discussion of these conditions. In unison they insist that the riots and the instances of looting that have taken place are solely the consequence of a large “criminal underclass” of young people that “infests” the inner-cities and must be dealt with ruthlessly.
This is a slander against the youth. Those self-appointed custodians of morality who promote it—hypocrites of the first order!—fail to consider the implications of their own lies. What judgement is to be made of a social system that produces an entire generation of criminals?
The fact is that for 35 years the ruling elite and their political representatives have carried out a war against society. Every aspect of life has been subordinated to the interests of a parasitic financial elite that has looted public assets without restraint, leaving record levels of inequality and deprivation in their wake.
The immense social distress that presently prevails is set to worsen dramatically. It is no coincidence that the backdrop to the youth revolts is a new meltdown of the world’s stock markets. An orgy of speculation and greed on the part of a small, super-rich elite has produced an economic catastrophe.
In Britain, as elsewhere, the response of the ruling elite to the breakdown of capitalism is the imposition of austerity measures that will further impoverish tens of millions of people. This class war policy underlies the vicious response of the political establishment and the media to the disturbances. Their aim is to whip up the most reactionary elements so as to justify mass state repression and even more draconian attacks on social conditions.
That is why Prime Minister David Cameron is invoking the “rule of law” to sanction the use of water cannons and plastic bullets. It is the same reason that Labour leader Ed Miliband, whose party while in government helped create the appalling social conditions against which young people are rebelling, demands the “strongest possible police response.”
Their denunciations of the “criminality” and “immorality” of the young are staggering in their cynicism and hypocrisy.
They are made by the representatives of a bourgeoisie that is waging criminal wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya in which innocent civilians are killed daily. The very politicians—beginning with Cameron—who wax eloquent about morality have been exposed as the political bagmen of the multi-billionaire arch-reactionary Rupert Murdoch, whose News of the World was involved in criminality on an industrial scale, including the systematic bribery of the Metropolitan Police, the very force that is now being let loose on the streets of London to attack working class youth with impunity.
No action has been taken against Murdoch or any of his executives and bribed police officers—nor is any demanded. Murdoch and his son James are treated with grovelling deference by the politicians of all official parties as well as the media.
In all the condemnation of “lawlessness,” virtually no mention is made of Mark Duggan, the 29-year-old father of four whose fatal shooting by police last Thursday triggered the riots. There are no calls to bring to justice the police officer who murdered him.
Nor has a word of criticism been made of the mass arrests taking place across the country. Almost 2,000 people have been rounded up so far in the course of mass police sweeps in which young protesters have been indiscriminately attacked and seized. Courts are presently sitting through the night to process people charged with petty crimes, many of whom have been refused bail.
There is more than a whiff of fascism in the repeated appeals to “property owners” and “respectable citizens” to “take back the streets” from those described as “feral rats.” Writing in the Daily Mail, Max Hastings described the youth involved in the disturbances as “wild beasts” who “respond only to instinctive animal impulses.” In the early 19th century, Hastings continued, with undisguised approval, “spasmodic outbreaks of violence” by the “underclass” were dealt with “by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.”
In contrast, he complained bitterly, “Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.”
Such racist and fascistic rants are legitimized and disseminated by the “respectable” bourgeois press, while right-wing forces such as “libertarian” Paul Staines circulate electronic petitions to demand the restoration of the death penalty.
The re-called parliament is set to discuss stripping all unemployed people involved in the riots of their welfare entitlements, while the riots are being used to test out domestic counterinsurgency measures in preparation for the far broader struggles of the working class that are foreshadowed by these events.
The youth revolts have above all brought into the open the contemptible and reactionary character of those who style themselves as “liberals” and even “lefts.” For years these privileged middle-class layers have accommodated themselves to rising social inequality. Utterly indifferent to the impoverishment of broad layers of the population, their “progressive” credentials are based entirely on their championing of lifestyle politics and various forms of petty bourgeois identity politics.
Their reaction to the inner-city rebellions is one of intense fear and loathing. Labour’s Ken Livingstone—once known as “Red Ken”—was amongst the first to call for the deployment of water cannons, while the black and Asian Labour MP’s and assorted “community leaders” who have utilized racial politics to bolster their careers and bank balances are the most vociferous in insisting that poverty is “no excuse” for rioting and that the police must respond with force.
Ian Dunt, editor of politics.co.uk, articulated the outlook of such layers most explicitly. In the past, he wrote, “those of us who consider ourselves civil liberties advocates” had been wary of calls for law and order by “authoritarians.” But not anymore. “Let’s be clear, we have seen a glimpse of the breakdown of society,” he continued. We “must show we understand the need for tougher sanctions when they are genuinely needed to protect the public, or else we're just fanatics with no grasp of reality.”
Such statements speak to the political tragedy of the youth. Their entirely justified indignation has been unable to find any organized, progressive expression because of the utter rottenness and bankruptcy of the Labour Party and the various “left” tendencies. There is nothing fundamentally that separates these organisations from the Conservative Party and the right wing more generally. They simply speak for different sections of the same privileged elite.
As for the trade unions, their systematic efforts to sabotage and strangle any opposition to the government and its austerity measures have played a central role in isolating the youth, leaving them feeling frustrated and helpless.
The Socialist Equality Party unequivocally condemns the police assault that has been unleashed against young people and demands the immediate withdrawal of riot police from the areas they now occupy. Those held on petty charges must be released immediately without any further repercussions.
To the youth we say: all the resources you need to lead the fulfilling and productive lives to which you are entitled—well-paid jobs, free education, access to culture, sport and leisure and other essential provisions—can be attained, but only by challenging the monopoly exercised over society by the super-rich and their three political parties—Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat.
Your allies in this struggle are the working people in Britain and internationally. The working class—your class—is the only social force capable of overthrowing the capitalist system and reorganising economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit.
To workers and those genuinely concerned with democratic rights and the fight for social equality we say: come to the defence of the youth. Show them the way out of the nightmarish future of poverty, unemployment and war which capitalism offers.
To workers and youth alike we say: read about and study socialism and the history of the Marxist movement and take up the fight to build the Socialist Equality Party as the new revolutionary leadership of the working class.The new Russian liquid-fuel Liner missile is world’s most advanced submarine-based strategic weapon with range and payload capabilities surpassing every model deployed by any other country, its developer says.
The submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) Liner can carry up to 12 low-yield MIRV nuclear warheads and has a payload/mass ratio surpassing any solid-fuel strategic missiles designed by the US, UK, France and China, the developer Makeyev State Rocket Center said in a statement. It is very flexible in terms of what its payload can be, varying and mixing warheads of different capabilities.
The design bureau believes that the missile, which was first tested on May 20, will ensure the use of Delta IV class submarines until at least 2030.
There are seven vessels of this class in the Russian Navy, and they are armed with the SLMBs Sineva. The Liner is a highly advanced version of the Sineva missile.
There is little further detail about the Liner’s specifications so far. Sineva is a three-stage ballistic missile. It has a reported operational range of almost 12,000 kilometers, listed throw-weigh of 2.8 tonnes and can be launched from up to 55 meters deep.
Russia is the only nation that uses liquid-fuel submarine-based nuclear missiles. All other nations deploying SLBMs opt for solid propellants, since they allow for the building of more reliable missiles, which are simpler and cheaper to operate.
Russia has a solid-fuel SLBM in development too. The Bulava missile, which is the designated armament for the advanced Borey-class submarines, has seen several delays and setbacks over the years, but now it is slated to enter service after a series of successful test fires in 2010-2011.
Military experts say there is a certain competition between the two design approaches, but each has its own niche in the Russian Navy.
“The Bulava, which is similar to the American Trident II missile, is not able to replace the heavy liquid-fuel missile Sineva and its advanced version, the Liner. Only such heavy liquid-fuel missiles are capable of throwing big payloads to very long ranges,” military analyst Igor Khokhlov told RT.
The use of such missiles is necessary due to specifics of the missions,which the Russian Navy has to carry out, as well as its structure and nature, the expert says. Historically, Russia has perceived a land invasion as the primary military threat, while the Navy’s task was to protect the coastline rather than serve as an attack force. Liquid-fuel missiles are part of this force and will remain an integral part of Russia’s nuclear deterrence for at least several decades to come.
“Submarines armed with such missiles can operate from Russia’s safe territorial waters, where they are covered by the Russian Air Force and its surface Navy. They can also have electronic equipment, necessary to suppress the US antiballistic missile system, as part of their payload in addition to the warheads themselves,” Igor Khokhlov from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations explained.
Building heavy liquid-fuel SLBMs is a scientific and engineering task, which only Russia can carry out at the moment, Khokhlov added. No other technology can provide similar capabilities now, unless an unexpected sudden breakthrough happens.The baking time is TOO long or the temp. is too high. Also, why does it say "set aside" the bottom layer when it is to be baked BEFORE the streusel is added? The flavor is OK but the bars are too dry due to the excessive baking time/temp. I would recommend these with modifications but not as the recipe is written.
Thanks for giving this recipe a try, Marian, and for sharing your thoughts. While we've written this recipe intending for both the squares and the topping to be prepped before baking, you're right to think that the topping could also be made while the squares are baking. This is a great, time-saving option for some bakers, and can be stressful to others. Based on your mention of "excessive baking time/temp", we wonder if you might have been baking in a glass pan, rather than a metal one? Since glass pans don't conduct heat as evenly or efficiently as metal pans, it can be easy to harden or dry out the edges while waiting for the middle to set. If you choose to bake in glass, we recommend reducing the oven temp by 25° to allow for a slightly lower, slower bake. Mollie@KAFArab Knesset Member Basel Ghattas (Joint Arab List) attacked former President Shimon Peres in a Facebook post in Arabic on Wednesday as Peres lies unconscious and fighting for his life in a hospital bed after suffering from a stroke.
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"Let us remember in his death his true essence as a tyrant," Ghattas's post said. “He was directly responsible for various atrocities and war crimes which he committed against us…He is completely covered with our blood."
The Arab MK continued, saying "Is Peres's inevitable end coming close? We don't know. He has seven lives. But he is, without doubt, on his final journey. We must remember that he is one of the pillars of the arrogant, imperialist Zionist enterprise, and of the settler enterprise, along with being one of the most heinous, most brutal, and oldest in terms of age and results. He is the one who inflicted the most damage and brought a plethora of disasters to the Palestinian nation and to the Arab world. Yet despite all of this, Peres is viewed as a dove, and even won the Nobel Peace Prize."
MK Basel Ghattas (Photo: Balad)
Peres would not have been able to achieve this, Ghattas claimed, “without the direct and indirect help we gave him throughout his life. We should not rush to support this festival of sadness and collective loss to the tribe."
MK Yoel Hasson (Zionist Union) came out in Peres's defense, responding that "before Basel Ghattas opens his mouth to say Peres's name, it might be worth it for him to take his immense contribution to Israeli-Arab society in particular and Israeli society in general into consideration. You are someone who doesn't come to Knesset meetings, even to just warm up your seat. You're a man who has scammed the Israeli-Arabs, abandoned them, and have worked unceasingly to strengthen Palestinian terrorists."
Hasson continued, asking "when was the last time Ghattas worked to advance education in the Arab sector? When did he ever care about those who have been injured by violence, the lack of proper infrastructure, or the dearth of public transportation in Arab communities?"
MK Yoel Hasson (Photo: Dana Kopel)
"Basel Ghattas is a festival of disgust and shame, a festival of provocation, evil, and shame, and a loss to his constituents. Even if Ghattas lives for 300 more years, he wouldn't even be able to come close to the amount of good which Peres did for the Israeli-Arab community."
MK Itzik Shmuli (Zionist Union) also came out swinging against the comments, according Ghattas of self-promotion and a provocateur: “Ghattas is a small and wretched man and all his contribution to politics has amounted to sowing hatred and strife between people, support for terror and cheap provocation for his own self promotion. He is not worthy at all of even mentioning Peres’s name from his mouth.”
MK Itzik Shmuli (Hagai Dekel and Yogev Atias)
Similarly, Deputy Knesset Chairman MK Meir Cohen also joined the rejection and issued his own attack against the comments: “Basel Ghattas is a despicable person in the public domain. Comments such as these by haters of Israel have blackened our name around the world. He is a person who lives here and enjoys the fruits of the state but is constantly bashing it,” Cohen said. “And if that is not enough, he chooses to curse one of the greatest symbols of peace in the world. I hope that we will find the way to remove people like Ghattas from our parliament.”
Ghattas's Facebook post
He went on to say that he was consoled by the fact that Ghattas does not represent the vast majority of the the Arab public, but the “despicable extremists among them.”
He called upon the head of the Joint List to condemn Ghattas’s inflammatory statements, before recalling a personal encounter with Peres during which the former president implored him to ensure the wellbeing of the Arab community.
“I will tell you, Ghattas, that in my time as minister of welfare, Peres invited me to his office and asked me to utilize massive resources for the benefit of the Arab sector. He urged me to ‘Make sure that not another Arab child will go hungry,’” Cohen concluded.Well if it isn't the ol' snake-mimic caterpillar! Otherwise known as Hemeroplanes triptolemus, this shape-shifting larva of a sphinx moth has one of the dandiest of tricks to perform when feeling threatened. It flips up its back section to reveal a perfectly rendered snake face, complete with white spots acting as the reflection of light. Incredible! It also mimics snake behavior with actual darting gestures. If I were a bird, I'd stay so far away.
Thank you to photographer Andreas Kay who took this remarkable photo in the Amazon rainforest near Puyo, Ecuador.
(See more of these masters of mimicry here: 10 spectacular caterpillars that look like snakes.)
Would you like to see your nature photo featured as the TreeHugger photo of the day? Join TreeHugger’s Reader Photo Pool on flickr and add your pictures to the group.
This updated post was originally posted in 2016.Installing Git for Windows
Download git for windows Run the downloaded installer and pay attention to the following settings You may prefer installing the git context menu, but I like to keep things simple so I just unchecked it Choose “Use Git from the Windows command prompt” Choose “Checkout windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings”
Installing SSH tools
The most common SSH windows utilities are the ones coming with Putty.
Downloading Putty binaries
First you need to go to Putty binaries repository and download the following resources:
puttygen.exe plink.exe pageant.exe
Generating SSH keys
If you don’t have a SSH public/private key pair you can generate it using the puttygen utility.
From now on I’ll use %USER_HOME% whenever I refer to your Windows user home folder, which depending on your Windows version may be located in:
Version Path Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\vlad Windows 7 and later C:\Users\vlad
You need to create a %USER_HOME%.ssh folder to store your SSH private key.
mkdir.ssh
Open puttygen and click Generate Copy the public key to clipboard Go to your GitHub account, open the Account settings menu and navigate to the SSH Keys section. There you need to paste your public key Add a strong key passphrase for securing your private key usage and click “Save the private key”. You need to save it to the %USER_HOME%\.ssh folder. You should now have a %USER_HOME%\.ssh\github-rsa.ppk file.
Setting up the SSH agent
Create a shortcut of pagent.exe and save it in the Startup folder.
In Windows 10, you can access the Startup folder associated to your user account under this path: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\
Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup Make sure the shortcut’s target contains the path to your key as well. C:\Putty\pageant.exe %USER_HOME%\.ssh\github-rsa.ppk Run pagent and it should go to your System Tray Double-click the pagent System Tray icon Make sure the %USER_HOME%\.ssh\github-rsa.ppk private key is listed Go to environment variables and add the GIT_SSH variable to reference the plink.exe system path.
Testing time
First you need to establish a Plink connection, to make sure the SSH authentication works:
D:\kits\Putty>plink.exe -v git@github.com Looking up host "github.com" Connecting to 192.30.252.129 port 22 Server version: SSH-2.0-libssh-0.6.0 Using SSH protocol version 2 We claim version: SSH-2.0-PuTTY_Release_0.63 Using Diffie-Hellman with standard group "group14" Doing Diffie-Hellman key exchange with hash SHA-1 Host key fingerprint is: ssh-rsa 2048 16:27:ac:a5:76:28:2d:36:63:1b:56:4d:eb:df:a6:48 Initialised AES-256 SDCTR client->server encryption Initialised HMAC-SHA-256 client->server MAC algorithm Initialised AES-256 SDCTR server->client encryption Initialised HMAC-SHA-256 server->client MAC algorithm Pageant is running. Requesting keys. Pageant has 1 SSH-2 keys Using username "git". Trying Pageant key #0 Authenticating with public key "artsoft96" from agent Sending Pageant's response Access granted Opening session as main channel Opened main channel Server refused to allocate pty Started a shell/command Server sent command exit status 1 Hi vladmihalcea! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access. Disconnected: All channels closed
Now clone one of your GitHub repositories and play with git. You shouldn’t be asked for your username/password.
D:\vlad\GitHub>git clone git@github.com:vladmihalcea/db-util.git Cloning into 'db-util'... remote: Reusing existing pack: 213, done. remote: Total 213 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0) Receiving objects: 100% (213/213), 150.94 KiB | 97.00 KiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (86/86), done. Checking connectivity... done. D:\vlad\GitHub>cd db-util D:\vlad\GitHub\db-util>git commit -a -m "Change developer id to author" [master 93ee2bf] Change developer id to author 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) D:\vlad\GitHub\db-util>git push Counting objects: 7, done. Delta compression using up to 2 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done. Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 337 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done. Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0) To git@github.com:vladmihalcea/db-util.git 21e9c0e..93ee2bf master -> master
Download free ebook sampleAfter Target announced that they would be making their toy section gender neutral—no signs demarcating toys for “girls” or “boys”—some people were upset by the move and took to Target’s Facebook page. They didn’t expect the response they got from user Mike Melgaard, who pretended to be an official Target customer service account.
All Melgaard needed to fuel outrage and confusion was a Facebook account he created called Ask ForHelp that sported Target’s bullseye logo. Ask ForHelp was obviously not verified, but most people didn’t care, interacting with Melgaard and growing increasingly irate as he trolled their gender neutral hatin’ ways. Ars Technica points out that “rather than checking for a verified blue checkmark,” they believed that Ask ForHelp was legit at first glance and sought repeatedly to report him to Target overlords. When Melgaard screencapped his shenanigans and posted them to Facebook, the prank went viral.
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The comments following Target’s toy signage announcement are surprisingly nasty. It’s evident from some of the posts that people weren’t sure what the announcement meant, accusing Target of a wide range of politically correct capitulations and declaring their intention to now shop at Walmart. Usually such comments would go unread or receive a neutral customer service response. Melgaard had other plans.
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Melgaard got away with posing as a “Target rep” for 16 hours despite numerous reports before he was finally shut down. Target hasn’t addressed his trolling specifically, but rather invited disgruntled haters to call them with their concerns. For his part, Melgaard told Ad Freak that he did it mostly for the lulz. “I definitely side with Target and support their decision wholeheartedly,” Melgaard said. “That being said, this was, for me, more about the laughs. I absolutely love satirical humor, and I think America could use a little more laughter.”
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Don’t forget, kids: someone on the Internet is always watching you comment.
[Ars Technica; Ad Week; Mike Melgaard on Facebook]Sony Corp.'s deputy president and SCE Group CEO Kaz Hirai believes PS Vita isn't in direct competition with devices like Apple's iPhone and iPad, and recently shared the company's strategy in tackling the growing mobile market with PS Suite.Though the past couple of years has seen the rapid rise of gaming on smartphones and tablets -- resulting in many consumers abandoning dedicated handhelds for mobile gaming -- the executive argued that PS Vita won't be threatened by that trend."We're catering to a completely different market," said Hirai in an interview with The Guardian. "I don't see the PS Vita being in direct competition with smartphones and tablets."He added, "However, I do recognize that that's a growing market as well, and that's why we announced the [PlayStation Suite] initiative where we are bringing the PlayStation experience to Android-powered smartphones and tablets."The PS Suite program, introduced by the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play last month, is a framework allowing certified Android-powered devices to download and run PlayStation content released by Sony."We're doing it in a uniquely PlayStation way where we certify the hardware devices as PS Certified," said Hirai. "That means you can enjoy Sony experiences the way they're meant to be enjoyed."News and insights from around the Web:
Payments
Bitcoin payments around the world are reportedly failing: "There's a technical upper limit on how many transactions the blockchain can process per second — putting a limit on how much the digital currency can grow as a substitute for cash. This week problems materialized when the bitcoin network reached capacity, resulting in lengthy transaction times of 43 minutes, up from the usual 10 minutes, according to a thread on Reddit. Several of them failed completely."
Bubblewatch
Snapchat raises capital but at a flat valuation: "Snapchat’s inability to raise funds at a higher valuation than a year ago may be a sign investors have grown more cautious about the company’s prospects. In recent months, tech startups have increasingly raised capital at the same or lower valuations than earlier, posing risks to these companies’ ability to recruit and retain talent and adding to concerns that the era of runaway growth in valuations is ending."
Startups
An Estonian startup helps people get tech jobs around the world: "Jobbatical aims to match the skill sets and travel aspirations of tech and startup professionals with companies in search of talent. Companies list jobs on the platform and ambitious travel enthusiasts are invited to apply for them. The startup, which hails from the same country as Skype, makes money by charging a commission on each successful hire."
Uber's "GrubHub killer" has arrived in the U.S.: "For the first time, the company has broken a product out into its own standalone app. On Tuesday, the company launched its long-awaited UberEats app in the US, kicking it off in Los Angeles. Availability will roll out in the rest of the country throughout the month."
Here's a hoodie startup whose target customers are entrepreneurs: "Elena Titova is the founder of Et 2 Graphics in New York City, a UI/UX design firm and she interacts (and hires) lots of developers and technical geeks. She noticed they all seem to wear essentially the same thing day in and day out: some variation of a tee-shirt, jeans, Adidas and the ever-present hoodie. 'If you go anywhere in this world—networking events, investors speeches, Starbucks, a coworking space–you’re surrounded by people wearing the same thing,' says Titova. 'I thought, if all these people are going to wear a hoodie anyway, they might as well wear one of mine.'"
Family Business
A family feud splits a renowned cheese-steak shop in Philadelphia: "'My heart is broken,' said Tony Lucidonio Jr., the bald, goateed longtime frontman of the sandwich brand. 'I would never do anything to hurt my family. … [This is] painting me out to be this evil, greedy son, to destroy my father and my brother. That is not true.'"
Finance
The first equity-crowdfunded IPO soars past a $1 billion valuation: "Elio Motors – the startup automaker with the space-age, three-wheeled car – has surpassed $1 billion market valuation, days after becoming the first equity-crowdfunded company to list its shares on the public markets. The lofty valuation, $1.3 billion at close of trading on Monday, is the latest sign of success for crowdfunded companies after years of twists and turns following the 2012 JOBS Act, which was intended to increase funding for entrepreneurs and small businesses during the recession."
Social Media
An Irish entrepreneur uses social media to drum up interest, and she expects sales to reach $60 million by 2020: "So, in 2009, she took the social media route, sending samples to dozens of technology bloggers, in the belief that if they saw its potential role in repairing information technology equipment, they’d promote it. The strategy worked. 'It went viral,' she said. When the company introduced its website in December 2009, all 1,000 packages, which took two months to make by hand, sold out within six hours. An additional 2,000 were sold on back order."
Marketing
Facebook is really going after small and medium-sized businesses: "In the past year, Facebook revamped its Pages product to add features like appointment booking, better inventory-listing options, and easier formats for things like hours of operation. It also started to let businesses communicate with people via private messages. For a while, the company ardently made the pitch to small businesses that creating a Page was the easiest way to establish an online |
Something we dubbed “the tentacle” emerged, spiraling the length of his belly and yielding a substance that smelled of old fish and garbage.
I called Dr. Meyers. “Señor Bacon has come of age,” I said.
In his garage, I got to observe the surgery.
Related More From Menagerie Read previous contributions to this series.
He made incisions and snipped out what resembled two oblong golf balls. Dr. Meyers clamped the veins and tied them off.
I hadn’t eaten meat in 16 years out of love for animals. But Jason ate it and I loved cooking for him; I’d made — and sampled — pork tacos and ragù.
My guilt worsened when Señor Bacon arrived, but seeing him splayed out on a table, hogtied and sliced open turned me back. My rational mind was aware that this was surgery, not slaughter. Even so, I stopped eating meat and persuaded Jason to give up pork in honor of our 30 (fortunately not 500) pounds of pterodactyl-screeching, shovel-nosing, vegetable-scrap chomping, Great-Lake-making, snuggly potbelly.
At night, he hops up on the couch to wedge into a lap or an armpit. He ditched his own bed for ours, taking flying leaps in and nosing us over to make room. At first, I protested. Yes, the dog slept there, but a pig in the bed was strange. Jason alluded to Bacon’s potential as a foot-warmer on chilly winter nights. As he burrowed under the blankets and we rested our feet against his warm body, the coziness was convincing.
The real Señor Bacon was even better than the one we’d imagined.
Liza Monroy is the author of “The Marriage Act,” a memoir, and “Mexican High,” a novel. She teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Rutgers College,
New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers College,
New Brunswick, N.J.
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Rutgers College,
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Rutgers College
Old Queens Building Old Queens Building, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Old Queens Building Winants Hall Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Winants Hall and Queens Campus, Rutgers College, Brunswick, N.J. Winant's Hall, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J.
Geological Hall and Van Nest Hall, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. New Brunswick, N.J. Winants Hall, Rutgers College. New Brunswick, N.J. Chapel and Library, Rutgers College. Kirkpatrick Chapel Kirkpatrick Chapel, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. College Avenue and Entrance to Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J.
NB-6--Main Hall, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. Queen's Building and Campus, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. New Jersey Hall, Rutgers College New Brunswick, N.J. N.B.18 Queens Campus, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. (Class of 1902 Gates) Balantine's Gymnasium, New Brunswick, N.J.
Ballentine Gymnasium, Rutgers College. New Brunswick, N.J. Gymnasium, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Gymnasium Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Ballentine Gymnasium, New Brunswick, N.J. Engineering Building, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Engineering Building, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J.
Rutgers College - New Brunswick, N.J. (Engineering Building) Engineering Building, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. John Howard Ford Dormitory, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J, Wessel - Leupp - Pell Dormitories, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, N.J. NB-9 -- Hertzog Hall, Theological Seminary, New Brunswicn N.J.
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Statue of William the Silent on Bleeker Campus of Rutgers University N.B. 10 -- Gymnasium, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
Ceramics Building, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. Vorhees Library & Balantine Gymnasium, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Library, Rutgers College New Brunswick, N.J. Library, Rutgers College New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers, The State University, New Rutgers Library, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers, The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hardenbergh Dormitory
R10 - Rutgers, The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Livingston, Hardenburgh, Frelinghuysen Men's Dormitory Group. Demarest Hall, Rutgers - State University. New Brunswick, N.J. Real Photo Postcard - Student Dorm Room, Rutgers College Rutgers Trap, New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers College.
Kappa Sigma House. Rutgers College.
Phi Epsilon Pi House.The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Last week, the citizens of the United Kingdom decided by majority vote to pull out of the European Union. One thing that voters probably didn't consider was that world governing bodies such as the EU are rampant with espionage.
Global governance institutions act as permanent installations in and around which intelligence officers can intermingle with their counterparts from other countries -- identifying, recruiting and cultivating sources and assets in order to discreetly collect information or influence policy, all while enjoying the diplomatic immunity that prevents them from suffering any serious consequences if they are caught.
This partly explains why the European Commission's diplomatic corps isn't limited to European countries and also includes accredited missions of the African Union, the General Delegation of Palestine, the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates), Hong Kong, the International Monetary Fund, the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the United Nations, the World Bank and others.
Basically, intelligence officers from around the world gather in Brussels under the guise of European solidarity, all while competing for potentially valuable information. The show that European citizens see on television, with members of European Parliament squawking at one another in a near-empty hall, represents only the noisy splashing on the surface of much deeper waters.
In 2014, the online publication The Intercept revealed that the British electronic intelligence agency GCHQ used malware to gain access to Belgian telecom operator Belgacom, which serves the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council.
Members of the "Five Eyes" -- the intelligence alliance of the U.S., Canada, U.K, Australia and New Zealand -- are obligated to share intelligence with the other members. Even though the U.K. is the only member of the Five Eyes based in Europe, the information that the GCHQ obtained on the EU was surely shared with American intelligence agencies.
You might wonder, "Why would the United States or Canada care to spy on European nations? Aren't they supposed to be allies?" It's not a matter of xenophobia. It has more to do with a perceived discrepancy in values.
Here in France, for example, the sort of shady political practices that allow for blind eyes to be turned when envelopes full of cash are passed under the table wouldn't fly in English-speaking countries. The kind of transparency that exists in Canada, where even the detailed lunch expenses of elected officials are published online, is unheard of in France and most other EU nations.
Economic espionage by the GCHQ and its allies is seen as unethical by some, including former NSA contractor and CIA employee Edward Snowden, but top-ranking officials believe it to be necessary. Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey explained the rationale for such information-gathering in a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2000 titled, "Why We Spy on Our Allies."
"That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe," Woolsey wrote. "Your companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible."
In the 1990s, the U.S. collected such information through the National Security Agency in order to expose bribery by French industrials and scuttle contract bids. Today, the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office is investigating France-based Airbus over allegations of corruption.
Modern warfare is largely economic in nature. Take, for example, the competition between Boeing and Airbus to sell jets to Iran. At first it looked as if Airbus was winning that battle, but then a $27 billion provisional deal between Iran and Airbus hit a snag. Airbus is required to obtain U.S. export licenses since more than 10 percent of the parts on the Airbus jets involved in the deal come from the United States. In the meantime, Boeing has announced its own deal with Iran for 100 airliners, and Iran's longtime pal, Russia, has unveiled a new passenger jet that rivals Boeing and Airbus jets.
The U.S. has a vested interest in the success of Boeing, the country's largest manufacturing exporter, and if America can stick a spoke in the wheel of other nation-state competitors to help one of its own, so much the better. That's the game being played among allies in places like Brussels.
Now that the only European member of the Five Eyes has pulled out of the EU, the U.S. is in danger of losing a critical monitoring channel.Paul-Erik Veel, one of the lawyers representing Douglas Cardinal, says the continual use and display of the Cleveland Indians logo causes some to have to'make a choice between avoiding a game altogether, or attending a game at an increased burden to themselves.'
An Indigenous activist’s case against a Major League Baseball team and its league will be before the Ontario Divisional Court next week as the league argues that Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal does not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
In 2016, Douglas Cardinal — a renowned Canadian architect of Blackfoot descent — commenced two applications, before the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, seeking to enjoin the Cleveland Indians Baseball Company, Major League Baseball, and Rogers Communications Inc. from displaying, broadcasting, communicating or otherwise disseminating any representations or depictions using the word “Indian” or any form thereof in relation to the Cleveland Indians and using the “Chief Wahoo” logo within Canada.
The logo, as Legal Feeds previously reported, is a cartoon caricature of an aboriginal man, red-skinned with a toothy grin and a feathered headband, holding a baseball bat. Cardinal argues that the team name and the logo are racist and discriminatory, and using them in baseball games contravenes human rights codes.Rathinagiri
Posts: 374
Fractal FertilizerPosts: 374 My 3D Stereo Fractals « on: April 26, 2010, 10:35:31 PM »
I had seen many wonderful fractals here. I know that mine won't even come near to them.
However, I wish to share some of them with you.
I am a 3D enthusiastic. One year before I found Chaoscope and Apophysis. Since then, I started to create random 3D stereo fractal flames.I had seen many wonderful fractals here. I know that mine won't even come near to them.However, I wish to share some of them with you. Logged
Rathinagiri
Posts: 374
Fractal FertilizerPosts: 374 Re: My 3D Stereo Fractals « Reply #4 on: April 26, 2010, 10:57:15 PM »
I will continue if you like to... I will continue if you like to... Logged
Sockratease
Fractal Senior
Posts: 3181
Global ModeratorFractal SeniorPosts: 3181 Re: My 3D Stereo Fractals « Reply #5 on: April 26, 2010, 11:13:22 PM » Those are very nice!
I never could quite get the stereoscopic effects to work for me. Must be related to being dyslexic. I need the viewers (like "Viewmaster" style reels) to see such things really working.
Logged
The All New Fractal Forums is now in Public Beta Testing! Visit FractalForums.org and check it out! Life is complex - It has real and imaginary components.
Lee Oliver
Posts: 314
Fractal FanaticPosts: 314 Re: My 3D Stereo Fractals « Reply #6 on: April 26, 2010, 11:26:46 PM » Those are really cool. I especially like your spirals. Keep it up! Logged Kalosmi lokaksayakrt-pravrddho
Lokan smahartum-iha pravrttah|
rtepi twam na bhavisyanti sarve
yevasthitah pratyanikesu yodhah
bib
Fractal Senior
Posts: 2070
At the borders...
Global ModeratorFractal SeniorPosts: 2070At the borders... Re: My 3D Stereo Fractals « Reply #11 on: April 29, 2010, 03:59:20 PM » Thanks, those "true 3D" mandelbulbs look so real. Can you do the same with more detailed/zoomed views? Logged Between order and disorder reigns a delicious moment. (Paul Valéry)
cKleinhuis
Fractal Senior
Posts: 7044
formerly known as 'Trifox'
AdministratorFractal SeniorPosts: 7044formerly known as 'Trifox' Re: My 3D Stereo Fractals « Reply #12 on: April 29, 2010, 04:05:13 PM » my eyes hurt... how to use the 3, 4 part images?!
Logged ---
divide and conquer - iterate and rule - chaos is No random!
cbuchner1
Posts: 443
Fractal PhenomPosts: 443 Re: My 3D Stereo Fractals « Reply #13 on: April 29, 2010, 04:25:10 PM »
Cool stuff in this thread. After renaming these files to.jps (stereo jpeg file extension) I should be able to watch them with my 3DVision shutter glasses and the nVidia 3D image viewer.
Thanks for sharing.
Logged(AP) SAN FRANCISCO - If you're amazed and maybe even a little alarmed about how much Google seems to know about you, brace yourself. Beginning Thursday, Google will operate under a streamlined privacy policy that enables the Internet's most powerful company to dig even deeper into the lives of its more than 1 billion users.
Google says the changes will make it easier for consumers to understand how it collects personal information, and allow the company to create more helpful and compelling services. Critics, including most of the country's state attorneys general and a top regulator in Europe, argue that Google is trampling on people's privacy rights in its relentless drive to sell more ads.
Here's a look at some of the key issues to consider as Google tries to learn about you.
Q: How will Google's privacy changes affect users?
A: Google Inc. is combining more than 60 different privacy policies so it will be able to throw all the data it gathers about each of its logged-in users into personal dossiers. The information Google learns about you while you enter requests into its search engine can be culled to suggest videos to watch when you visit the company's YouTube site.
Users who write a memo on Google's online word processing program, Docs, might be alerted to the misspelling of the name of a friend or co-worker a user has communicated with on Google's Gmail. The new policy pools information from all Google-operated services, empowering the company to connect the dots from one service to the next.
Q: Why is Google making these changes?
A: The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., says it is striving for a "beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google." What Google hasn't spent much time talking about is how being able to draw more revealing profiles about its users will help sell advertising the main source of its $38 billion in annual revenue.
One reason Google has become such a big advertising network: Its search engine analyzes requests to figure out which people are more likely to be interested in marketing pitches about specific products and services. Targeting the ads to the right audience is crucial because in many cases, Google only gets paid when someone clicks on an ad link. And, of course, advertisers tend to spend more money if Google is bringing them more customers.
Q: Is there a way to prevent Google from combining the personal data it collects from all its services?
A: No, not if you're a registered user of Gmail, Google Plus, YouTube, or other Google products. But you can minimize the data Google gathers. For starters, make sure you aren't logged into one of Google's services when you're using Google's search engine, watching a YouTube video or perusing pictures on Picasa. You can get a broad overview of what Google knows about you at http://www.google.com/dashboard, where a Google account login is required. Google also offers the option to delete users' history of search activity.
It's important to keep in mind that Google can still track you even when you're not logged in to one of its services. But the information isn't quite as revealing because Google doesn't track you by name, only through a numeric Internet address attached to your computer or an alphanumeric string attached to your Web browser.
Q: Are all Google services covered by the privacy policy?
A: No, a few products, such as Google's Chrome Web browser and mobile payment processor Wallet, will still be governed by separate privacy policies.
Q: Is Google's new privacy policy legal?
A: The company has no doubt about it. That's why it's repeatedly rebuffed pleas to delay the changes since announcing the planned revisions five weeks ago. But privacy activists and even some legal authorities have several concerns.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, sued the FTC in a federal court in an effort to force the FTC to exercise its powers and block Google's privacy changes. A federal judge ruled the courts didn't have the authority to tell the FTC how to regulate Google. The FTC says it is always looking for evidence that one of its consent orders has been violated.
Earlier this week, the French regulatory agency CNIL warned Google CEO Larry Page that the new policy appears to violate the European Union's strict data-protection rules. Last week, 36 attorneys general in the U.S. and its territories derided the new policy as an "invasion of privacy" in a letter to Page.
One of the major gripes is that registered Google users aren't being given an option to consent to, or reject, the changes, given that they developed their dependence on the services under different rules. In particular, people who bought smartphones running on Google's Android software, and signed two-year contracts to use the devices, may have a tough time avoiding the new privacy policy. They could switch to non-Google services, but those typically don't work as well on Android software. Or they could buy a different smartphone and pay an early-termination penalty.
Q: What regulatory power do government agencies have to change or amend the privacy changes?
A: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission gained greater oversight over Google's handling of personal information as part of a settlement reached last year. Google submitted to the agreement after exposing its users email contacts when it launched a now-defunct social networking service called Buzz in 2010. The consent order requires Google's handling of personal information to be audited every other year and forbids misleading or deceptive privacy changes.
Google met with the FTC before announcing the privacy changes. Neither the company nor the FTC has disclosed whether Google satisfied regulators that the revisions comply with the consent order.No word yet on what the violation was, but I assume it must be far more serious than using an alias or a computer. Given the insanity of the past two weeks, replete with the White House nudging Google to pull the video off of YouTube and the State Department running ads on Pakistani TV to apologize for a movie they had nothing to do with, I can’t quite believe the DOJ would risk the perception that they’re punishing this guy for a thoughtcrime unless something serious was involved. There has to be a real crime underlying this. Right?
The California man behind a crudely produced anti-Islamic video that has inflamed parts of the Middle East was arrested Thursday for violating terms of his probation, authorities said. [The filmmaker] has been on probation for a 2010 federal check fraud conviction that brought a 21-month prison sentence. Under terms of his probation, he was not to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer… A U.S. District Court hearing was scheduled for [him] on Thursday afternoon. It was closed to media and the public.
Meanwhile, new from Fox News:
Two weeks after the killing of a U.S. ambassador in Libya — an attack the Obama administration blamed in part on an online video mocking the prophet Muhammad — a majority of likely voters thinks the first thing a president should do in such situations is stand up for free speech, and not criticize how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights. A Fox News poll released Thursday finds 61 percent of voters think the president of the United States should “stand up for freedom of speech, even if it’s offensive,” while 22 percent say the president should “condemn offensive speech if it might provoke Islamic violence.”
Those 22 percent know something important that the 61 percent don’t, namely, that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. And if we occasionally have to haul a guy in on a probation violation to ensure that the future doesn’t belong to him, hey. Exit quotation from our new kinda sorta ally in Egypt: “Egypt respects freedom of expression … [but] not a freedom of expression that targets a specific religion or a specific culture.”
Update: In order to prove that it’s evenhanded about blasphemy, Egypt’s gone ahead and arrested a Muslim cleric for burning a copy of the Bible. Note to The One: If you want to show the Middle East that American free-speech principles are not, in fact, an anti-Muslim plot and apply even to people who insult the faith of most Americans, this is a fine opportunity. Speak up in this guy’s favor.
Update: According to TMZ, the guy’s probation report is sealed. Question for criminal defense attorneys: Is there any way to force it to be unsealed, or is that at the discretion of one or both of the parties? There’s a public interest at this point, I think, in knowing why they’re sending him back to prison. Did he commit a serious crime that we don’t know about, or are they using a technicality to punish him for blasphemy?A former teacher who is currently jailed for having sex with a 16-year-old student is suing the teen for defaming her.
Culinary arts teacher Tara Yvonne Stumph, 37, was sentenced to 180 days in jail in San Luis Obispo County, California after pleading no contest to one count of sex with a minor in April.
Now the teacher has filed a civil suit against the boy she slept with, accusing him of defaming her 'to various classmates, family and other members of the community,' the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported.
Teacher Tara Stumph, pictured with her firefighter husband, is suing the 16-year-old student she admitted having sex with for defamation
Stumph's teaching license has been revoked but she will not have to register as a sex offender after her release, which is set for next week
Stumph is set to be released next week after serving roughly half of her sentence, according to jail records.
Her teaching license has been revoked but she will not have to register as a sex offender after her release.
The victim's family had previously named Stumph and the Lucia Mar Unified School District in their own suit, claiming she had victimized at least one other student.
It is unknown whether that claim is the basis of Stumph's countersuit for defamation.
Stumph is a married mother of three, whose husband works as a firefighter in California
She taught at Arroyo Grande High School where she was previously awarded regional occupation Teacher of the Year
The victim's suit claimed Stumph'molested him during and after class and sent nude pictures and sexually explicit videos of herself to him'.
Stumph is a married mother-of-three, whose husband works as a firefighter, according to social media posts.
She taught at Arroyo Grande High School where she was previously awarded regional occupation Teacher of the Year.Playing at South Florida, Marlon Mack truly is a Bull. The 6-foot, 210-pound back is a physical, scrappy runner, who truly wheels away and can be hard to stop. Entering the NFL draft after his junior year, Mack had 3 fairly productive seasons in Tampa. Mack finished his college career with 3,609 yards on 586 carries with 32 rushing touchdowns, as seen below.
Although his numbers aren’t jaw dropping, his production was consistent and showed year-by-year improvement. During his time at South Florida, Mack also reeled in 65 receptions for 498 yards. He is by no means a “Shane Vereen type” in the passing game, but also isn’t at the Alfred Morris end of the spectrum. He proved that in the right scenario he could be more than competent, as shown in the Memphis game on 11/12/16, where he caught 9 targets.
Despite playing at a smaller school, Mack still garnered national attention as a candidate for the Maxwell award, Walter Camp award, and Doak Walker award during his Junior season.
From a physical perspective, it’s hard to say that Mack is elite. The USF all-time leading rusher and 3 time ALL-AAC running back doesn’t have elite acceleration; he’s expected to run a 4.6 40 yard dash at the combine and isn’t thought of as an agile, springy runner, however, he has proven top end speed and is elusive enough to post 6 TD runs of 40 yards plus.
What stands out most is his running style. Mack literally carried his offense for the last two seasons, and despite opponent defenses routinely keying on him, he managed to increase his YPC from 5.2 to 6.8. He did it with grit and determination, running hard between the tackles on each attempt. He constantly fights for yards after contact and has proven that with some vicious stiff arms. An example of which can be seen on this 56-yard TD vs UCF, where he makes numerous tacklers miss, and breaks through contact:
Scouts opinions seem to differ on the Bull. Some CBS analysts rank him as high as the 5th RB on the board, however, the likes of Walter Football have him at 19th. NFL Insider’s Jared Tokarz is one of those who is big on the Sarasota native, claiming, “He comes out the backfield and he’s got good hands. When I watch him when he hits the hole, he hits that second level and no one can keep up with him. That’s what’s really impressive about him. It’s pretty similar to Cook.”
My main concern is that I don’t think he will be viewed as a 3 down back in the NFL. I could see many teams viewing him as part of a committee or a part time role, and thus won’t be a reliable fantasy option. At 210 pounds and a few concussions to his name already, I simply don’t believe he will hold up with a bell cow workload.
As with many running backs in this class, landing spot will be crucial and I do think if he lands in a nice spot with a good o-line, he could produce sufficiently when a starter gets hurt. Many mock drafts currently have him going in the 4th round. For that value, it can’t hurt to take a risk on the guy. My NFL comparison would be a slightly less explosive Tevin Coleman or Ryan Mathews. Whether he can reach those heights, is yet to be seen. But at his going price, I like the valueMilitia groups are once again on the rise in the United States, up almost 40 percent in 2015.
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks the numbers and hate-related incidents around the country. It identified 276 militia groups in the latest count, up from 202 in 2014.
The center says the number represents a renewal of growth after several years of declines.
The movement grew rapidly after President Obama was elected, from 42 groups in 2008 to a peak of 334 in 2011.
Ryan Lenz, a spokesman for the Southern Povery Law Center, told Eyewitness News there are several things that stand out in the case in southwestern Kansas, where three men were arrested for threatening an attack on an apartment complex and mosque in Garden City. Lenz said the bomb they were planning to build uses the same ingredients that Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.
Lenz said militias are growing in numbers again, as well as Muslim hate crimes, driven by immigration fears and the political climate.
"It's really interesting the case in Kansas," Lenz said. "It really is the perfect storm of all these factors that have driven growth in the movement. What stands out to me is the ultimate racism at the core of their motives."
Lenz also points out that not all militias, or their splinter groups, are dangerous or commit hate crimes. He also said the number could grow again, depending on the outcome of the election in November.BOYDS, Md. — Last week, the Washington Spirit gave up a stoppage time goal to settle for a draw with Boston. This week, they conceded late again, but the Spirit equalized almost immediately to earn a point against the Western New York Flash.
Saturday night’s contest was scoreless through the first 85 minutes until the Flash and Spirit each scored in less that two minutes to tie 1-1 in front of 4,569 fans at the Maryland SoccerPlex.
Concern after the game, however, surrounded the health of Flash forward Abby Wambach, who was hit in the face by the ball at close range by her teammate, Brittany Taylor.
Wambach stayed in the game after being struck. Western New York head coach Aaran Lines indicated after the match that she had suffered a head injury and was “not doing too well.” Questions surrounded a possible concussion, but there was not immediate diagnosis given.
Samantha Kerr scored what looked like the game-winner for the Flash in the 85th minute when she headed the ball into the net from nearly on the goal line. Wambach flicked on Taylor’s free kick from 30 yards out.
But the home side tied the game less than two minutes later when Canadian midfielder Diana Matheson scored from the penalty spot after Jasmyne Spencer was brought down in the box.
Washington controlled for the first fifteen minutes of the game. During that time, the Spirit managed two corner kicks and a couple scoring opportunities. The corner kicks didn’t amount to much, unsurprisingly for the undersized Spirit.
Through the next 30 minutes, the sides were pretty even in possession. The near parity between the two extended to shots as well; Washington recorded five and Western New York had six in the half.
Although the teams had a similar number of shots in the first half, Western New York’s chances were far more dangerous. Wambach nearly scored for the Flash twice in the half. In the 18th minute, Wambach got her head on the ball inside the 6-yard box. The header hit off the crossbar and then somehow bounced away from goal. Ten minutes later, Spirit keeper Ashlyn Harris was forced to make a diving save on another Wambach header.
The Flash dominated possession in the second half while the Spirit had trouble connecting passes. On at least two occasions, the Spirit attempted to send through balls to their front runners but passes had too much pace and were collected by Flash goalkeeper Adrianna Franch. While Western New York controlled the second half, the Spirit defense remained composed.
The second half of Saturday’s game was marred by controversy. In the 63rd minute, the Flash were on the attack and the ball came into the box, possibly hitting the Matheson’s arm. Western New York argued for a penalty to no avail. Washington would later equalize in the late stages of the match on a contentious penalty.
Prior to the scoring plays, the two teams traded dangerous opportunities. In the 72nd minute, Franch was forced to make an impressive diving save on long range shot by Spirit captain Lori Lindsey. Four minutes later, Harris intercepted the ball right before Wambach was able to head the ball at close range.
In the 85th minute, the night’s score began on a close range header from Kerr. Wambach was credited with the assist after she flicked forward Taylor’s free kick.
Washington answered almost immediately when Spencer was taken down in the box by Taylor. Matheson converted the penalty kick to tie the game.
“We fouled a little bit in the box and it’s a P.K. My job is to read it as much as possible and go with my instinct and I did,” Franch said. “I went the right direction but didn’t come out with it.”
Flash Head Coach Aaron Lines said he needed to look at the tape but stated that “from where I was standing, it looked like the ball would go away from the player.”
On a encouraging note for Washington, the teams played front of a sold out crowd. The bleachers on both sides of the field as well as the hill behind the near side goal were full. The beer garden also saw its fair share of patrons.
“We had a fantastic crowd. Some of them were cheering for Abby, so I didn’t approve of that,” Matheson said with a laugh. “But aside from that, an amazing home crowd and they were with us until the end and hopefully they come out every week. “
Lines was also impressed with the turnout. “Tonight to see a sold out crowd at the stadium here with a brand new franchise is excellent.”
Western New York will now open their home schedule Saturday, April 27, against the Boston Breakers, potentially without their hometown hero, Abby Wambach. The Spirit will stay home to take on Sky Blue FC on the same day.
The point is Western New York’s (0-1-1) first of the season, while the Spirit (0-0-2) earned a second consecutive draw to open 2013.
Key Takeaways from the game:
1) For the fourth time in five matches, an NWSL game ends as a 1-1 draw. Is this a result of the allocated players’ fragmented preseason with their club teams or will scoring be at premium for the rest of the season?
2) Washington’s young guns struggled mightily in last night’s game. McCarty did not record a single shot in the game and while Ochs contributed in other areas, the majority of her three shots were relatively tame long distance chances. The youngsters will have to be better if the Spirit hope to compete.
3) Adrianna Franch continues to impress. The rookie recorded three saves including the diving save on Lindsey’s long distance blast.
Lineups:
Spirit XI: Harris; Toulouse, Huster, Gayle, Krieger; Roberts, Lindsey, Matheson, Wells (Spencer, ’46; Hodak. ’90), Ochs, McCarty (Miller, 84′)
Flash XI: Franch, Sahlen, Johnson, Taylor, Reynolds; Yokers, Zerboni (DiMartino, ’79), Perez; Kerr (Robinson, ’90+), Martin, WambachA group of House Democrats are planning one final, futile effort to challenge Donald Trump's election by raising objections when Congress meets to certify the electoral votes today – but the move will get immediately shut down unless a senator decides to signs on.
The Republican Congress would vote down the effort in any event.
Several House members have been considering raising objections to the official vote certification – an act that wouldn't have halted Trump's win but could have forced debates in each chamber that would have kept the spotlight on the intelligence community's claims of Russian interference in the elections.
Their chief problem has been finding a senator who would join their effort to at least secure a debate on the subject.
Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee is now saying she will voice an objection when Congress meets in a Joint Session Friday afternoon.
But a senator has not emerged who would second her effort.
Democratic representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas says she will challenge Donald Trump's election when Congress meets in Joint Session to certify the electoral votes – but hasn't secured a requisite senator to join her protest
Representative Ed Perlmutter was prepared to issue a letter objecting to the certification of Donald Trump's electoral college victory, after failing to find a senator who would join him
Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado had been prepared to raise an objection to certifying the vote, but backed off after failing to locate a senator in agreement.
'We are not going to file an official objection. We just weren't able to secure a senator,' his spokeswoman, Ashley Verville told DailyMail.com.
"This is an American question of justice and fairness and the appropriate running of presidential elections," Jackson Lee told Politico.
Her decision to push forward sets up a scenario that echoes the session following the contested 2000 elections, when angry Democrats – including several members of the Congressional Black Caucus – yelled out futile objections, only to get shut down because of the lack of a Senate ally.
In a bitter twist that year, the loser, Vice President Al Gore, had to preside over his loss as president of the Senate at the time.
'Is the point of order signed by a senator?' Gore was forced to ask objecting Democrats.
'I don't care that it is not signed by a senator,' responded one of them, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), who walked out in protest.
'You will be advised that the rules do care,' Gore responded.
Jackson Lee acknowledged her failure to find a supporter in the other chamber. '"I certainly think the difficulty will be if we do not secure a senator,' she told the publication.
Even if they got an objection through, it would have been voted down in the GOP-controlled House and Senate, sealing Trump's win.
Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) has been considering a challenge to the certification of the electoral votes
Representative Bobby Scott also has been considering a challenge – but without a senator it won't go anywhere
Colorado members of the |
older than this Christian version. At the west end of the nave is a necropolis with eighty stone coffins. This was pre-Christian and features layers of coffins. When one layer was filled and covered with soil, the next layer was filled up. This necropolis was hidden from sight until January 1961. A truck was passing on the adjacent street when the road began to collapse and revealed the necropolis below.
But despite using these pre-existing elements, the monks excavated and created this Romanesque church. Notice the perfect apse with an oven vault at the east of the church. In that apse is a superb stone reliquary six meters tall, also carved from a single rock. This is classic Romanesque – two levels each decorated with clusters of columns and arches. This was originally built to house relics of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, brought back during the Crusades by Pierre II de Castillon, owner of the castle in Aubeterre. These relics made the church part of the prestigious pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella.
Three sides of the church are bordered by a high gallery or triforium which is accessed by a staircase cut directly into the rock. This gallery originally opened to the outside and served as an entrance to the church. The beautiful arched windows open out onto the nave below. I like the following shot particularly because my father is seated just left of center, studying the vaulting.
On the fourth side – the south wall – are large windows to the outside which flood the church interior with sunlight.
It is interesting to note that the only three monolithic churches in France (that I am aware of) are in this region. There is the famous monolithic church in the wine town of Saint Emilion just 60 kilometers away, and just south of Talmont in the Charente-Maritime is the monolithic chapel of Mortagne-sur-Gironde. They were all built at about the same time and this is evidence for some scholars to suggest that they emulated the monolithic churches seen in Cappadocia by French crusading knights and monks. Whether this is true or not, they are unique and fascinating variations on the Romanesque churches of France.Discovery allows for more accurate assessments of how much greenhouse gases are absorbed from the atmosphere by the world's vegetation
By Umberto Bacchi
MILAN, May 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Vast tracts of land previously considered barren are actually covered by forests "hiding in plain sight", scientists said on Friday, a discovery that could help the fight against climate change and desertification.
An international team of researchers led by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) used new technology to analyse high-resolution images from Google Earth and map forest coverage in drylands worldwide.
They found that trees like baobab and acacia shade 467 million more hectares of land than previously thought - an area roughly equal to half the size of the United States - increasing estimates of global forest cover by at least nine percent.
The discovery allows for more accurate assessments of how much greenhouse gases are absorbed from the atmosphere by the world's vegetation, FAO experts said.
"Drylands absorb more carbon than we thought and they can actually help mitigate climate change," Eva Muller, director of FAO's forestry policy and resources division told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
The analysis, published in journal Science, would also help forestry experts better identify areas suitable for restoring trees and vegetation in a bid to slow down desertification, added Jean-Francois Bastin, one of the study's authors.
In Africa only, some 60 million people could be forced to leave their homes within five years and two thirds of arable land could be lost by 2025 as land progressively turns into desert, according to the United Nations.
Bastin said the new estimate of forest coverage was calculated using a data collection tool named Collect Earth, which enabled researchers to analyse Google Earth satellite images with a resolution of less than one meter.
"This allowed us to visually see and almost count the trees," he said.
Earlier studies used lower definition images with a resolution of 30 to 250 meters that made it difficult to distinguish trees from soil in semi-arid areas where vegetation is sparse, he said.
Thanks to the new method "hidden" forests were found on every continent, with the largest concentrations in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean, India, Australia, South America, Canada and Russia, the study said.
(Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi, Editing by Ros Russell.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.The Mayor of London, together with the property industry, on Monday made a last-ditch plea asking Chancellor Philip Hammond to take emergency action on housebuilding, as fears about the impact of Brexit on recruitment heighten.
Sadiq Khan said “housebuilders are increasingly worried” that leaving the bloc could make the capital’s housing crisis worse, with a number of companies concerned about access to some 100,000 construction workers from the European Union.
He added that losing skilled workers could be “catastrophic” for building plans.
As Hammond prepares for his November 22 Budget, Khan called for:
Devolution of new powers to London, such as greater control over public land, and allowing councils to borrow to invest in homes;
A massive increase in government funding for homebuilding and infrastructure;
Guarantees of the rights of EU nationals living in London.
The British Property Federation, which counts listed builders British Land and Capital & Counties as members, urged the government urgently to make a deal on EU workers’ rights to be here, while the Home Builders Federation warned reducing the supply of workers “could threaten” future building.
Jon Di-Stefano, chief executive of Telford Homes, said: “I am pleased that the Mayor recognises the urgency required.”
London builder Mount Anvil also supported the plea.
The building industry is also facing falling consumer confidence and flagging prices since the Brexit vote.
Property website Rightmove on Monday said more than a third of homeowners trying to sell their house have been forced to reduce their asking price, with the number of price cuts at their highest level since 2012.Every so often, we as football fans get to experience a player, and a particular play so dominant, nearly everyone just accepts it as unstoppable, and simply tries to contain it. In 2012, rookie quarterback Robert Griffin the Third and the Washington offense ran a read option based attack centered around Griffin’s ability to run the football, as well as rookie running back Alfred Morris. That year the Washington rookie duo combined for 2,428 rushing yards, a 5.3 yards per carry clip, as well as 20 touchdowns. The two rookie’s totaled over 800 yards and 12 touchdowns more than the entire team had during the 2011 campaign. The result? A five win increase from 2011 to 2012, and an NFC East Championship.
This leads us, indirectly, to Stillwater, Oklahoma where there’s another duo, with another play that is setting their respective league on fire. Welcome to the “Mason Rudolph to James Washington go route” show. The “deep” ball alone has made James Washington a legit Heisman contender. If you don’t believe me look at this excerpt from Pro Football Focus: “Washington showed that he is a perennial deep threat as he leads the crop of returning draft-eligible wide receivers in deep receiving yards (690)”
Take those 690 yards, and factor that in with the fact that he finished with 1380 total receiving yards last season, that means that exactly half of his yards are via deep balls (20+ yards in the air). This play has so far been virtually unstoppable; I can’t wait to see the ridiculous numbers Washington puts up in 2017. So outside of just the “go” route, who is James Washington the prospect? Where should we place him in terms of Dynasty, and Draft rankings? We’ll answer all of these questions as we break down Washington piece by piece.
Go route
Strengths:
Athleticism: As you might expect from a player who has a career average of 18.9 yards per catch, he’s a pure burner (his lowest recorded 40 time is a 4.40). But of course, athleticism is so much more than straight line speed. Washington is a “plus” athlete in every sense of the word when you’re talking about the wide receiver position. Acceleration, Agility, Vertical, to go along with his straight line speed, Washington has no weakness athletically.
*Note: While Washington is indeed a “plus” athlete, he isn’t an “elite” athlete that almost guarantees a first round pick ala Will Fuller or Percy Harvin.
Hands: Surprised? I certainly was. Maybe the most frequent thorn in the deep threat receiver’s game (besides route running) is “stone” hands. Not Washington however, this guy’s got the hands of a short yardage possession receiver. Technique wise, the Cowboy meets the ball with his hands spread with the ideal triangle shape as he brings it into his body. So how strong are his hands? Can he catch the ball outside of his 6’0 frame? You tell me.
Slant route
Route Running: Washington can run more than just a 9 route, he can run the entire route tree. The kid has quick cuts, precise breaks in his routes, and uses his “plus” agility and acceleration to create separation at all levels of the field. Not only is Washington adept at creating good distance between himself and the corner, but he is also straight up electricity after the catch.
“Out-go” Double move
In route
James Washington is pure magic after the catch! #DraftTwitter #NFLDraft pic.twitter.com/jyZNA8VZcn — Bradley Ylitalo (@NFL_drafthub) August 10, 2017 Comeback route
Washington destroyed Baylor all day on comebacks, more magic after the catch!! #DraftTwitter #NFLDraft pic.twitter.com/4aqzLQreQF — Bradley Ylitalo (@NFL_drafthub) August 10, 2017
Blocking: While not the biggest receiver (6’0, 205 Lbs), Washington combines great technique and effort to be the kind of run blocker any coach appreciates. With his route running, blocking, and athleticism, Washington should be able to fit into any offensive system and contribute.
Weaknesses:
Height: Antonio Brown and Odell Beckham Jr. are both examples of wide receivers shorter than Washington who are dominating the NFL. But for a receiver who makes a lot of his catches by going up and getting the ball, being at least 6’2 would be ideal for Washington. More than anything, this will most likely limit where Washington will line up, putting him more often at the Z or slot position, instead of at the X position.
Big 12: The Big 12 has a recent history of having teams with immense firepower, but fairly few NFL successes that come out of it. Dorial Green Beckham, Tavon Austin, Kevin White (so far), are all Big 12 first round receivers who didn’t or haven’t lived up to their hype. Let’s take Oklahoma State in particular, will James Washington follow in the footsteps of Dez Bryant? Or Rashaun Woods? He’ll probably end up somewhere in between. As we see with Mr. Bryant, coming out of the Big 12 is by no means a death sentence. But it is something to be cautious of.
Summary: James Washington is an unbelievably productive NCAA receiver who in three years at Oklahoma State has accumulated 152 receptions, 2,923 yards, and 26 touchdowns. He has the athleticism, route running skills, and hands to continue that production as he goes on to the NFL. Going into his senior year for the Top 15 ranked Cowboys, Washington should be a Heisman contender along with Mason Rudolph. At this point of the draft process, I have Washington as a late first round/early second round prospect, as for his dynasty value, just like his draft value expect him to go in the late portions of the first round of your drafts.
Baylor: http://draftbreakdown.com/2017/06/13/james-washington-vs-baylor-2016/
Texas: http://draftbreakdown.com/2017/07/02/james-washington-vs-texas-2016/
Iowa State: http://draftbreakdown.com/2017/05/26/james-washington-vs-iowa-state-2016-2/Android software frequently sags under the sheer weight of all the different devices it’s required to support. This is because developers can’t fine-tune the performance of their apps and games with the same ease and speed that they can on iOS, where consumer choice over hardware is kept to a bare minimum. Indeed, it can be a major effort to make an Android game run crash-free on popular devices, let alone optimise its frame rate, RAM requirements, battery consumption or other aspects of its usability.
There's nothing earth-shattering in these observations, and nothing to make us appreciate Google's operating system any less. What's new, however, is that we're just starting to get a handle on the precise scale of Android's performance deficit relative to iOS, as measured from the perspective of real phone users. This is an important step towards fixing the issue and ultimately making Android experiences more responsive, less resource-hungry and more energy-efficient.
Our team at GameBench recently completed a unique comparison between the Galaxy S6 and the latest iPhones, based on how well each phone handles a sample of ten popular cross-platform games. The GS6 is the best-performing Android phone we've tested so far, but we found that it lagged behind the iPhone 6 Plus to the tune of around 5 percent, and behind the regular-sized iPhone 6 by around 15 percent. Other Android phones fared worse: the HTC One M9 and Google Nexus 6 both showed a shortfall of 19 percent, while the LG G4 lagged by 21 percent, compared to the iPhone 6.
We think this information is interesting and others do too, judging from the way journalists and product reviewers have responded to it. GameBench's cross-platform comparisons also offer a way to speed up and scale up cooperative efforts between hardware and software engineers across the mobile industry, which is why OEMs, chip designers and game studios are starting to make use of our data and tools. However, the data will only be truly constructive if they're interpreted the right way: not as judgements of hardware or software, but as evidence of how pairings of devices and apps come together to produce good or bad user experiences. This distinction still leaves a lot of people stumped.
After we published our last report, we saw plenty of commentators using our work as ammunition to argue that "my phone is better than your phone." Some hardware-centric readers even suggested that our evidence proved certain technical superiorities in the iPhone's GPU, involving its texture compression formats, pixel data storage formats, and the precision of its arithmetic logic units. These notions all ignore the influence of game developers and the software optimisation process, so they are not logically supported by our data.
Texture compression is actually one area where the developer’s decisions are crucial to the end result. The developer may choose to use an older (and worse) type of texture compression in their game for the sake of being compatible with older devices, or because they are not aware that better choices were available to them. If this game then looks bad or performs poorly on a very modern device, whose more up-to-date texture compression capabilities are left unexploited, this can't really be blamed on the hardware.
Our performance tests don’t apportion credit or blame to hardware factors for the simple reason that our methodology wasn't designed for this. Specifically, unlike traditional hardware benchmarks, we don’t fix the software load that is applied to different devices. We wouldn't even try to control this variable, because doing so would require synthetic workloads rather than the real workloads that we wish to measure (and that users actually care about).
To illustrate this point about measuring real workloads, and why this is useful even though it doesn't necessarily identify causal factors, let's look at the cross-platform sci-fi strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Within. From a pure engineering perspective, the iOS and Android editions of XCOM technically constitute different software loads and therefore can't underpin any sort of hardware comparison: they don't have the same code, they don't play at the same resolution and they probably don't exploit available hardware capabilities to the same degree. From a user's perspective however, XCOM is marketed as the same game on both platforms, with the same price tag and the same promise of letting you defend the earth against an alien invasion. So we absolutely can use it to compare user experiences -- and when we do, the results are pretty interesting.
GameBench shows that XCOM plays smoothly on the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and the GS6, at a steady 30 frames per second (fps). On the other hand, the game stumbles along at just 22fps on the LG G4. The game also murders the G4's battery, draining it around 50 percent quicker than it does on the GS6, despite the fact that the GS6's battery has a smaller physical capacity.
We can't know from these top-level figures what's hurting the user experience on the G4, but we can be pretty sure it's not just hardware. If we tried to lay it at the feet of the GPU for example, we would then have to explain why the Google Nexus 6 plays XCOM rather better, at 25fps, and with less battery drain, despite having very similar GPU specs and the same display 1440p display resolution as the G4.
A whole range of different factors could be at play, but what matters most is that the G4's problem with XCOM is properly highlighted and not just dismissed as a hardware issue. Ideally, it would be investigated through the sharing of performance data between the OEM and the game developer, and then fixed for the benefit of LG customers who want to indulge in some smooth, stutter-free killing of extraterrestrials. If this same approach could be used to assess and optimise many popular device-app pairings on Android, preferably during pre-release testing, then the platform's performance deficit relative to iOS would very likely disappear.
Editor's note: If you're a developer and you'd like to learn more about performance profiling and optimisation, check out GameBench's upcoming event: Open(London). It'll offer a chance to hear from and talk to major hardware and software players who are pushing the boundaries of mobile performance, including representatives from ARM.Aim To perform a systematic review of studies describing the prognosis of chronic fatigue (CF) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and to identify occupational outcomes from such studies.
Method A literature search was used to identify all studies describing the clinical follow-up of patients following a diagnosis of CF or CFS. The prognosis is described in terms of the proportion of individuals improved during the period of follow-up. Return to work, other medical illnesses and death as outcomes are also considered, as are variables which may influence prognosis.
Results Twenty-eight articles met the inclusion criteria and, for the 14 studies of subjects meeting operational criteria for CFS, the median full recovery rate was 5% (range 0–31%) and the median proportion of patients who improved during follow-up was 39.5% (range 8–63%). Less fatigue severity at baseline, a sense of control over symptoms and not attributing illness to a physical cause were all associated with a good outcome. Return to work at follow-up ranged from 8 to 30% in the three studies that considered this outcome.
Conclusions Full recovery from untreated CFS is rare. The prognosis for an improvement in symptoms is less gloomy. This review looks at the course of CF/CFS without systematic intervention. However, there is increasing evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural and graded exercise therapies. Medical retirement should be postponed until a trial of such treatment has been given.Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
~ Fight Club
Fight Club is a spiritual story; it is a story of a man trapped in terrible delusion and suffering who walks a spiritual path and makes some serious breakthroughs.
This might seem hard to believe since violence is such a fundamental part of the film, but ultimately it is revealed that violence doesn’t really help.
In the beginning, the unnamed narrator who I will just refer to as Edward Norton, is just going through the motions of life. He’s got a good job and money, but he can’t sleep because he knows something is missing from his life. He tries to fill that void with materialism. He spends a lot of time buying things and this doesn’t end up making him any happier.
He tries two methods for dealing with his suffering and they are both ultimately found to be unhelpful.
We know from the story of the Buddha that his journey took a similar route.
The Buddha studied with two different hermit yoga teachers. They both taught him meditation practices that helped him a lot with his concentration and with finding temporary bliss states, but they weren’t really what he was looking for. They didn’t really impact the suffering of life in a meaningful way. Suffering is a really important concept in Buddhism.
It is one of the three marks of existence, the three characteristics that all sentient beings share.
First Edward deals with it by going to support groups for people that are dying. When he sees their suffering it helps him to mindfully understand his own. He gains a fundamental understanding of the first noble truth, that all of life is suffering and then he is able to sleep. But, ultimately he does find this practice isn’t what he’s looking for.
He also explains the Buddhist concept of impermanence, another of the three marks of existence, when he says: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
So, he ends up creating a Fight Club. Men get together and punch each other to feel better about the suffering in life. There are a lot of men like Edward, who go through the motions of life, but don’t really live it. They join and the fight club grows and grows. But, ultimately, it doesn’t help him.
The Buddha tried ascetic practices after he studied with those two yoga teachers. He stopped taking care of his body to see if that would bring enlightenment. He put himself through more suffering to see if that would help and it didn’t. In the same way, Edward puts himself through a lot of suffering by getting into all of these fights.
Spoiler alert: There’s a big surprise in the movie. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Edward creates an alter ego. An imaginary person named Tyler Durden who he imagines as a lot cooler and better than himself. Tyler represents his ego, everything dangerous about himself. Tyler is the figure that stands between Edward and enlightenment, much like Mara, the evil being that appears when the Buddha is trying to attain enlightenment. Mara, like Tyler, is an extension of the Buddha’s ego.
Although, it should be noted, in a way, Tyler is helpful. Tyler helps challenge Edward’s preconceptions. He tells Edward that consumerism, modern materialistic, is useless.
“The things you own, they end up owning you,” he says.
He also says, “Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”
Like the Buddha leaving home and giving up everything, Edward leaves his possessions behind. He blows up his home, destroying everything. This is the beginning of his real spiritual journey. Like the Buddha, he goes and lives something like an ascetic life, moving into a dilapidated old house.
Ultimately, the Fight Club evolves into a terrorist organization called Project Mayhem, designed to change the world.
The first recruit to Project Mayhem shows up at their door in an incident that is incredibly similar to Bodhidharma‘s encounter with Huike.
This young man shows up at their door and Tyler and Edward tell him to leave. He doesn’t leave. He just stands there waiting outside. They spend time alternating between abusing and ignoring him, but still he doesn’t leave. Eventually, they let him join.
When the monk Huike wanted to become a student of Zen Master Bodhidharma, a similar thing happened. Huike went to the cave that Bodhidharma lived in and asked to be his student. When Bodhidharma refused, he just stood outside the cave and waited.
After a lot of time passed, he couldn’t wait any longer. Huike cut off his own arm to demonstrate to Bodhidharma that he was truly devoted, because Zen stories are more hardcore than Brad Pitt movies, and Bodhidharma accepted him as a student. This scene is what really inspired me to write this article.
In the training for Project Mayhem, Tyler tells the trainees his anti-materialist message. He tells them that being attached to material things is very harmful. He also seems to explain the principle of Non-self, that we are part of a whole, not separate entities. He says: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
This is an important concept in Buddhism. Non-self is another one of the three marks of existence.
Ultimately, Tyler is a delusion, the last delusion that Edward needs to get rid of. The Buddha likened the spiritual journey to riding a raft across a river to the other shore. The raft represents Buddhism and the other shore represents Enlightenment. We are supposed to not carry the raft around anymore after we reach the other shore.
Tyler was a delusion. A fantasy character created by Edward to help him live the life he wanted to live. Edward came to a point in which he didn’t need this delusion anymore, so he had to get rid of it.
We need to remember the same thing, I suppose. I’ve heard that Buddhist practice itself can become a form of attachment.
Like elephant Buddhadharma on Facebook.
Ed: Sara CrolickHello everyone following the voxel tutorial, it's been a long time since an update. In this time I've written a new updated tutorial on voxel terrain that supports infinite terrain and saving/loading of chunks. Try it out on my new site: AlexStv.com
void GenTerrain(){ blocks=new byte[96,128]; for(int px=0;px<blocks.GetLength(0);px++){ for(int py=0;py<blocks.GetLength(1);py++){ } } }
int Noise (int x, int y, float scale, float mag, float exp){ return (int) (Mathf.Pow ((Mathf.PerlinNoise(x/scale,y/scale)*mag),(exp) )); }
void GenTerrain(){ blocks=new byte[96,128]; for(int px=0;px<blocks.GetLength(0);px++){ int stone= Noise(px,0, 80,15,1); stone+= Noise(px,0, 50,30,1); stone+= Noise(px,0, 10,10,1); stone+=75; int dirt = Noise(px,0, 100,35,1); dirt+= Noise(px,0, 50,30,1); dirt+=75; for(int py=0;py<blocks.GetLength(1);py++){ if(py<stone){ blocks[px, py]=1; } else if(py<dirt) { blocks[px,py]=2; } } } }
int stone= Noise(px,0, 80,15,1);
stone+= Noise(px,0, 50,30,1);
stone+= Noise(px,0, 10,10,1);
Stone and dirt noise.
void GenTerrain(){ blocks=new byte[96,128]; for(int px=0;px<blocks.GetLength(0);px++){ int stone= Noise(px,0, 80,15,1); stone+= Noise(px,0, 50,30,1); stone+= Noise(px,0, 10,10,1); stone+=75; print(stone); int dirt = Noise(px,0, 100f,35,1); dirt+= Noise(px,100, 50,30,1); dirt+=75; for(int py=0;py<blocks.GetLength(1);py++){ if(py<stone){ blocks[px, py]=1; //The next three lines make dirt spots in random places if(Noise(px,py,12,16,1)>10){ blocks[px,py]=2; } //The next three lines remove dirt and rock to make caves in certain places if(Noise(px,py*2,16,14,1)>10){ //Caves blocks[px,py]=0; } } else if(py<dirt) { blocks[px,py]=2; } } } }
Now you should get caves and dirt spots.We Speak With The Producers of The Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures
From a shared love of Star Wars at a USC Summer writing program in the early 90’s, Bob Roth and Bill Motz paired on a project together over that love and have been working together ever since. After a successful pitch to Disney/ABC Animation for a “DarkWing Duck” episode, the comedy duo has achieved great success including several awards and Daytime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Children’s programming and writing, and winning the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding writing in Animation in 2008.
Bob and Bill collaborate on their story ideas jokingly “screaming and shouting at one another” out of Bob’s guest house. The house holds all of Bob’s Star Wars collection and has been affectionately named “Rancho Rowan” in comparison to “Rancho Obi-Wan”, the name given to the space that holds the vast private collection of longtime Lucasfilm executive Steve Sansweet. It was funny for Bob to read via Twitter that some fans of the show questioned their love of Star Wars and whether or not they were actually fans. Bob admits that a Star Wars shirt is part of his everyday wardrobe and his mind is about 80% Star Wars all of the time. Star Warriors can attest to know what that’s like.
Bob and Bill mentioned that their hardcore love for Star Wars was a major factor of consideration in going forward with working in the Star Wars Universe. They had to weigh “the risks” of possibly loosing their love for Star Wars by “peeking behind the curtain”. It’s a common thing to loose the luster of something so magical once you know how the magic is done. Being steeped in Star Wars, not because you want to but because you have to, might leave a bad taste in their mouth for the Universe they had come to know and love so dearly. Fortunately, they say, not only has it not been the case, but has “Enhanced their connection with Star Wars.” They feel lucky and blessed to be apart of it and really enjoy the fans. One of the highlights, they remember from Celebration, are the Cosplayers and being able to screen an episode of the Freemaker Adventures for the fans and to hear their reactions. It really lets them know that they are connecting with the fans in a positive way. That connection is important for them as producers and fans themselves.
Bob Roth remembers sitting in the theater in May of 1977, at the age of 7, and feeling that at the end of the movie he was moved towards his true destiny. Not being an actor or a Jedi, but being a creative person. The men both love the Empire Strikes Back as the one movie in the series that did what most sequels still struggle to achieve, especially in the Sci-Fi genre. Empire, they say, was a true continuation and expansion of the characters and the struggle that George Lucas started in A New Hope. The introduction of iconic characters like Yoda, Lando, Boba Fett, and the Emperor and places like Dagobah, Hoth, and Cloud City, is why they feel the Empire Strikes Back is the movie that they would both pick as their favorite of the series despite a New Hope forever holding a special place in their hearts. It doesn’t get more true Star Warrior then that! “A Caravan of Courage” is a Star Wars movie you should check out if you’ve never have. Bill mentions it jokingly in the interview. It’s the official name of what was first broadcast as “An Ewok Adventure’. It’s a story about a space family who is stranded on Endor and have Ewoks come to their aide; it takes place just before Return of the Jedi. Warning, it was the 80’s and a made for television movie. It’s not terrible, just…be warned.
The Star Wars Freemaker Adventures, which was nominated for several Daytime Emmy Awards, takes place just after the Empire Strikes Back. Bob and Bill say that this timeline is ideal for them because they are able to utilize the full character list and battles from both the pre-quels and the original trilogy. One of the things I enjoyed most about the Freemaker Adventures is how we re-visit or address some of the events and situations that might have risen in the movies, but were not important enough to be addressed or explained later. ***Spoilers*** One of these questions answered is: “Why is Lando wearing Han Solo’s clothes at the end of Empire Strikes Back?’ Watch the movie, it’s true. “Family Guy” also made fun of this as it’s something that has bothered Star Warriors for decades. The Freemaker Adventures not only answers that question, but gives a hilarious resolution for it as well. You need to watch the show. While watching, keep an eye out for visual easter eggs. I was able to spot the Airspeeder from the Star Tours Ride at Disneyland sitting in a docking bay during a fly over scene. I want to go back and re-watch the series with a sharper eye. Bob and Bill say that there will be a lot more of that coming in season 2. Bob says that Star Wars fans are some of the most observant about these kinds of things, so little has been missed, but does allude that there are still some that might have gone unnoticed.
The Freemakers are a family trio of space salvagers who put themselves at risk in order to salvage the best scrap parts from the ongoing battles between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire. R0-GR or Roger is former Clone War era battle droid repurposed for the Freemakers needs and baking cookies, he often relives the horrors of the Battles he’s seen. Season 1 focuses on Rowan Freemaker, the youngest of the three Freemakers, and the force sensitive one of the family. Rowan is befriended by Naare, a young “Jedi” who saves his life when she discovers that Rowan can sense Kyber crystals with the force. Kyber crystals, if you remember from Rogue One and the Clone Wars Series, are the crystals that power the Death Star laser and also power lightsabers. Naare tells Rowan of the Kyber Saber, a lightsaber made completely of Kyber crystals that is so strong that it can multiply the force users power by a thousand. Created by the maker himself, he realizes it’s too strong for the galaxy and can be used for great evil. ***Spoilers*** The Maker breaks up the saber into several pieces and has Jedi scatter them throughout the galaxy. During his quest for the Kyber crystals Rowan runs across some heroes you might recognize, like Lando and the Skywalker twins. Rowan, however, makes it clear that he is neither a Sith or A Jedi, but a Force builder. Something that “the Maker”, who curiously looks like George Lucas, tells him that he is. When I asked the Producers about what a force builder was they said that it was something that came down from Lucasfilm, and although the “building” part is intuitive to Lego, being “neither” is a potential addition to the Jedi Mythology. OOOOhhh Grey Jedi???
Even though the Lego brand allows from some license in comedy, you’ll not find Darth Vader throwing out any “Spank You’s” and “Alllllrighty Thens”. The Emperor does have a wicked sense of humor in the show but Bob and Bill both recognize that these are still the two most evil men in the galaxy. However, Bill reminds us that in the movies, The Emperor was very snarky. “Oh, I’m afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive.” Bill warns that in Season 2 there is a scene between Vader and Rowan that shows us just how bad Darth Vader is. Don’t forget that the ending of Rogue One is this Vader’s Past. He’s got the Dark Side in him and you get to see a bit more of that in Season 2.
You can watch the adventures of Rowan Freemaker and some of the classic characters you love from the original star wars movies in The Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures airing on Disney XD, check your local listings for channels and times!
ALL IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHTED AND PROPERTY OF THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY, USC, LUCASFILM, LEGO, DISNEY XD, WALT DISNEY ANIMATION AND/OR THE CREDITED INDIVIDUALS.A key reference tool for all tax practitioners
If you are responsible for managing taxes in a business that trades or operates across a number of different territories, you will recognise how much of a challenge it can be trying to keep on top of the tax rates and rules in each of them, notwithstanding the fact that these frequently change.
Worldwide Tax Summaries is a useful tool, to help you find tax information from around the world. It provides details about tax systems in over 150 territories worldwide, in an easily digestible format.
You can access Worldwide Tax Summaries as an online tool or you can download the reference guide Worldwide Tax Summaries - Corporate Taxes 2018/19 as a PDF or ebook. The latest edition of the guide compiles worldwide corporate tax rates and rules for 152 territories as of 1 June 2018.> (delay (/ 1 0))
#<promise>
> (force (delay (/ 1 0)))
division by zero
class Promise(object):
"""This is a promise to execute something on demand."""
def __init__(self, f):
""" |
“I cannot hide that. Some players were in a very difficult situation. I’m just glad that now they will be able to get paid. I’m glad that the Cosmos will be able to continue.”
Even before the deal for Commisso to purchase a majority stake in the Cosmos was finalized, Savarese was already reaching out to players from his 2016 championship squad, trying to sell them on the new ownership.
“We are trying to talk to a lot of [the players] to explain how the new era of this new ownership is trying to rebuild the club,” he said. “We are fortunate that some of the guys have already accepted to come back, but definitely we have a lot of work and not a lot of time to be able to do it.”
The only players from last year’s squad already under contract are Kenyan international David Ochieng, U.S. youth international Eric Calvillo and last year’s Soccer Bowl penalty shootout hero Ryan Richter. Discussions with other players to return are ongoing.
Talks to bring back Savarese’s technical staff have also already begun. Assistant Coach Carlos Llamosa has already been lost to New England Revolution’s coaching staff, but the return of fan-favorite Alecko Eskandarian is still possible.
“We’re talking with Alecko to be back,” confirmed Savarese. “Luis Gutierrez [Fitness Coach] we also believe will be back. Memo Valencia [Goalkeeper Coach] at the moment is entertaining some offers but is also thinking about coming back. We’ll try to rebuild the staff with the same people that we had and are meeting with new people in some positions.”
Commisso claims he’ll have “zero to none” to do with building the team’s roster, at least for the time being. He did leave open the option of him interjecting with his opinions later on once he settles into his new role.
“Our conversations have always been on the same page, in believing the same thing to rebuild a team that is a reflection of New York City, is very diverse, and to have local players, international players,” Savarese said of his talks with Commisso. “He’s has given full confidence to not just me, but my whole staff to be able to rebuild the club.”Ever since Telegram introduced bots in 2015, other messengers have added bots to their own platforms. But Telegram's extensive bot API and the freedom it offers the developer keep it at an edge ahead of its competitors.
Lately, businesses have begun to adopt Telegram's bot platform to build completely separate apps that can do virtually anything within the bot framework.
How bots work
In order to be able to get updates from Telegram, you need a token. All the updates and the interactions with your bot gets stored in Telegram and you can get them by sending a request to this URL with that token.
https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/METHOD_NAME
The Bot API is an HTTP-based interface created for developers keen on building bots for Telegram.
Getting started
First of all, go ahead and create your bot with BotFather - which is a bot by itself. Now you have the token and can get updates from Telegram. Let's get some info from Telegram so we can make sure our bot works.
Replace the URL above with your token and a method from Telegram's Bot API. Let's use getMe method.
https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getMe // --> {"ok":true,"result":{"id":437852999,"is_bot":true,"first_name":"Reddit Bot","username":"SimpleReddit_Bot"}}
Well done. But how do we do this in NodeJS? It's basically the same. Every time we need an update we send a request to that URL with our desired method.
But the whole process of doing this would be frustrating, so we have handy frameworks for this. They handle everything and let us focus on what's important. There are some good frameworks available for NodeJS, in this tutorial we're going to use Telegraf.
Start coding
Initialize the project and install Telegraf:
npm init
npm install telegraf --save
Now let's add it to our script and make a simple bot:
const Telegraf = require('telegraf'); const app = new Telegraf(YOUR_TOKEN_HERE); app.hears('hi', ctx => { return ctx.reply('Hey!'); }); app.startPolling();
What's going on? Telegraf has it's own methods to handle most of the work for us. We can use this method to respond to a user's message:
Reddit bot
Let's take an example. We're going to send the top post of the subreddit that a user asks for. Install axios library to simplify sending GET requests and grabbing data from Reddit.
npm install axios --save
const axios = require('axios'); // add axios // handle the reaction everytime user sends a text message app.on('text', ctx => { // ctx object holds the Update object from Telegram API // So you can use everything you see there // get the text message sent by user const subreddit = ctx.message.text; // GET the data from Reddit API axios.get(`https://reddit.com/r/${subreddit}/top.json?limit=10`).then(res => { // data recieved from Reddit const data = res.data.data; // if subbreddit does not exist if (data.children.length < 1) return ctx.reply("The subreddit couldn't be found."); // send the first top post link to the user const link = `https://reddit.com/${data.children[0].data.permalink}`; return ctx.reply(link); }) // if there's any error in request.catch(err => console.log(err)); });
When a user sends a subreddit name, we're going to grab the top post of that subreddit and send its link to them. Simple, huh?
Saving state
Imagine users want other options such as top, hot and new. We need to store the latest command they used to be able to respond correctly. Note that we use command method instead of on.
You can create commands on a Telegram bot. Commands start with '/' and are clickable. To add commands to your bot, message BotFather.
let state = {}; app.command('top', ctx => { const userId = ctx.message.from.id; // if user id does not exist create one if (!state[userId]) state[userId] = { id: userId }; // save/update user last command state[userId].command = 'top'; return ctx.replyWithMarkdown(`Enter a subreddit name to get *top* posts.`); }); app.command('hot', ctx => { const userId = ctx.message.from.id; if (!state[userId]) state[userId] = { id: userId }; state[userId].command = 'hot'; return ctx.replyWithMarkdown('Enter a subreddit name to get *hot* posts.'); });
Now we can send the proper post based on filter. In our text response:
const userId = ctx.message.from.id; // check if state and command exists and set defaults const type =!state[userId]? 'top' : state[userId].command? state[userId].command : 'top'; axios.get(`https://reddit.com/r/${subreddit}/${type}.json?limit=10`).then(res => [ // do stuff ]);
Inline buttons
Telegram bots have interactive buttons called InlineKeyboardMarkup. We're going to add a next button, so the user can get the next post in that category.
We need to extract the specific methods for buttons from Telegraf in order to work with them:
const { Markup } = require('telegraf');
First, let's add the current post number to the state. Every time a user asks for a subreddit we need to set index to 0. In our text method:
if (!state[userId]) state[userId] = {}; state[userId].index = 0;
Instead of sending plain text, we send it with an inline button in the axios response:
// old response, only text return ctx.reply(link); // new response, with inline buttons return ctx.reply( link, Markup.inlineKeyboard([ // first argument is button's text // second argument is callback text Markup.callbackButton('➡️ Next', subreddit), ]).extra(), );
We can handle the callback with on method, but this time, the update method is callback_query:
app.on('callback_query', ctx => { // get info from callback_query object const subreddit = ctx.update.callback_query.data; const userId = ctx.update.callback_query.from.id; // check if user state and its properties exist let type; let index; try { type = state[userId].command? state[userId].command : 'top'; index = state[userId].index; } catch (err) { return ctx.reply('Send a subreddit name.'); } // reply with a popup to callback ctx.answerCallbackQuery('Wait...'); axios.get(`https://reddit.com/r/${subreddit}/${type}.json?limit=10`).then(res => { const data = res.data.data; // check if next one exists if (!data.children[index + 1]) return ctx.reply('No more posts!'); // send next link and update the user state with new index const link = `https://reddit.com/${ data.children[index + 1].data.permalink }`; state[userId].index = state[userId].index + 1; return ctx.reply( link, Markup.inlineKeyboard([ Markup.callbackButton('➡️ Next', subreddit), ]).extra(), ); }).catch(err => console.log(err)); });
Wrapping up
As you can see, we've created a simple Telegram bot in minutes. Creating bots in Telegram easy, but it doesn't stop here. There are a lot of more stuff you can do with them—such as sending photos, videos, documents etc.
Imagine all the things you can do with Telegram's huge API which continuously gets better with each update.
You can find the source code of this bot on GitHub. Here is a more complex Reddit bot I've created, which uses more bot features such as sending photos and inline buttons.Joe Jackson 1949 Sport Magazine Interview
THIS IS THE TRUTH!
By SHOELESS JOE JACKSON
AS TOLD TO FURMAN BISHER
EDITOR'S NOTE: Almost any day of the week, if you drive down East Wilborn Street on the South side of Greenville, South Carolina, you'll find an aging man with sparse white hair sitting in the shade of a sapling oak at No. 119. He will be Joe Jackson - Shoeless Joe Jackson, sometimes known as the greatest natural hitter in baseball history. But you'll never find Joe's name in the record books, because he was black-listed for life after the great baseball scandal broke in 1920. Jackson has never raised his voice in protest, though he has stoutly maintained his innocence. In his South Carolina textile country, where he lives comfortably, he is revered as an idol and as a persecuted man. They will always believe Joe innocent. Here, for the first time in national print, is Joe Jackson's own story, just as he tells it himself.
Jackson, one of the game's most brillant batters, hit over.400 during the 1911 season.
W
[ PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 ]
HEN I walked out of Judge Dever's courtroom in Chicago in 1921, I turned my back completely on the World Series of 1919, the Chicago White Sox, and the major leagues. I had been acquitted by a twelve-man jury in a civil court of all charges and I was an innocent man in the records. I have never made any request to be reinstated in baseball, and I have never made any campaign to have my name cleared in the baseball records. This is not a plea of any kind. This is just my story. I'm telling it simply because it seems that 30 years after that World Series, the world may want to hear what I have to say.If I had been the kind of fellow who brooded when things went wrong, I probably would have gone out of my mind when Judge Landis ruled me out of baseball. I would have lived in regret. I would have been bitter and resentful because I felt I had been wronged.But I haven't been resentful at all. I thought when my trial was over that Judge Landis might have restored me to good standing. But he never did. And until he died I had never gone before him, sent a representative before him, or placed before him any written matter pleading my case. I gave baseball my best and if the game didn't care enough to see me get a square deal, then I wouldn't go out of my way to get back in it.Baseball failed to keep faith with me. When I got notice of my suspension three days before the 1920 season ended -- itcame on a rained-out day -- it read that if found innocent of any wrongdoing, I would be reinstated. If found guilty, I would be banned for life. I was found innocent, and I was still banned for life.It was never explained to me officially, but I was told that Judge Landis had said I was banned because of the company I kept. I roomed with Claude Williams, the pitcher, one of the ringleaders, they told me, and one of the eight White Sox players banned. But I had to take whoever they assigned to room with me on the road. I had no power over that.The Hill has reported that FBI records from 2009 and 2010 show that people within the Kremlin attempted a campaign to move spies close to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and those close to them.
This happened when Rosatom, a Russian nuclear company, wanted to purchase the Canadian company Uranium One, “which controlled 20 percent of America’s strategic uranium reserves.”
Target: Hillary Clinton
The Hill reported:
A female Russian spy posing as an American accountant, for instance, used a false identity to burrow her way into the employ of a major Democratic donor in hopes of gaining intelligence on Hillary Clinton’s department, records show. The spy was arrested and deported as she moved closer to getting inside the secretary’s department, agents said. Other activities were perfectly legal and sitting in plain view, such as when a subsidiary of Russia’s state-controlled nuclear energy company hired a Washington firm to lobby the Obama administration. At the time it was hired, the firm was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro bono support to Bill Clinton’s global charitable initiative, and it legally helped the Russian company secure federal decisions that led to billions in new U.S. commercial nuclear business, records show.
The records show that the FBI does not think the Clintons or those “close to them did anything illegal.” But one source told The Hill that Russia targeted Hillary “because she was the quarterback of the Obama-Russian reset strategy and the assumed successor to Obama as president.”
As we all know she failed bigly at that last November against now-President Donald Trump.
Anyway, the FBI intercepted a communication from Russia in October 2009 that told two spies to retrieve information:
“Send more info on current international affairs vital for R., highlight US approach,” part of the message to the spies read, using the country’s first initial to refer to Russia. “… Try to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources closer to State department, government, major think tanks.”
Accountant Spy
Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi helped bust the spy ring, which launched Russian spy Anna Chapman to international fame. But the interesting spy within the ring was the fake accountant known as Cynthia Murphy:
Murphy, living with her husband and kids in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, reported a major breakthrough in February 2009 in an electronic message sent to her handlers: she had scored access to a major Democrat, FBI records state. “Murphy had several work-related personal meetings with [a prominent New York-based financier, name omitted] and was assigned his account,” one FBI record from the case read. “The message accurately described the financier as ‘prominent in politics,’ ‘an active fund-raiser’ for [a major political party, name omitted] and a ‘personal friend’ of [a current Cabinet official, name redacted].” Multiple current and former officials confirmed to The Hill that the Cabinet officer was Hillary Clinton, the fundraiser was New York financier Alan Patricof and the political party was the Democratic National Committee. None of the Americans were ever suspected of illegalities, but the episode made clear the Russian spies were stepping up their operations against the new administration after years of working in a “sleeper” capacity, officials said.
Russia hoped Murphy could get the donor to reveal information about “US foreign policy, roumors (sic) about White House internal kitchen, invite her to major venues.” The handlers even pressured “Murphy to consider taking a job with a lobbying firm because ‘this position would expose her to prospective contacts and potential sources in U.S. government.'”
Figliuzzi explained that Murphy would never have tried to land a position inside the State Department, “where the vetting process might unmask her true identity.”
The FBI busted the spy ring in June 2010 after the agency “feared Chapman might flee the country and Murphy was getting too close to posing a security concern to Hillary Clinton.” The Hill continued:
As a result, they arrested the entire ring of 10 spies, and quickly expelled them. “In regards to the woman known as Cynthia Murphy, she was getting close to Alan, and the lobbying job. And we thought this was too close to Hillary Clinton. So when you have the totality of the circumstance, and we were confident we had the whole cell identified, we decided it was time to shut down their operations,” Figliuzzi said. The FBI announced the arrests on June 28, 2010, a day after they were made.
Lucrative Clinton Businesses
The Clintons plenty of lucrative businesses that caught Russia’s interest, including “a multimillion dollar speech-making business, the family foundation and a global charitable initiative.” Figliuzzi told The Hill that “even for Russia” it comes down to four things in D.C.: “donations, lobbying, contracts and influence.”
Yeah, you know what happened the day after the FBI arrested the spies? The $500,000 90 minute speech Bill gave in Russia. Yes, that even interested the FBI because, as I mentioned, all of this happened during the Uranium One deal.
The Kremlin-connected bank Renaissance Capital paid Bill’s speaking fee and don’t forget he met with then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
But there are two other reasons why the speaker fees set off red flags:
The second issue was the Russian company TENEX’s desire to score a new raft of commercial nuclear sales to U.S. companies. TENEX for years was selling uranium recycled from old Soviet warheads to the United States. But that deal was coming to an end and now it needed a new U.S. market. And the third was a promise Secretary Clinton herself made to Russian leaders to round up support in America’s Silicon Valley for then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s dream for a new high-tech hub outside Moscow known as Skolkovo. A team of venture capitalists had been dispatched to Moscow just a few weeks before Bill Clinton landed his payday, records show. “We have 40,000 Russians living in Silicon Valley in California. We would be thrilled if 40,000 Russians were working in whatever the Russian equivalent of Silicon Valley is, providing global economic competition, taking the internet and technology to the next level,” Hillary Clinton said at the time, according to a State Department transcript. She added that the business executives she dispatched to Putin’s homeland had Twittered their way through Russia.
TENEX
At the same time as the spy ring and Bill’s speech, the FBI had an investigation going on that also involved the Clintons. An undercover FBI informant employed by “the Moscow-based nuclear energy giant Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary on a multiyear campaign to grow Moscow’s uranium business inside the United States” discovered “Russian nuclear industry corruption.”
This included the U.S. approving Rosatom’s “purchase of Canada-based Uranium One’s American uranium assets” along with more approvals “to sell new commercial uranium to the federally backed United States Enrichment Corporation and winning billions in new U.S. utility contracts for Russian nuclear fuel.”
These records refer to the FBI informant as “confidential source 1,” “contractor,” and “Victim 1.” Toensing said this man is her client. It also shows that her client went to the FBI in 2009 “after Russian officials asked him to engage in illegal activity.”
The FBI allowed the informant to hand out “kickback payments to the Russians” as he gathered other evidence.
The Hill heard from sources that this informant led the government “to crack a multimillion dollar racketeering scheme by Russian nuclear officials on U.S. soil that involved bribery, kickbacks, money laundering and extortion.” This led to an executive to expand the nuclear business, an executive at a U.S. trucking firm, and Russian financier from New Jersey to plead “guilty to various crimes in a case that started in 2009 and ended in late 2015.”
Now that FBI informant has come forth and said that President Barack Obama’s DOJ prevented him from speaking to Congress “about conversations and transactions he witnessed related to the Russian nuclear industry’s efforts to win favor with Bill and Hillary Clinton and influence Obama administration decisions.”I recently enjoyed participating in a discussion about recursion in R on the new RStudio Community site, and I thought to inaugurate my blog with a post inspired by the discussion.
R supports recursive functions, but does not optimize tail recursive functions the way some other languages do. Fortunately, with a mechanism known as a trampoline, the R programmer can implement something like the optimization manually and with very little code.
To understand trampolines, one must first understand the mechanics of function calls and recursion.
The Call Stack
As in many other languages, functions in R may call themselves. For example, here is a recursive function that decrements its argument until 0 is reached:
countdown <- function (n) if (n > 0 ) countdown (n -1 ) else "done"
This function has no problem with small values of n :
> countdown(10) [1] "done" > countdown(100) [1] "done" > countdown(1000) [1] "done
Unfortunately, when n is big enough, an error is raised:
> countdown(10000) Error: C stack usage 7969236 is too close to the limit
The problem here is that the top-most invocation of the countdown function, the one we called with countdown(10000), can't return until countdown(9999) returned, which can't return until countdown(9998) returned, and so on.
R keeps track of all of these calls in a data structure called the call stack or sometimes just the stack. The stack contains references to all outstanding function calls, recursive or not.
Since the stack is stored in memory, and since computers only have so much memory, the number of nested calls that can occur in a program is limited.
If we want to decrement a number 10000 or more times and print something when we're done, we have to do it a different way. That way is to use a loop.
Loops
Here's the countdown function using a loop instead of recursion:
countdown <- function (n) { while (n > 0 ) n <- n -1 ; "done" }
It doesn't overflow the stack:
> countdown(10000) [1] "done"
The new countdown contains the same essential pieces as the recursive version: the n > 0 test, decrementing n, and returning "done" at the end. The pieces are just slightly differently arranged so that countdown doesn't need to call itself.
If it does what we want, and looks only slightly different than the recursive version... why did we care about recursion again?
Well, maybe we don't. The choice to use recursion is a stylistic one with arguable benefits. People with a mathematical bent seem to enjoy it. So do I, usually.
Forgoing a debate of the merits of recursive style, let's assume we want it, and continue on to trampolines: a means to stack-friendly recursive functions.
Trampoline
A trampoline is a function or set of functions that together give us the tools we need to write code in a recursive style, in a way that doesn't overflow the stack. Here's an awesome trampoline by Jim Hester:
trampoline <- function (f,...) { function (...) { ret <- f (...) while ( inherits (ret, "recursion" )) { ret <- eval ( as.call ( c (f, unclass (ret)))) } ret } } recur <- function (...) { structure ( list (...), class = "recursion" ) }
Using it, countdown now looks like this:
countdown <- trampoline ( function (n) { if (n > 0 ) recur (n -1 ) else "done" })
It's very close stylistically to the original recursive version, but has no stack issues:
> countdown(10000) [1] "done"
The trampoline works because it's thin veneer over a regular loop. Compared to our direct loop version of countdown, the body of the trampoline's while is parameterized by the f function instead of being hard-coded.
The only new requirement of this re-arrangement is that the body, or the f function, return recur instead of calling itself if it wants to keep going.
In languages that perform this optimization automatically, applicable cases are recognized by the compiler and the recursive code is rewritten as a loop. Compilers that do this are said to perform TCO, where TCO stands for tail-call optimization.
Tail call conversion
Trampolines only apply to singly-recursive functions that call themselves in tail position, but many algorithms commonly expressed do not meet these criteria. For example, here's a recursive factorial function in R that can't immediately be trampolined:
factorial <- function (n) if (n == 0 ) 1 else n * factorial (n -1 )
Note: It probably wouldn't make sense to trampoline this function without other modifications first, because n is coerced to the numeric class if it wasn't already. For medium-sized n, the numeric (double precision) n overflows to Inf before the stack overflows. The gmp library might be a way to produce the necessary large integers. I'll use factorial anyway because it's a compact function and the transformation is clear.
The "tail" of factorial is the expression n*factorial(n-1), which places a call to factorial on the stack before returning. This is exactly the operation that eventually leads to stack overflow and that we need to eliminate.
The way forward is to introduce an accumulator, or a variable to store intermediate state between calls. It's a step towards an explicit loop, but with R's named and default argument support, can be done in a decidedly un-loopy way:
factorial <- function (n, prod = 1 ) { if (n == 0 ) prod else factorial (n -1, n * prod) }
Instead of relying on a recursive call for the number to multiply n by, we store it explicitly in the prod argument and pass it along. In this way the running product is maintained across invocations and the stack doesn't need to grow.
Of course, in R, the stack does grow, but now we've refactored the function sufficiently enough to apply trampoline. Let's do that:
factorial <- trampoline ( function (n, prod = 1 ) { if (n == 0 ) prod else recur (n -1, n * prod) })
Mutual recursion
Jim's trampoline is really efficient, but can't handle interdependent, mutually recursive functions. These are functions that call one another.
Arrangements like this don't come up much in my experience, and require a different kind of trampoline, and so I generally prefer solutions like Jim's. One type of program where mutual recursion seems to come up is in parsers.
But just for completeness, here's a trampoline function and two mutually recursive functions from SICP:
trampoline <- function (f,...) { function (...) { ret <- f (...) while ( is.function (ret)) ret <- ret (); ret } } even <- trampoline ( function (n) { if (n == 0 ) TRUE else function () odd (n -1 ) }) odd <- trampoline ( function (n) { if (n == 0 ) FALSE else function () even (n -1 ) })
Conclusion
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! In summary:R.W. Bray is someone many would consider an unlikely ally of Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Bray, who is black, is the Texas GOP’s director of African-American Engagement and leads the Republican recruitment of black voters.
Bray is not entirely alone; at least some people in the black community support Trump. Still, the GOP nominee has the lowest approval rating with blacks since Sen. John McCain ran against President Barack Obama in 2008.
The Daily Caller News Foundation talked to Bray and the organizations he works with about getting blacks to vote for Trump and the GOP as a whole.
“We don’t have to come out and say vote for Trump. We go and we collaborate with black institutions on projects that directly affect the black neighborhood,” Bray told TheDCNF.
One such program, Integrity Plus Economic Empowerment Training (IPEET), works primarily with people in inner cities. The program teaches an eight-week moral value training class, as well as four weeks of classes on job readiness and opportunities.
Bray, according to Campus Director Freddie Oliver, acts as a conduit and raises awareness to donors for the organization.
In 2015, 1,053 people registered into the IPEET program, and approximately 245 graduated. Of those who graduated, 120 were hired by successful companies like BRAND Energy & Infrastructure Services, Sanders and Sons Special Touch LLC, and Sunshine Personnel Solution Service.
Early voting hasn’t started in Texas, so Oliver said it’s still hard to determine whether the work has convinced people to vote Trump, but added, “when somebody lends you a helping hand, I don’t really think you care if they are Democrat or Republican.”
To help ensure effectiveness before the election, Trump needs to visit Houston much like he visited the church in Detroit earlier in September, according to Oliver. The black vote is won by connecting with people right in their communities, sitting in the same church pews, and building individual relationships.
“That’s how we’re going to be effective. We’re integrating ourselves into the black community in the same way the Democrats have integrated themselves into the black community. We don’t believe that one party should have a monopoly over the black vote,” Bray told TheDCNF.
But, according to Oliver, there’s one nuance the GOP must remember: not every black community is the same. Instead, communities share some commonalities, but are still distinct and need individual consideration.
While working in these communities, the Republican Party needs to always ask how it can help blacks solve their own problems, rather than claiming to know the problems and vowing to solve them through government aid, according to Oliver.
Empowerment Radio Network, another network Bray partners with, works to get out the message of “economic empowerment through entrepreneurship” to its listeners.
“We deal with social injustice, but our fight is more of an economic injustice fight,” founder Dr. David M. Anderson explained.
Empowerment Radio Network has an audience of 3.5 million listeners with 32 affiliates nationwide. Bray, according to Anderson, is a strong voice that speaks the message of black empowerment.
The GOP has long been a party of economic empowerment, but has recently washed the message out, Anderson said. To get the black vote, Republicans are really going to have to understand the value of the black dollar, Bray added.
“If African Americans are spending their money on certain products and initiatives, it would behoove the GOP to know what their spending averages are and then tap into that,” Bray said.
The GOP already often appeals to black voters because of its school choice platform, namely its promotion of charter schools and the expansion of homeschooling. These issues appeal to blacks, according to Bray, because parents are currently criminalized for trying to send their children to better schools in different areas from where they live.
Yet, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People recently declared a moratorium on charter schools despite approval from many blacks.
Trump and GOP leaders need to hammer this issue in order to gain traction with the black vote, according to Bray.
“What the Trump campaign can do is start pointing out these idiosyncrasies, pointing out these things that don’t make sense and that are adverse to the black community. These are things that white liberals have taken and started to champion for their own agendas,” Bray said.
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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.Oct 11 (Reuters) - Stan Lee Media, a company that says it controls the rights to Marvel characters including Spider Man and Iron Man, has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Colorado against the Walt Disney Co seeking “billions of dollars of profits.”
Stan Lee, no longer associated with the company, created many of Marvel’s stable of comic book characters. The company claims Lee assigned it his rights to those characters in 1998 but then agreed a month later to assign the same rights to Marvel Enterprises.
Disney acquired Marvel Enterprises, which had been renamed Marvel Entertainment, in 2009 for $4.3 billion.
“The Walt Disney Company has represented to the public that it, in fact, owns the copyright to these characters as well as hundreds of other characters created by Stan Lee,” the suit alleges. “Those representations made to the public by the Walt Disney Company are false.”
The lawsuit focuses on successful movies based on Marvel characters that Disney has released since its Marvel acquisition. Those films include “The Avengers,” which has grossed more than $1.5 billion in worldwide sales and is second only to “Avatar” and “Titanic,” according to movie site Box Office Mojo.
“This lawsuit is without merit,” Walt Disney said in a statement. “It arises out of the same core facts and legal claims that have been rejected by three federal district court judges.”
Stan Lee Media, which said it was created in 1999 to “sue to recover damages to its assets,” has been involved in what it called a “somewhat tortured history” of litigation dating from 2001 over corporate governance issues and the characters rights in cases filed in Colorado, New York and California.
They include suits between the company, its shareholders and Lee.
The latest suit claims that Stan Lee Media owns the rights “to the billions of dollars that Disney has generated, or allowed others to generate”. It cites more than $3.5 billion from motion pictures, and what it calculates is more than $2 billion from “other media,” merchandising and the Broadway show “Spiderman: Turn off the Dark.”Former Mighty AOD player Arachne joins ZenGaming as a Coach
Arachne, former tank player for Mighty AOD, has joined ZenGaming eSports as a coach, as per a forum post made by Arachne on Inven. Arachne last competed for Mighty AOD in the Nexus Cup 2016 Grand Final, leaving the team shortly after. He has been learning English during his absence from the competitive Overwatch scene, enabling his move to the west as a coach.
ZenGaming, formerly known as (ex-)x4ckers, are Israel's best team and a consistent presence in European play, competing in numerous monthlies and cups. However the team has struggled to compete with the region's top talent, failing to advance past the opening stages of numerous events. Most recently the team came up short in the qualifiers of Contenders EU Season Zero, falling to Misfits and Alfa Squad in the round of 32. The addition of Arachne may be what the team needs to take the next step and challenge top teams.
Want to see ZenGaming in action? Well you're in luck as all but one player on the team will travel to Burbank to represent Israel in the World Cup Qualifiers. This will provide the team with the opportunity to face a selection of some of Europe's best talent, as they will compete in all-European Group H alongside the United Kingdom, Belgium and Germany.
The ZenGaming eSports roster is now:Stretching across five terraced houses and using more than 15,000 bulbs, this is the Frozen-inspired Christmas lights display which drew a crowd so large for the switch on police had to close the road.
The display, inspired by the Disney smash-hit movie was set up by father-of-five Andy McNab, who installed the lights outside his home in Dagenham, Essex.
It took the 47-year-old a month to put up the display, which boast of 15,000 bulbs and stretches across the row of houses.
Scroll down for video
The Frozen themed display, set up by Andy McNab outside his home in Dagenham in Essex which stretches across five houses
It took Mr McNab a month to set up the display and install the lights which boasts more than 15,000 bulbs
An aerial shot of the row of houses in Dagenham showing the Christmas lights display taken by the Metropolitan Police helicopter
But despite the lights paying tribute to the film, which tells the story of Princess Elsa, Mr McNab admits he has never actually seen the highly successful and popular children's movie.
On Monday night, Mr McNab held the big switch on for the display in the Dagenham street, which saw more than 1,500 people turn up.
The crowds were so large that police were even called in to close the road and direct traffic.
The lights are switched on daily as soon as it gets dark and go off around 11pm but Mr McNab says that they'still get cars turning up at midnight'.
The grandfather was encouraged by family and friends to bring back the annual charity light displays that he created to amuse his children when they were younger - but on a much grander scale.
He said: 'I was just talking, as you do, and people kept saying "why don't you do it" and now that I've got the grandchildren I thought that I might as well.
The display has been inspired by the smash hit Disney movie Frozen, but Mr McNab admits he has never actually seen the highly successful children's film
On Monday night, the display had its official switch on and drew crowds of more than 1,500 people, which meant police had to close the road outside
Mr McNab pictured with his wife Lesley outside their home. The couple usually start planning their Christmas lights displays in August but this year did it all in a month
Mr McNab's family, pictured, urged him to put up the lights after he created annual charity displays when his children were younger
'It was just one of those funny things where I thought it was about time.
'Now we have people turning up with their kids saying that they remember that they used come with their parents.'
But Mr McNab and his |
a priori assumption that oil is biogenic. That paper thus proves nothing.
Alwyn. We have briefly referred to the work of Jourdan et al (1987) on quartz overgrowths previously. A later paper by Hogg, Selliers, and Jourdan (1992) provides additional data, specifically on the Alwyn reservoir. There are also a good selection of photographs (some color) and labelled diagrams.
The key points that the authors make is that the overgrowths indicate several different silica-rich pulses of fluids produced the overgrowths. One source of the silica-rich fluids is identified, and fluids are shown to have spread several kilometers to the north and west.20
Smørbukk and Smørbuuk Sør. Smørbukk is another of Norway’s giant hydrocarbon fields. Karlsen produced a poster display on fluid inclusion work at the 2003 conference on Geochemistry and Reservoir Engineering. Earlier studies on the reservoirs had supposedly shown that oil entered Smørbukk from the west, where there is now a sealing fault. On that basis, wells were drilled to the west, because if oil had filled Smørbukk from the west, there ought to be pools of oil still there. No oil was found, but the sand grains showed fluid inclusions (fig. 3). As a session chairman, Karlsen admitted that he had come to the conference hoping for some answers, but was going home with more problems than he had come with.
The paper covering the items in the poster presentation has now been published (Karlsen et al 2004). It is a mammoth tome of over 60 pages. The following points are made:
The failure of drilling to find the conduits by which oil entered Smørbukk meant that the engineers had to use indirect methods to try and understand how oil entered Smørbukk. Inevitably these were based on geochemistry, and the principle that oil has a biological origin, and therefore shows different levels of maturity.
On basin modelling, calibration is required to make models correctly predict where oil is found. If temperatures are changed by 20°C, no oil is predicted. (This temperature range is not an unreasonable amount. So the basic level of confidence in basin modelling is low, because the model requires a subjective assumption about temperature.)
The authors offer no simple explanations as to how oil-filled inclusions occurred. We are reminded that quartz is naturally water-wet21 so the oil does not stick to the grain surfaces. However, if events were rapid, then oil droplets could be trapped during precipitation of the quartz around them. Stokes Law shows that oil droplets of size = 10 μm will not rise rapidly.
Several levels of oil-filled inclusions are found, suggesting that different types of oil were passing by at the same time as the silica-rich fluids were passing.
Smørbukk Sør contained a reduced number of inclusions. This supposedly testifies to the later filling (3 million years ago) of Sør from a basin between Smørbukk and Smørbuuk Sør, whereas Smørbukk filled supposedly 50 million years ago.
In summary, we appear to have been presented with a series of facts and a forced interpretation based on an a priori assumption that oil is biogenic.
Troll. The Troll field is a Norwegian gas reservoir. The fields are apparently filled to spill-point, and have a tilted oil-water contact implying active migration (Goldsmith 2000). On the basis of an inferred migration route, a well (31/6-3) was drilled but found no hydrocarbons. This failure to find more reservoirs “acted as a challenge to seek alternative migration routes where “intuition” suggests that there should be a migration path.” That paper concludes with the statement that “Troll may be a unique example of a field that is apparently full to spill, but not spilling” (into other reservoirs). That use of “intuition” failed, because it was based on long timescales. We need the biblical fast-Flood model.
An independent assessment of secondary migration. There are further problems that have since been identified concerning secondary migration. Oil has to enter the target reservoir when the reservoir is at shallow depth (Wilson 2005). To that extent, the origin of oil has to be discussed alongside the question of the origin of the reservoirs. We shall return to this point later.
The timescales
Although timescales for secondary migration are not a specific problem for those who adopt an old-earth scenario, they are for those who believe that the age of the earth is less than 10,000 years. The issue of timescales applies in several areas. There is the catagenesis, which, even if we accept works at low temperatures (~100°C), does not deliver the oil volume within 10,000 years. No one has demonstrated primary migration, so we cannot put a timescale on that. On secondary migration and the way the oil equilibrates chemically in a typical reservoir, we can put timescales.
In the Danish chalk reservoirs, estimates have been made of how long it took to reach fluid equilibrium after emplacement. Around 2 million years are needed (Vejbæk et al. 2005). Recognizing that we have at most 10,000 years, the migration the authors proposed must be completely wrong. (This analysis is based on supposed fluid flow rates obtained from Darcy’s Law, and is not related in any way to uniformitarian geological timescales.)
A similar problem is present in the Moretti (1998) paper, because she considers that there are millions of years available to charge reservoirs when there are not, otherwise they cannot be filled on the basis of the known hydraulic properties of faults.
Porphyrins
“Porphyrins” are present in many oils and the claim is made that they have a similar basic structure to those of chlorophyll from plant material. Krauskopf and Bird (1995, p. 396) state that this is “a piece of chemical evidence that petroleum must be chiefly of organic origin.” But what do these and other authors mean when they declare similarity?
Krauskopf and Bird admit that some of the side chains are missing in the petroleum “porphyrins” and further that the magnesium in the chelate ring (in plant porphyrins) is either absent or replaced by a heavier metal such as vanadium or nickel in the supposed petroleum equivalents. So at a biological level (which is the essential test that determines whether the oil is of organic origin) the two are not similar. Magnesium is a light metal essential to the chemistry of life whereas nickel and vanadium can be poisonous.
Thus, innocuous statements (that there is similarity between the structures of porphyrins from plants and the same substance in oil) are insufficient to show that oil is of organic origin. To clinch the point that the presence of “porphyrins” is not an indicator of an organic origin for the bulk of oil, we note that there are no recorded examples of pure plant porphyrins being found in oil nor of laboratories successfully converting plant-porphyrins into oil-porphyrins. Should these statements ever be successfully challenged, there are still the other seven or so problems with the organic explanation for oil in reservoirs listed above which rule out (on a sufficiency basis) the idea that the bulk of oil has an organic origin.
Coal
There are many references to coal being seen as a source rock for oil (for example, Cornford, 1998). As far as the North Sea province is concerned, in the Carboniferous the coal beds are seen as the source of hydrocarbons in the gas fields of the southern North Sea (Besley 1998). In the Brent province, the mid-Ness shale which separates the upper part from the lower part of many reservoirs contains coal sequences (Morton et al 1992).
Undoubtedly, samples of coal could, under controlled laboratory conditions, be turned into a partial set of hydrocarbons. That is a necessary requirement, but not a sufficient condition, to sustain the argument that the bulk of oil is biogenic in origin.
Ultimately, coal can be ruled out as the source rock for the bulk of hydrocarbons in proximity to coal beds on the basis of the problems described above with reference to the supposed clay, shale, and silt layers being source rocks. The geochemistry does not have to be explored in detail when migration is a fundamental problem of getting hydrocarbons out of the source rocks and into the reservoirs.
The other problem with suggesting that coal can be a source rock for oil is the question of the origin of the coal. The secular model is that coal is formed from organic matter in peat swamps over long periods of time. Within a Flood geology paradigm, we simply do not have the years available, but they are not necessary if the coal beds formed within the Flood year from the destruction of pre-Flood vegetation.
Conclusion about biogenic oil
There appear to be too many subjective assumptions regarding the possibility that the bulk of oil is of a biogenic origin. A few percent of certain alkanes may be of a biogenic origin, but it is misleading to say that these are “fingerprints” telling us about the origin of oil. The “fingerprints” are not an integral part of the bulk of oil.
To that extent, we need now to turn to the other secular option advanced for the origin of oil.
Abiogenic Oil
The idea that oil does not have a biological origin has been prevalent amongst Soviet block countries for perhaps the last 100 years. The reason is that many of their oil and gas fields are either in metamorphic or igneous rocks, or seemed to have no biogenic source rocks beneath them because the basement rocks were crystalline. The idea has been promoted in the West more recently by Gold (1979, 1987). Two things would have pointed him in this direction.
First, Thomas Gold, along with Fred Hoyle and Herman Bondi, are better known for their work on radar during World War II, and their subsequent studies in astrophysics. They promoted the idea that the universe is self-generating. It is then a short step to suggesting that hydrocarbons are self-generated. They pointed out that there is spectral evidence for hydrocarbons on astronomical bodies.
Second, Gold recognized that volcanoes discharge many complex molecules (Gold, 1979), and because these have no obvious biological origin, they must have been either primordial, or constructed from smaller primordial molecules in a process which he calls abiogenesis. The fact that the geochemistry is not described in detail has made his theory difficult to accept in the West (see for example, Cornford, 1998), but the situation is not that simple, as shown by the summary of the 2005 Hedberg Conference by Katz, Mancini, and Kitchka (2008).
Within the oil industry, some may argue that oil is of biogenic origin. But the fact that we have shown that huge volumes of oil, supposedly the result of biogenic origin, cannot be explained in this way means that an alternative explanation for oil is needed. To that end the abiogenic origin must be considered, even if we do not end up with the details as Gold suggested. As a very minimum, for an abiogenic model to be acceptable, we need to explain the missing alkanes (below C15) which are not formed by biogenesis.
Many of the problems with the biogenic model of the origin of oil do not occur in the abiogenic model:
We do not have to find large volumes of organic matter, since this is no longer the precursor material.
We do not need diagenesis.
We may not need a very specific burial history.
We do not need the doubtful thermodynamics of catagenesis.
We do not need to find mechanisms that would release oil from shales.
We do still need a mechanism for secondary migration (moving oil from the point of its origin to the host reservoir), but Gold and Soter (1982a, b, 1984/1985) suggest that a series of fracturing episodes can perform this operation.
We comment briefly on the points listed in the Introduction above using that numbering system:
Hydrocarbons are found in the line of arcs which are deep-seated crustal structural features. I am not familiar with any examples, but the evidence points to little or no precursor sedimentary rocks in these areas, so the idea is at least attractive. Hydrocarbon areas tend to be rich at many depths. (Examples already quoted include Maureen and Wytch Farm.) This implies a localized source of hydrocarbons with vertical puncturing to allow hydrocarbons to move upwards, but Gold cannot explain the variations in alkane distributions that are seen in vertically stepped accumulations, though natural chromatographic separation during fluid movement through the rocks could play a part. Deep hydrocarbons show no biological evidence (for example, optical activity or disparity) between the even and odd numbered alkanes. The hydrocarbon molecules are therefore, in some sense, primordial. Methane is found where a biological origin is not probable. The planet Jupiter is believed to be covered by methane, so therefore the origin of that must be primordial. However, the more complex heavier alkanes, waxes, etc. are apparently not present. There is no link between the hydrocarbon characteristics across different areas of the world with the geological column. Although the point is a valid one, Gold may be making too much of this, because in his evolutionary mind-set he may be thinking that types of animals and plants varied significantly (thereby controlling the compositions of oil they produced after catagenesis) during geological history. There is associated helium in some U. S. reservoirs. Helium is assumed in Gold’s mind to be the next building element after hydrogen in the total collection of the periodic table. What Gold forgets is that since there are no stable elements of (atomic) mass numbers 5 and 8, construction of the elements by this route is not tenable. In particular, therefore, the origin of nitrogen (atomic number 14) in the German reservoirs is unexplained.
Options for explaining abiogenic oil
The Geological Society memoir by Petford and McCaffrey (2003) is one useful source of information on the abiogenic model of the origin of oil. The memoir is principally about hydrocarbons in and around igneous rocks, rather than a detailed discussion of abiogenic hydrocarbons. It is admitted by authors of key papers, such as Potter and Konnerup-Madsen (2003), and Schutter (2003), that some of the hydrocarbons in igneous rocks probably have a biogenic origin. To that extent they are not providing an explanation for the origin of oil at all, because they fail the sufficiency test—their requirement does not fit with the analysis that we have concluded previously. At this part of our study, having rejected biogenic oil, we are therefore relying entirely on an abiogenic process to explain alkanes up to C15 and even-numbered ones thereafter.
Schutter (2003) reviews many reservoirs that are supposed to have hydrocarbons in them that have an abiogenic origin.22 Some of these reservoirs are not of trivial size. He notes one giant reservoir in Java having over one billion barrels of oil in place. Generally there is a “lack of rigorously documented geochemistry” which prevents us from being convinced, even before we get to the detailed reasoning behind the suggestion that abiogenesis is a viable process, that the hydrocarbons are not abiogenic. Specifically he has said, “Many more questions arise than answers exist concerning hydrocarbons in and around igneous rocks”.
Potter and Konnerup-Madsen (2003) review the three common suggestions for explaining hydrocarbons by abiogenesis, though they admit that the true origin remains controversial. There is supplementary information by Schutter (2003). The following are the suggestions:23
Direct derivation from the mantle; Formed by respeciation of the C-O-H system during late crystallization at temperatures below 500°; and Synthesis by the Fisher-Tropsch process during post-magmatic alteration processes.
Suggestion 1 allows the hydrocarbons to be primordial (as on Jupiter) or to be continuously produced by a Fisher-Tropsch process in the mantle. The Fisher-Tropsch process is an industrial process used to convert a material with a high carbon content (such as coal) into petroleum liquids in the presence of catalysts such as ferric oxides and/or silicates. A supply of hydrogen is needed, and the suggestion is made that this comes from the splitting of water. The reaction may be written
nCO 2 + (2n + 1)H 2 → C n H 2n + 2 + nH 2 O
The suggestion is declared as invalid because of the disappointing results from the Siljan Ring well, and is also precluded by the estimated low temperatures and pressures of entrapment of fluid inclusions found. Furthermore, the Fisher-Tropsch process can be controlled in an industrial plant, but in the geology and history of rocks, where there cannot have been such control, it really can only be explained by Roberts and Cordell’s “sponsored... enhanced... imagination.”
Suggestion 2 can be demonstrated in a ternary diagram (with vertices C, O and H) with specific temperature and pressure histories, but as to whether the history of rocks allowed this to happen to produce the particular distribution of alkanes that we cannot explain biogenically is an open question.
Suggestion 3 is the most favoured in the literature, but in view of the fact that this still requires a geological history that allows the Fisher-Tropsch process to occur, as if it were an industrial process with operators controlling the individual stages of the process, the suggestion remains contentious.
Conclusion about abiogenic oil
There appear to be too many subjective assumptions regarding the possibility that the bulk of oil is of an abiogenic origin. A few percent of certain low numbered alkanes may be of an abiogenic origin, but that is all.
Prompting a Complete Re-think
To summarize so far:
We have two secular theories for the chemical origin of the hydrocarbons, and the methods by which it may reach reservoirs.
There are a catalog of problems with the biogenic model, and a catalog of guesswork as to how abiogiesis assembled complex hydrocarbons, waxes, etc.
Both models involve “geological timescales” of millions of years.
Reservoir paleo-reconstruction cannot be performed.
There is no a priori geological history of the reservoir rock to support the geochemical history.
geological history of the reservoir rock to support the geochemical history. Guesswork has to be used to explain events surrounding the emplacement of the reservoir cap rock.
Quiet, long timescales cannot explain the variability of the formation waters.
We have no uniformitarian explanation for the oil emplacement whilst the reservoirs are at shallow depth.
Therefore, there must exist another explanation.
The two models that have been proposed have been based on an implicit assumption of naturalism. The danger that many people see if a non-naturalist explanation is allowed in science is that there are unattractive philosophical consequences (Johnson 1998, p. 51). Freedom to ignore a creator may be more important to scientists and engineers than to establish the truth about oil and gas.
Johnson’s (1998) essays are about evolution. He puts the unthinkable into words and asks why we are giving answers to questions before asking what the question should be. We have two major theories of the origin of life. In the first, we have a slow evolution of life due to natural selection (Darwin 1859). However, the fossil record does not show slow changes, but rapid and punctuated changes. So there is available an alternative model to the origin of life, namely punctuated equilibrium. At the chemical level (DNA) we cannot explain rapid changes because of the complex inter-linking of genes, and the fact that mutations are generally harmful. As for Darwinism, it does not explain the “fossil record.”
However, the question that is not being asked is “how did life come to be?”. We have been offered an answer that a priori excludes anything other than naturalism. The remaining option is that life was directly created by an intelligent designer. Many have taken that route and accepted that, in view of the problems with Darwinism (and its modern versions) and punctuated equilibria, life was directly created by an intelligent designer. We need to apply this kind of thinking to oil and gas.
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists produces a technical Bulletin which generally contains articles on the geological origin of oil, and trying to trace the source rocks. There is also a monthly magazine (Explorer) which contains oil industry news items and a forum for readers’ letters. In 2005, a series of letters appeared, apparently prompted by a high-profile author criticizing creationism in an earlier article. A number of creationists (they appeared to be old-earth creationists) wrote letters (which were published), and these were interspersed by letters from anti-creationists. From my viewpoint in the U. K., I was encouraged by the dialog, even if I could not subscribe to all that the old-earth creationists were saying. In the U. K., our learned bodies such as The Geological Society forbid any kind of dialogue with creationists (Nield 2008). We are considered to be no better than flat-earthers.
I took the plunge and wrote to the editor, pointing out that there was a fundamental practical point to the discussion which had not been addressed. If the origin of oil could not be explained by biogenesis or abiogenesis, then there was only one option left—creation. That letter was printed (Matthews 2006), but it brought the shutters down on the discussion.
I found a similar conspiracy of silence in the U. K. oil industry. I joined over thirty years ago when I was an old-earth creationist. Within five years I had encountered Whitcomb and Morris’ (1961) book, and after a long gestation period had become a young-earth creationist. The geology I was discovering as a petroleum specialist was bringing me into contact with real geology, as opposed to the sterilized geology in textbooks and journal articles which often deal only with facts that do not compromise naturalism.
There were many occasions when I put forward the view that the earth is young, life is created, and oil is also created. No one ever put any structured counterarguments forward.
A Biblical View to Explaining Hydrocarbons
To summarize, the fact that the two major suggestions for explaining the origin of oil have numerous problems suggests that we have to rationally examine the idea that oil is theobaric (made by God). This suggestion will be examined under scriptural and technical headings. In the process we need to ask where and when God made it. For a moment we consider the geology in the Bible.
There isn’t a lot, but it is crucial and sufficient to develop a third option for explaining the origin of oil. During the Creation Week, God created a mature earth. It remained relatively undisturbed until the Noachian Flood.
The goodness of God in creating a mature earth
The Garden of Eden had everything ready for its first occupants. There must have been mature plants and trees to supply food for immediate consumption. There must also have been partially grown plants which Adam and Eve would have to tend in order to supply food for the days ahead. It would mirror the tree of life described in Revelation 22 which produces a new crop each calendar month. The need for harvesting and storage is then much reduced. In fact, Genesis talks about harvests being a feature of life only while earth remains. We can only talk about these anthropomorphically, and further discussions are not germane to this note.
Life without oil with the population we now have, and cold climates, would be almost impossible, even if we walked everywhere and/or used donkeys to save driving or flying. Consider how we use the components of oil. Methane is the smallest hydrocarbon. It is the main component of natural gas, which we use in our central heating. Ethane, which is number two in the sequence, is used for making the multi-purpose plastics. Propane and butane are next, and are valuable for portable heating because they are almost liquids under normal conditions. The next part of the alkane sequence are the hydrocarbons that make up petrol. Then comes diesel fuel, lubricating oil, and finally the asphaltenes. Each seems to have a purpose in life. Even helium is valuable because of its use for welding, and as an additive for compressed-air diving. My thoughts are that God, in His bounty, made hydrocarbons to meet our specific needs.
Although the molecules that make up the hydrocarbons are complex,24 their complexity is miniscule compared with that of molecules (such as DNA) within living matter. So God would have no difficulty (I speak anthropomorphically to avoid arguments that I am invoking God of the Gaps) in making hydrocarbons. It also fits in with ideas expressed in Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard ( chapter 5 ). God is seen as someone who prepared the earth fully for man’s habitation. The hydrocarbons are useful, not only as a fuel, but for their ability (through changing the carbon bonds around in the refinery) to be transformed into other conveniences of modern life, such as the plastics.
Biblical evidence for God creating oil
Some kind of oil derivative was used by Noah to waterproof the Ark. We also have to recognize that, in the pre-Flood landscape (although we do not have detailed descriptions in the book of Genesis), we do know that a wide range of minerals were available for human use. We read of gold, onyx, soil,25 building materials (for cities),26 bronze and iron. The wide range of vegetation and the number of animal kinds also point to God who was liberal with his creative activity. So that although oil is not something simple (see earlier), the idea of God directly creating oil is not unreasonable when compared with other aspects of the young-earth creationist model.
On thoughts about other minerals
Although my ascribing the origin of oil to the direct creation of God is something new, the idea that minerals were already present on the earth (and oil is one of many minerals) as part of the rich diversity in creation has been made before, and therefore strengthens the case I am making. Jones (1998), considering the way science is taught, points out that there is no way in which science is neutral about origins. Whilst the following quote was written about cells, I consider that it is appropriate to oil. He says (Jones 1998, p. 103): “each design is special, and has that unique combination of features and properties that fit it for specific roles and relationships in God’s world.”
We turn our attention now to how the reservoirs where we now find oil are related to earth’s history, especially in the Flood.
Completing the geological story with reference to the Flood
In a young-earth framework, the oil reservoirs that we now find were either deposited during the Noachian Flood (Flood geology for short) or formed after the Flood (Recolonization geology). Either way, the oil that we now have access to was either:
created after the Flood;
or lain relatively undisturbed during the tectonic activity of the Flood (since then it has been released from wherever it was placed by God during the Creation Week and now entered the reservoirs that we now have);
or was placed in deeper locations during Creation Week, and moved by standard hydraulic means into the target reservoirs during the Flood (Flood geology) whilst the “fountains of the great deep” were open.
Oil created after the Flood
It would seem unusual for God to have created oil after the Flood. Whilst the Bible contains many examples of God actively creating new healthy limbs (for example, in some of the miracles of the New Testament) after the Creation Week, and oil (though surely comparable to a plant derivative rather than what we get out of the ground) for the Shunammite woman, that level of creativity is miniscule to what God did during the Creation Week. It would therefore seem more likely that God created oil during the Creation Week.
There is a technical issue that seems to confirm God creating oil in the Creation Week. Oil in known reservoirs seems to have entered from deeper positions in the earth (Wilson 2005). We will examine the details later.
Oil moving into target reservoirs after the Flood
In the Recolonization model of geology (Bush 2008), the bulk of the fossiliferous sediments are assumed to have been deposited after the Flood. For the fossiliferous sediments to have filled with oil only after the Flood, we have to accept that for all the tectonic activity during the Flood, oil was not released from the repositories that God placed it in during the Creation Week. Since during the Flood the “fountains of the great deep” burst forth, the oil repositories must have been deeper so that the oil remained undisturbed. How the oil could then have been released from these even deeper repositories becomes a matter of unreasonable speculation. The “fountains of the great deep” were “closed,” yet as oil would have to pass these “shallower” positions during migration, it seems unreasonable to expect that the intense tectonic activity associated with the release of the oil would not also have breached the “fountains of the great deep.”
In addition, there are severe problems with the recolonization model of geology which we will briefly list. Some of them are general issues, but some are specifically derived from the information supplied in this document. They are:
The timescale needed for animal recolonization of the world, and their subsequent fossilization, requires an unacceptable stretching of biblical dating. There is often no provenance for the sediments. The Davisian cycle does not work (see previously). The enormity of geological events during recolonization. As an example, consider the dry valleys in what is commonly called Tertiary times compared with the paucity of evidence of rapid run-off of Flood water somewhere lower in the rock sequence. The fact that during the Flood the “fountains of the great deep” were closed, so no new deep water has since been delivered to the surface of the earth. To that extent we would expect a high degree of similarity between the salinity of the sea at the end of the Flood and that of the present day. The variability of the formation waters in reservoirs of many ages shows that that post-Flood emplacement of oil is not a convincing model.
Oil moving into target reservoirs during the Flood
The most likely event that placed oil in the target reservoirs is the Flood. There are biblical and scientific reasons for this interpretation.
We have suggested that oil was created by God in the beginning. What we have not discussed is the question where God put that oil. Noah had access to some of this oil,27 but that is all we know.
The known evidence could be explained by suggesting that God created oil in deep primordial repositories during the Creation Week, and that it migrated upwards into present-day reservoirs during the Noachian Flood.28 Since the secular ideas on migration of oil are not viable (discussed previously), we need a new explanation for this vital part of the process.
A new model of hydrocarbon emplacement
Whichever Flood model one adopts, intense geological activity will have occurred whilst the “fountains of the great deep” described in Genesis were active, though after day 150 of the Flood God said that the fountains were closed, so we would expect a sharp cut-off in hydraulic activity. During the Flood, the primordial repositories containing the hydrocarbons will have been breached and fluids released. Provided that the sedimentation was rapid, both in respect to the porous rocks and the cap rock, then most of the hydrocarbons could be trapped at shallower depths than the primordial repositories. If sideways sedimentation occurred, then the trapping of oil by the process discovered by Berthault (1986) would have been even more effective, because cap rock and reservoir rock would have been deposited at the same time.29 Whatever the true events, the new hydrocarbon emplacement model favors the short timescale associated with the 150-day period when the “fountains of the great deep” were active, rather than the post-Flood strata model where sedimentation takes place over many subsequent years.
The author is not precluding the formation of oil reservoirs after day 150, since after day 150, in order to drain large tracts of land ready for rehabitation, significant tectonic events will have had to take place. We observe oil seeps (for example, see fig. 5) today when tectonic activity is limited. Some reservoir rocks will therefore have been deposited as a result of a Davisian type of sedimentation (though on timescales unbelievably short for Davis) and the hydrocarbons would have been released from lower temporary positions. Paleo-oil is one example of this. Even more significant are the blowout pipes being observed as a result of improved seismic surveys, as will be discussed.
Illustrating the model-synchronous geo-events
Cause and effect is not always unravelled in geology. One exception is synsedimentary faulting. Faulting, if it takes place in a watery environment, will give rise to sedimentary activity. Material may be eroded from the footwall of a normal fault, and deposited in the basin created by the hanging wall. Another example of a synchronous geo-event is when tectonic activity results in abnormal oil seeps at the surface. This is common in the fault zones on the western seaboard of the USA (Sibson 1990). These separate cause and effects may be illustrated by Fig. 9.
What is not considered is whether all the three events are synchronous. The reality has to be that a single tectonic event could have the links shown in Fig. 10.
Finally, if we reduce conventional timescales by 6 to 10 orders of magnitude, then the sedimentation is potentially fast enough to entrap the released oil. We can then complete the diagram as Fig. 11.
In this scenario, oil will also have the potential for release into the environment. If the reservoir cap material is deposited in a matter of hours after the reservoir sediments, then the loss will be small, and some of the escaping oil will be entrained in the cap rock (as in the Kimmeridge Clay). Sideways sedimentation, as suggested by Berthault (1986), would be an even more effective means of trapping oil.
Explaining individual reservoir phenomena
We briefly recap on the list of reservoirs described so far. The aim is to see how what we know about them fits in with the idea that theobaric oil moved into the reservoirs during short, though sometimes localized, bursts of sedimentary activity during the Noachian Flood.
Cap rock hydrocarbons
—Maureen, Brae, and Wytch Farm
Hydrocarbons within the cap rock (shales and saltseals) are a consequence, not of local generation of the hydrocarbons or of diffusion (there is not enough time), but of hydrocarbons being intimately mixed with the cap-rock material while those materials are being deposited, and before they are sufficiently compacted to be impermeable. This explains the situation in Maureen, Brae and Wytch Farm regarding oil in “cap rocks.”
Explaining capillary behavior
—Magnus
Capillary behavior30 within the reservoir and the distribution of illite in the Magnus reservoir is explained (see Matthews 2004).
Explaining high pressures
—Brae, Magnus, and Ekofisk
The high pressure of the Brae reservoir is now explained. Sedimentation of the conglomerates (200 to 500 meters of it) must have taken place within a matter of minutes to an hour or so. The source of the “cap rock” is already active (those sediments are inter-digitating with the Brae conglomerates). That sudden cessation of reservoir sediment31 simply allows the deposition of the Kimmeridge Clay to continue, trap some of the oil, and finally seal the Brae reservoir. Such abrupt cessation of the conglomerate sediment supply does not tie naturally with the diagram in Harris and Fowler (1987).
The Ekofisk and Magnus reservoirs support this same interpretation. In Alba, the pressures are “normal,” but this is due to extensive remobilization of the sands which have penetrated the “cap rock,” thus releasing any original over-pressure. But the oil was already in the reservoir.
Fluid inclusions
While geological features such as kimberlite pipes have been mined below the level of the Precambrian basement (Holmes 1979),32 we now have a greater understanding of the earth’s structure because of improvements in seismic capability. For example, Cartwright (2007) shows examples of what he calls “blowout pipes” within the North Sea. Later he quotes diameters of 100 m to 3 km, and heights up to 2.5 km.
These pipes are potentially the answer to Hogg, Selliers, and Jourdan’s (1992) question about the origin of hot acidic waters during deposition of the reservoir facies for Alwyn and Smørbukk that give rise to the fluid inclusions. They could be the conduits used by the “fountains of the great deep,” but if any over-pressured formations remained at the end of day 150 (when the “fountains of the great deep” closed) they may have had a less-catastrophic origin due to de-watering.
Dealing with Objections
Theological and physical objections have been raised against this theory that oil is “theobaric.” This section deals briefly with four key ones. Readers are welcome to contact the author for more details, or discuss their own points.
Secular pressure
Mention the word “God” in a science paper, and it is not likely to be printed. Gould (1999) came up with this idea of science and religion having their individual magisteria. Science and religion cannot be mixed. But the truth is that most people who object to the Bible do so, not on intellectual grounds, but because of its call to be obedient to the ways of God (Lennox 2007). Furthermore, Jesus never seemed to divide life into the secular and the sacred. This view is sustained in Romans 1:20, where we are reminded that God’s invisible nature can be understood through what He has created.
Objections from old-earth creationists
Disappointingly, some Christians fail to offer a consistent reason for their line of thinking, because young-earth creationism may be seen as going back to “the God of the gaps.” The issue has been addressed by Weinberger (2008), who argues that as long as the science is consistent with the Bible, then we should not worry about offering an explanation for phenomenon that science has no explanation for. After all, God does not try to prove His existence. He simply tells us that He is there. The science and the theology now form an impregnable position on the origin |
account for apostacon.org)
Relinquish control of admin of Dropbox folder to RJ
Mail chimp
Relinquish control of admin of Eventbrite to Meagan
Any and all usernames and passwords to any of Apostacon’s digital property
Bank/Financial
Apostacon’s EIN number
Tax ID number – State of Nebraska
All information about any taxes filed
Social media accounts
Twitter username and password
Reddit username and password
Imgur username and password
Username and password for Google Account (apostacon@gmail.com)
YouTube account username and password, if different
Relinquish control of admin of Apostacon’s LinkedIn page to RJ
Relinquish control of Apostacon’s Facebook page to RJ
Relinquish control of admin of Aposta-Connections Facebook page to RJ or Robert
Any and all additional social media account usernames and passwords for Apostacon
Apostacon Merchandise
The box of Large Apostacon T-shirts last known to be in Ms. Morehead’s’s possession
Miscellaneous
Any and all property of Apostacon (digital, social media, promotional materials, financial information) must be returned to Apostacon. This is inclusive of any items not mentioned in this list that Ms. Morehead has access to or possession of.
The bank login information was provided to Meagan after Sarah left/was removed. They received nothing from the rest of this list.
RJ discovered that the Apostacon Facebook page has been deleted. Sarah was the sole admin. Did you do this? If so, why? If not, how did this happen? (The timing of these last two is interesting since this was two days after you received a request for all the passwords to Apostacon’s social media, etc.) I have no idea what date it was deleted, but my access to anything Apostacon related ended in early October 2015, within days of my last meeting with Meagan. At the time I presumed it was because our terms had ended, and as I’ve always had a fantastic team of volunteers, I had every confidence it was in good hands as my focus had to be elsewhere. The week following Apostacon my Aunt’s health took a serious downturn, and she died not long after. Within a week or two of that occurring, we had another family emergency that took 100% of my time from then onward. At one point in all of that I did deactivate/delete my personal Facebook account. In doing some digging tonight it appears this also does delete pages if you are the page creator and sole admin, screenshots in folder. If I was still an Admin, which I definitely didn’t think I was, that’s the most likely explanation. If that’s indeed what happened then it was unquestionably an accident and not the slightest bit intentional or malicious, nor was I aware that even occurred, as I was considerably distracted during that time.
According to the bylaws (that weren’t voted in, but upon which Sarah purports to be operating) a director’s term ends when a successor has been elected:
If Sarah left before this happened, then she was violating the bylaws which she believed to be valid. But also, the board would not have felt the need to formally remove her if she had already left of her own volition. The board also tells me that they are in possession of no communication from Sarah indicating that she was stepping down.
As for the facebook part, the way I understand it to work is if you deactivate your facebook account, it will only deactivate the page of which you are the sole admin until you reactivate your account. Once your account is reactivated, so is the page. If your account is completely deleted, it probably does delete the account. Since her personal account was still in existence and active when this was discovered, this doesn’t hold water. Also, Sarah currently advertises herself as a social media expert who admins and runs multiple large pages, so what are the odds that she would be unaware of how admin for pages works?
So, again, it’s left to the reader to wonder exactly how these things happened.
Now here is where it gets really depressing. I sent Sarah this email on Friday, April 22. The morning of April 23 the Apostacon board woke up to find that the Dropbox folder with all of Apostacon’s information had been deleted. Sarah was the sole admin. So I ran some tests with dropbox. It seems only the admin is capable of deleting that folder.
Thankfully the Apostacon team had already copied the entire contents of that folder, so all the financial information as well as some of the relevant documents they provided to me were preserved.
Bear in mind, this is not the whole story. There’s a great deal of information I have right now which I am incapable of sharing. I could also go further into Sarah’s mismanagement of Apostacon, but I honestly don’t see the point. I’ve been bad at jobs in the past, I’m glad people later gave me a chance to be good at jobs. But, unfortunately, much of what I’ve found suggests more than just well-intentioned ineptitude.
So why bother writing this? Is this a hit piece against somebody I’ve fully admitted has never wronged me in the slightest? Well, like I said in the beginning, rumors were beginning to fly after that reddit post – some true, some not, some exaggerated, and some understated. I couldn’t watch that and not say anything after all the work I’ve put in during these last few months.
But also…Sarah undoubtedly had access to lengthy donor lists during her time with Apostacon, Recovering From Religion, and the Reason Rally. It’s entirely possible (let’s face it, very, very probable) that she will be soliciting donations for her future projects. As Hemant established with his piece about We Are Atheism, potential donors need to know when things don’t add up, or if there’s a decent chance their money could be misused.
Remember, when this all began I did everything in my power to help Sarah. I began investigating with the full expectation that I would find she was wronged. My investigation came to feel very much like leaving religion. Regardless of my emotional investment, the facts are the facts, and the truth slowly began to overcome what I had previously believed. Like with religion, in the infancy of having my mind changed on some things I’d love to be proven wrong and have my mind changed back. If Sarah could do it, if any of you could do it, I’d be extremely happy. This has not been easy at all.
Anyway, there’s the information I’m able to provide.
While surely the Apostacon board deserves some of the blame for not keeping closer tabs on Sarah, she was also very good at keeping them in the dark. Still, the Apostacon board has done, in my eyes, an exemplary job of getting things back to an even keel. In the future I will do a post about why I still think Apostacon is a worthwhile investment and is heading in the right direction despite being left in shambles and $50,000 in debt after Sarah was removed/left. But I’ve been writing this post for three days straight and I think I’ve earned a rest.Philippine troops ride on their truck on their way to the frontline in the outskirts of Marawi on the southern island of Mindanao (AFP Photo/Ted Aljibe)
Islamist militants have beheaded two Vietnamese sailors held hostage for eight months in the southern Philippines, the military said on Wednesday.
Philippine troops found the remains of the two hostages early Wednesday morning on the island of Basilan, a stronghold of the notorious Abu Sayyaf kidnap-for-ransom group, military spokeswoman Captain Jo-Ann Petinglay said.
"This is a desperate measure of the Abu Sayyaf Group because they see they have no gains from their kidnap-for-ransom activity," Petinglay told AFP.
Vietnam's foreign ministry said it was seeking confirmation from Philippine authorities, and called for heavy punishment for the killers.
"Vietnam strongly condemns all acts of kidnapping and barbarous and inhumane murder, and we are of the opinion that these acts must be heavily punished," spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang told AFP.
Abu Sayyaf, originally a loose network of militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, has splintered into factions, with some continuing to engage in banditry and kidnappings.
One faction has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, with members among those holding parts of Marawi, the largely Catholic nation's most important Islamic city.
Militants continue to occupy parts of Marawi despite a US-backed military offensive there that has claimed more than 460 lives and displaced nearly 400,000 people since it began in May.
The two Vietnamese were seized last November along with four other Vietnamese crew members of a vessel that was boarded by the militants off the southern region of Mindanao, the military said.
One of the six crewmen was rescued last month and three remain in captivity, Petinglay said.
Abu Sayyaf militants are holding a total of 22 hostages, including 16 foreigners, according to Petinglay.
The Abu Sayyaf is known to behead its hostages unless ransom payments are made.
German national Jurgen Kantner, 70, was beheaded in February after the kidnappers' demand for 30 million pesos ($600,000) was not met.
Last year, the group beheaded two Canadian hostages.LAS VEGAS -- Heavyweight mixed martial artist Alistair Overeem was sentenced to 50 hours of community service Tuesday stemming from a Jan. 2 incident in which he allegedly pushed a woman at a Las Vegas nightclub.
Additionally, Overeem must attend anger-management counseling and stay out of trouble for 90 days. Failure to comply could result in a 90-day jail sentence.
"Of course, the side of the story I hear is that he was a victim, which I honestly do believe," UFC president Dana White said. "Why would Alistair Overeem want to fight a girl?
"I don't care how tough you are, when you're out in public you need security to diffuse certain situations."
Overeem's manager, Colin Lam, said Overeem now has a security team with him in almost all public circumstances.
Attorney David Chesnoff appeared on Overeem's behalf Tuesday. The UFC fighter, who trains out of Florida, is scheduled to appear at a news conference in Las Vegas later Tuesday but was not present in court.
Overeem (36-11) is scheduled to fight UFC heavyweight champion Junior dos Santos (14-1) on May 26 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. He earned a shot at the title by defeating Brock Lesnar at UFC 141 via TKO.With the Summer Season only weeks away, Vainglory 2.5 drops with an entirely new progression system for all players: Talents. This update comes packed with the most anticipated skins, quality of life improvements, and balance changes—all for your buttery smooth™ play experience. Let’s break down the Vainglory 2.5 Update Notes!
INTRODUCING TALENTS
After months of teasers and anticipation, Talents arrive full-fledged on the Fold in Update 2.5! In short, Talents are “collectible hero upgrades that make Vainglory’s short BRAWL game modes even more mayhem-filled and fun.” Remember that bulk Glory (and ICE) you’ve been saving for years? Time to blast it! Talents are available to unlock in methods accessible for players of all tiers and seniority, including misers who do not wish to spend a dime. Among these include: Talent chests, daily login rewards, coin rotations and more! In an in-depth walkthrough by PlayoffBeard, Talents and their core mechanics are augmented through quick and informative detail.
SUPER SPECIAL SHINY SKINS
Netherknight Lance (Legendary)
Hell yeah! Literally. Jump, roll, stun, root and roll again—with fire. Compared to his rare brother from beyond, Legendary Netherknight Lance features an entirely new set of wings, with changes as follows:
Nether Trident engulfed in fire
Obsidian shield featuring the Pinnacle of Awesome design
Combat Roll is now a combat corkscrew flip
Flames fly from his shield during basic attacks and Gythian Wall
Netherknight Lance is available to purchase in a limited-time Talent bundle pack, or for direct ICE & card unlock starting June 8.
Broken Doll Alpha (Legendary)
Twirl around as a pretty princess with demonic frights in the complete antique set of Broken Doll Alpha, topped off with her Legendary version. This quite realistic girl shows off her gentle manner with model and effect changes:
The key to Alpha’s clockwork heart is also a dangerous weapon
During Termination Protocol, Alpha falls inside a golden clock and explodes in sparks & gears before the key winds her back to life
Deadly clockwork key attacks with beautiful ballet movements
Recall: Red strings attach to her limbs, spin her around and drop her back in base
Broken Doll Alpha is available to purchase in a limited-time Talent bundle pack, or for direct ICE & card unlock starting June 8.
Spider Queen Kestrel (Epic)
This isn’t a web of lies! Kestrel yet again receives a glamorous skin to match her unique archer theme in Spider Queen Kestrel. Now, you’ll be able to silly string your enemies into a super sticky spider silk stun (say that 10x fast). Apart from elvish alliteration, Spider Queen Kestrel features model & effect changes as follows:
Spider Mother Bow with webs
Drops exploding spider sacs for Active Camo
Elvish leap during Glimmershot
Spins into new pose for One Shot One Kill
Spider Queen Kestrel is available to purchase in a limited-time Talent bundle pack, or for direct ICE & card unlock now.
Lapdog Grumpjaw (Rare)
Our adorable, hungry hero Grumpjaw gnaws on his first skin with Lapdog Grumpjaw. As the name suggests, Lapdog Grumpjaw shed his outer scales and arrives back with a total redesign from the vet. Themed like a French Bulldog, dog lovers will beg for his skin! Just don’t try to fit him in your purse (or murse, don’t even pretend).
Lapdog Grumpjaw is available to purchase in a limited-time Talent bundle pack, or for direct ICE & card unlock now.
QUEST REDESIGN
In order to accommodate upcoming progression, quests and their respective chests have been entirely redesigned to make reward participation more understandable at all levels of play.
“5-Hero Chest”
Talents, Talents, and even more Talents! I wish I had just one… Replacing the first quest slot comes the 5-Hero Chest. Play five different heroes to unlock Talent coins for those respective heroes. This resets often, making it the ideal earning method for F2P players.
“Slot 2 Quests”
Retaining its previous functionality, the second slot holds the most participated and thrilling quests from before. The only difference? Chest unlocks come bundled with Talents!
“Consecutive Wins”
For years now, players have earned bonus Glory for their First Win of the Day, Third Win of the Day, and “Sinister Seven,” achieved upon winning a match seven days in a row. These indicators were previously removed to make room for additional UI. But, now they’ve visually returned and replace the third slot!
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
Visual Clarity
Indiv idual turret-range indicators (turn off in settings) marked by colors: Green: Turret is targeting a creature, e.g. allied minion Yellow: Turret has no target or is targeting an allied hero Red: Turret has a target, and it’s you … RUN!
Burst dam age flashes the screen red, and stuns flash white (turn off in settings)
All slow effects receive prominent Frostburn particles
Death timers display next to the top match timer
Scoreboard displays item cooldowns
Pretargeted abilities prompt a selection radius when used without a target
Base Sanctuary
MOAR HEAL, LESS TIME! In all modes, heal and energy recharge per second has been increased from 8% to 12%, and also occurs in much faster ticks. For standard modes, a small speed boost is granted once in the sanctuary, which is lost upon taking damage.
ADDRESSING INTENTIONAL LOSING
Ranked Dodges
At the beginning of Update 2.4, a server-side hotfix was introduced which, after dodging, causes visual skill tier to be taken equal to if you lost that match. This change is present in Ranked mode, and only the player dodging has to pay the time.
Low Priority Queue
Community feedback quickly piled up to remind Super Evil that dodging remains a necessity in order to avoid definite toxic players. They heard with open ears, and as a result, LPQ punishments have been significantly increased for intentional losing scenarios. Although this alone will not solve the bone of contention, it’s the first step toward combating dodge-related issues. Be on the lookout for advanced troll detection during the Summer Season.
BLITZ
Middle Sentry replaces Gold Miner, and we don’t know what the flying Flicker he’s on Middle Sentry is always visible (does not require vision) No longer yields gold upon killing Harder, better, faster, stronger
Health and regen increased when out-of-combat
Individual “Blitz Score” records your Blitz progress, viewable on the play section of the home page
HERO BALANCE CHANGES
Someone forgot their dad jeans. With the meta retaining the prioritization of heavy burst damage, Ardan found himself standing there … and standing there … and standing there until he fell over like soggy bread, unable to keep his family trio alive. With a slight increase in his Julia’s Gift health gain, Ardan can now mingle longer with the other dads on the Fold. Only once he’s not mingled out.
Cloud9’s rendition of Operation just wasn’t enough. In good spirit, Baptiste’s Bad Mojo now comes with increased crystal ratios on the impact and explosion damage. As well, Baptiste’s sixth finger (oh, wrong hero?) resulted in his Ordained cast range to increase from 5 to 6.
The Stormguard saga continues! In this chapter, Catherine scales twice as tanky for twice the fun at no additional cost. Early game aggression was not rewarding, but now, each stack of Captain of the Guard grants Catherine 2 armor and shield, previously at 1. Be sure to purchase cooldown items and frequently stun and silence early on.
Just because he’s blind as a bat cat doesn’t make him any easier to chase across the map. The perpetual sound of a fuzzy engine followed by “You have been killed” just wasn’t fun, which led to Glaive’s Afterburn cooldown being increased from 22-20-18-16-10 to 22-20-18-16-12. (By the time you’ve read this far, Afterburn could have been cast around 23 times!)
NOM NOM NOM NOM crystal path, NOM NOM NOM french fries. CHEW GNAW BITE CHOMP grumpy more accurate. BURP.
This sheriff was just a bit too badass. In the late game, jail for her bounty targets was just a hop, skip and skedaddle away on her weapon path. Gwen has now returned her permanent search warrant with a base weapon ratio decrease from 45% to 35%.
Recent balance changes prior to Update 2.5 didn’t quite make the mark. Even at far distances, Kestrel was able to piledrive her targets with an endless barrage of halcyon-infused nuclear weapons (or at least that’s what it feels like). In addition to energy costs for Glimmershot and One Shot One Kill being increased, Kestrel’s basic attack and reload times have received bug fixes, making them slightly slower than before. Be at peace.
The votes are in! It’s time to buff Lyra again. Remember when Imperial Sigil had that burst heal? You’re free to resume your tear-filled slumbers—after being reactivated, Imperial Sigil now consumes the remaining heal duration at 60% effectiveness. Lyra’s basic attack range was decreased from 6.6 to 5.1 in order to relieve early game pressure. Because of this, the next logical change was to increase her range later on; Arcane Passage now passively increases Lyra’s basic attack range by 1.0-1.5-2.0 meters. As well, the portal-to-portal range was increased at the second and third ranks. Tl;DR: Just run. /s
Our favorite snaggletooth plant was sprouting too many dandelions and sunflowers (AKA chomping munions). With Brambleboom Seeds’ cooldown being increased from 2.5 to 3 seconds, escaping her loyal friends is an easier endeavor.
In good spirit, VaingloriousSAW returns to share his thoughts on the 2.5 balance changes:
FOOLISH CREATORS AGONIZE OVER HOW MUCH “ARMOR” AND “SHIELD” SAW HAVE. POINTLESS. DEFENSE IS FOR THE WEAK AND WRONGFULLY ACCUSED ARSONISTS.
THAT BUILDING WAS ON FIRE ALREADY WHEN SAW GOT THERE, SAW JUST WALKING SAWS DOG. YES SAW HAVE DOG YOU JUST CANT SEE IT NOW CUZ DOG ON VACATION. SAW NO NEED TALENT. SAW PUSH IS TALENT ENOUGH. ALSO PLAY STEEL DRUMS AND SPOT ON RINGO IMPRESSION. “WHERES MY ARM? WHY MY GUN SO SMALL? WHY I DIE TO SAW SO MUCH? WAA WAA” SEE?
The cute, cuddly and fire-breathing dragon followed too strict of a “flame and run” tactic. Initial ignite damage on Goop has been heavily toned down while the burn damage packs quite a bigger singe. If you’re looking for a real Skaarf hug, you’re in luck.
The award for the smallest (but sharpest) balance change this patch goes to … Taka! By increasing his House Kamuha weapon ratio from 30% to 35%, red builds may phase out of the “it’s like we’re not even here” state. The impact of said change is minuscule, but opens up an entirely new path for the ginga-ninja to follow.
Sometimes you just wanna port home, and Vox doesn’t let you escape that awful country song blasting in your ear at volume 35. Pulse’s slow at center has been reduced from 20-22-24-26-30% to 15-17-19-21-25% in order to make Vox more reachable for melee heroes.
ITEM BALANCE CHANGES
If you landed a successful Atlas Pauldron onto the weapon carry, it was basically melt city, population: 1. To reach ghost town, Atlas Pauldron’s cooldown has been increased while the effect’s duration has been decreased. As well, the active attack speed reduction has been lowered from 65% to 50%.
Despite its high cooldown reduction, Clockwork just wasn’t … working. Other items for a cheaper price outdid this grandfather, but now he’s caught up with a lower total cost. Watch out for flying canes!
Can you hear me me me me? Echo saw minimal purchase history, and for the right reasons, with cooldown items as the most effective investment. Alongside a total cost decrease and passive energy increase is a lower base cooldown. Scream, shout, and hear more back!
Just as Echo, Nullwave Gauntlet received a lack of attention once Captain players began to practice blocking this monster. To counter this, the range of Nullwave Gauntlet has been increased with a decreased cooldown from 40 to 35 seconds. Be careful for an Ardan double Gauntlet special (or triple with Echo).
This poor fellow heard about the Lyra burst heal and decided to wake up. With a fluffed pillow and warm milk on his nightstand, Slumbering Husk offers more base health and decreased cooldown from 45 to 30 seconds.
PERSONAL INSIGHT
The quality of life changes in Update 2.5 are prominent, and will continue to improve Vainglory in Update 2.6 with the start of the Summer Season. From upcoming heroes, meta differences, and ranked system enrichment, we’re beginning to see buttery smooth™ play experience cross with the aforementioned features promised in the Spring Developer Progress video. Despite Talents feeling gimmicky, Update 2.5 paths the way for Vainglory’s most anticipated arrivals such as 5V5 and additional servers, ultimately improving connection across the board. Special thanks to HipsterSkaarf for the lovely graphic!The neuropathological correlates of Alzheimer's disease (AD) include amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. To study the interaction between Aβ and tau and their effect on synaptic function, we derived a triple-transgenic model (3×Tg-AD) harboring PS1 M146V, APP Swe, and tau P301L transgenes. Rather than crossing independent lines, we microinjected two transgenes into single-cell embryos from homozygous PS1 M146V knockin mice, generating mice with the same genetic background. 3×Tg-AD mice progressively develop plaques and tangles. Synaptic dysfunction, including LTP deficits, manifests in an age-related manner, but before plaque and tangle pathology. Deficits in long-term synaptic plasticity correlate with the accumulation of intraneuronal Aβ. These studies suggest a novel pathogenic role for intraneuronal Aβ with regards to synaptic plasticity. The recapitulation of salient features of AD in these mice clarifies the relationships between Aβ, synaptic dysfunction, and tangles and provides a valuable model for evaluating potential AD therapeutics as the impact on both lesions can be assessed.Shari Bernson, Director of Development at Colorado Public Television in DENVER announced that they are the first Broadcast Station in the country to air the Architects and Engineers For 9/11 Truth new gripping documentary, 9/11 Explosive Evidence Experts Speak Out featuring more than 40 experts who say a new investigation is urgently needed.
Richard Gage, AIA founder of Architects and Engineers For 9/11 Truth was in the studio during the Airing and the broadcast was "LIVE" Streamed at:
http://www.cpt12.org/911ExplosiveEvidence
As of 3 days ago Shari reported that there had been 27,000 hits on the Colorado Public TV webpage which is more than any program ever received before. People from around the country are logging on to see it.
See also the 15 minute version of What Happened to Building 7?, aka, Solving the Mystery of WTC 7 featuring the former President of the Screen Actors Guild, Ed ASNER:
http://architects-engineers.org/ A shorter version has been airing on PBS TV nationwide for several months and an estimated 12 million people had seen it by Sept. 1st.
Hear Shari tell it on the phone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql_wZaKQhss&feature=player_embedded#!Blue Jays president Paul Beeston was a guest on Primetime Sports on Sportsnet 590 The Fan with Bob McCown and Stephen Brunt On Wednesday night. (Listen to the Audio here)
Beeston didn’t give any answers on whether the Blue Jays have made any progress with either free agent pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez or Ervin Santana. And wouldn’t really commit to being surprised if the Jays didn’t make any upgrades to the rotation, So take it for what it’s worth.
Beeston was asked about Kyle Drabek and Drew Hutchison’s health and if they were ready to go this spring, Beeston said that both would be ready to go this Spring, but most of us already had that part figured out.
The two most intriguing things to come out of the interview was the topic of grass in the Rogers Centre and that pesky five year policy that has been talked to death this winter.
Unlike Alex Anthopoulos, Beeston seems like he is steadfast on the five year plan and probably wouldn’t budge on it regardless of what Free Agent would come along, and Beeston added as long as he’s around the five year policy will be intact. Beeston also believes that the Jays can sell winning and the city to potential free agents to talk them into signing here. It’s not a bad idea I’m just not so sure that it’ll be as practical as the Jays would like to believe.
When asked about grass in the Rogers Centre, Beeston says that they are doing research on making grass work and have partnered with the University of Guelph on making it happen. Getting the Argos out of the Rogers Centre is the stumbling block right now but even if the Argos were to move to BMO Field for next year Beeston says it would still take three to four years to get grass at Rogers Centre.
As Beeston explained it would be a big project as they would have to dig up the cement and involve a ton of engineering work to make the natural grass work. He also mentions that they would have to work with getting the air currents to run across the grass, right now the air comes from the top of the stadium so it’s another issue that has to be brought up.
But as Beeston stated tonight that 2018 is the target for natural grass regardless what happens with the Argos.
Beeston did say that new turf will be in place for 2015, as for 2014 they are putting in fill to the current turf they have now which as Beeston says should make the turf softer which should take some of the strange hops out of the game.
Lastly when asked about ticket sales, Beeston said they are behind last years pace but ahead of the 2012 pace, and added that the April home schedule should help attendance as the Jays open up home portion of the schedule against the Yankees.
AdvertisementsImage copyright AP Image caption Pope Francis delighted his Palestinian hosts by referring to the "state of Palestine" during a three-day visit to the Middle East a year ago
The Vatican is to formally recognise Palestinian statehood in a treaty that will be signed shortly, officials say.
Israel has expressed its disappointment at the decision which it says will not advance the peace process.
Talks between the Palestinians and the Vatican - which favours a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - have gone on for 20 years.
President Abbas meets the Pope this weekend when two 19th Century Palestinian nuns will be canonised.
The Vatican is eager that property and civil rights of the Catholic Church in the Palestinian state is protected, correspondents say.
According to the New York Times, it has strong religious interests in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories that include Christian holy sites.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Roman Catholics in Jerusalem are preparing for the forthcoming canonisation by Pope Francis of two nuns who will become the first modern-day Palestinian saints
The BBC's David Willey in Rome says that Pope Francis is making every effort to strengthen the Christian presence in the Middle East at a time when hundreds of thousands of Arab Christians are fleeing Islamist violence.
The Vatican's announcement comes amid growing momentum to recognise Palestinian statehood. Over the last year the European Parliament as well as the UK, Republic of Ireland, Spain and France have all passed non-binding motions in favour.
Sweden has gone further, officially recognising Palestine as a state.
The moves have been criticised by Israel, which says recognition of statehood in this way discourages Palestinians from resuming talks on a final status agreement.
Important
The agreement on Wednesday will define Catholic Church activities in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the Holy See said on Wednesday.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The Vatican says that it wants to see the "establishment and recognition of an independent, sovereign and democratic State of Palestine"
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Pope - who included Israel in his Middle East trip last year - has yet to recognise Israeli statehood
A joint statement released by the Vatican said that the wording of the treaty had been finalised and would be officially signed by the respective authorities "in the near future".
Similar separate negotiations have also been going on for two decades between the Vatican and Israel, but so far without reaching full agreement.
This weekend President Abbas will have talks with Pope Francis at the Vatican, and on Sunday he will be attend a canonisation ceremony during which two Palestinian nuns who lived in the 19th Century - when Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire - will be declared saints.
They will be the first new saints from the Arab world to be named since the early days of Christianity.The NFL should be ashamed of itself, but it’s not, because shame is not a concept with which the people who run the NFL are acquainted. The NFL is a corporate monolith so used to having things its own way, so safe from criticism from the people who cover it, watch it on TV and unthinkingly pay small fortunes to attend its games in person that it quite literally believes it can make up its own rules and get away with it.
The news Monday that the league is docking the Washington Redskins $36 million and the Dallas Cowboys $10 million against the salary cap over the next two years (and spreading that extra cap room out among 28 other teams) isn’t likely to upset anyone other than those two teams and their fans. That’s how the NFL works. No one cares too much as long as their team wins, their fantasy team does well and the games are on TV every Sunday at 1 p.m. This issue, and likely this column, will be forgotten in a few hours when the “free-agency frenzy” the league is selling as this month’s offseason goodie bag kicks into high gear and everybody starts obsessing over which players their teams did or didn’t get -- just the way the league likes it.
Those ends, the NFL apparently believes, justify all means. Because what the NFL has done in this salary-cap case is a despicable abuse of the power handed to it by flocks of fans who happily fund it while wearing blinders.
If what the NFL did in 2010 was secretly tell its teams not to overspend in an uncapped year, then it engaged in an act that's illegal in any other industry. If that’s what happened, it’s collusion, plain and simple. It’s a bunch of businessmen who operate all of the businesses in a given industry getting together to limit the earning potential of the workers in that industry. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of labor law would classify that as collusion.
Two teams apparently declined to engage in this activity, even under threat of penalty from the league overseers. (Actually almost every team did what the Redskins and Cowboys did. Those two teams just did it more, and to an extent that upset the other owners.) Obviously, the Redskins and Cowboys didn’t do this to make a moral stand. They did it because they were trying to gain a competitive advantage over the other teams. But this was an uncapped year -- a year in which the richer teams theoretically should have been able to obtain a competitive advantage. If the league was telling teams to limit their spending in an uncapped year and the Redskins and Cowboys defied them, then what the Redskins and Cowboys did was technically legal and what the league was doing was not.
But that doesn’t matter to the NFL, which defines collusion very specifically under the collective bargaining agreement so as to protect itself and, as usual, operates by its own laws. After the story broke Monday, the league released a statement that said, “The Management Council Executive Committee determined that the contract practices of a small number of clubs during the 2010 league year created an unacceptable risk to future competitive balance, particularly in light of the relatively modest salary cap growth projected for the new agreement's early years.”
The statement goes on to say that the settlement, which resulted in the punishments for Dallas and Washington, was agreed upon by the parties in the collective bargaining agreement, which it was. The NFLPA agreed not to pursue collusion charges against the league in exchange for the league agreeing (a) not to cut the 2012 salary cap and (b) to spread the Redskins’ and Cowboys’ penalty money among the other teams so that the total amount of cap space league-wide would not be reduced.
Effectively, the league found a way to excuse itself for engaging in an illegal act and got the players to sign off on it. The only people who are suffering are the teams that decided, two years ago, not to go along with the illegal plan by which the league was ordering its teams to abide. The whole thing reeks of witch-hunt impropriety, from the fact that teams (such as Jacksonville and Tampa Bay) that drastically underspent that season because there was no salary floor aren’t being punished for the impact that had on competitive balance to the troublesome fact that the chairman of the aforementioned NFL Management Council is the owner of the Giants, who play in the same division as the two teams being docked.
The NFL should be embarrassed by this whole situation, but it isn’t, and won’t be. It never is. It does what it wants to do when it wants to do it, and it finds a way to excuse it after the fact. It is the epitome of modern corporate greed and arrogance. The big-money ends always justify the means, and we’re all complicit, continuing to feed the beast because it entertains us.
You may not care about this issue if you’re not a fan of the Cowboys or the Redskins. But if you think the league wouldn’t do the same kind of thing to your team, legal or not, fair or not, and find a way to get away with it as long as it suited its purposes, you’re kidding yourself. The NFL doesn’t care about you. It cares about itself. It cares about getting its way, no matter what. Sooner or later, fans of every team will find this out.Walmart is selling Black Lives Matter clothing and other items amid calls to designate the movement as a hate or terrorist effort. The retailer has banned sales of items bearing a Confederate flag, and an “All Lives Matter” bumper sticker saying it was “offensive.” Some of the Black Lives Matter clothing items also have the word “Bulletproof” on them.
A search on the huge retail corporation’s website shows a wide assortment of clothing and other items bearing the text “Black Lives Matter,” and there is even a Black Lives Matter monthly pocket planner for sale.
The retail giant recently faced media controversy when three of its employees in Georgia refused to bake a peace officer a cake for his retirement. Breitbart News reported in late September that the police officer’s daughter showed the bakers a design that said “Blue Lives Matter” with a blue line through the middle of the cake. Employees said it was racist. Her father was retiring after 25 years of service. A spokesman for the company later apologized for the incident.
In June of 2015, Walmart had to apologize after one of its stores in Louisiana baked a cake decorated with an ISIS flag after it had |
-related learning and memory deficits. Mice lacking the Cnr1 gene (Cnr1−/−), which encodes the cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1), showed an accelerated age-dependent deficit in spatial learning accompanied by a loss of principal neurons in the hippocampus. The age-dependent decrease in neuronal numbers in Cnr1−/− mice was not related to decreased neurogenesis or to epileptic seizures. However, enhanced neuroinflammation characterized by an increased density of astrocytes and activated microglia as well as an enhanced expression of the inflammatory cytokine IL-6 during aging was present in the hippocampus of Cnr1−/− mice. The ongoing process of pyramidal cell degeneration and neuroinflammation can exacerbate each other and both contribute to the cognitive deficits. Deletion of CB1 receptors from the forebrain GABAergic, but not from the glutamatergic neurons, led to a similar neuronal loss and increased neuroinflammation in the hippocampus as observed in animals lacking CB1 receptors in all cells. Our results suggest that CB1 receptor activity on hippocampal GABAergic neurons protects against age-dependent cognitive decline by reducing pyramidal cell degeneration and neuroinflammation.Actresses Lakana Wattanawongsiri, centre, and Benchasiri Wattana, right, and a lawyer hold a press conference at a hotel on Sunday to deny any involvement in the beating of a son of an army general at Malin Sky pub in Chiang Mai. (Photo by Cheewin Sattha)
CHIANG MAI - Police have ordered the closure of Malin Sky pub in the wake of a violent pub brawl in which a son of an army general was brutally beaten by a group of guards over use of the pub’s washroom which TV celebrities were using.
Meanwhile, police investigators have obtained useful information from a key witness that would shed light on the incident.
Issarajnuwat Wankawisan, 23, a fourth-year student at Payap Univerity and son of an army general, was assaulted by a group of guards at Malin Sky pub in tambon Chang Puak in Muang district at 11pm Friday.
Mr Issarajnuwat told police he had gone to the restaurant and pub alone. When he went to the washroom, he claimed he was blocked by four male security guards and told to wait while five or six actors and actresses used the bathrooms. He said he protested as the washroom was public space.
Media reports said the celebrities in the group included Channel 3 actor Mark Parin and his colleagues Nattaporn “Taew” Tameeruks, Nittha “Mew” Jirayungyurn and Lakana "Aum" Wattanawongsiri.
The student claimed that when the actors left the bathrooms, one of them ordered the guards to assault him.
The student, who is a son of Maj Gen Witthaya Wankawisan, commander of the 38th Army Circle, was later taken to Lanna hospital where he is being treated for a broken nose, two fractured teeth, a fractured jaw and some problems with his left eye.
But one actress visiting the pub on that night said the men were not the guards of anyone in her group and they were hired by the pub to provide safety and ensure their privacy.
On Sunday, a police investigation team went to Lanna hospital to interrogate the injured student about the incident, but the victim was not ready to give testimony due to his condition.
The investigators interrogated a woman, who witnessed the incident. Nobody was allowed to take her photo for her own safety.
Authorities said the witness has provided useful evidence, Thai media reported.
Pol Maj Gen Montri Sambunyanon, deputy chief of the Provincial Police Region 5, said police would ensure justice for both sides. Currently, authorities have closed the pub and investigated its operating licence.
All involved in the brawl would be brought to justice, said Pol Maj Gen Montri.
The pub operator must explain why closed circuit television cameras were not found when police went to examine footage. Other witnesses confirmed there were CCTVs installed at the pub, said Pol Maj Gen Montri.
Panumas Udomkhantikul, a representative of the Chiang Mai Complex Project, where Malin Sky rented space, visited the injured student at the hospital and apologised to his parents over the brawl.
Ms Panumas said the management of the project decided to terminate the rental contract with the pub.Full description
Three bedroom extended semi-detached.
- Stunning views. High quality finishes.
- Amazing gloss black kitchen - with granite work surfaces.
- Magnificent outdoor entertaining area, featuring Granite terraced patio, with decked seating area.
- Three reception rooms.
Hallway - Part-glazed front door, leading to stairs to first floor landing, doors to kitchen and lounge.
Living Room - 4.9m x 3.4m (16'1" x 11'2") - UPVC window to front elevation. Part-glazed double oak door to dining area.
Dining Area - 3.34m x 2.73m (10'11" x 8'11") - Door to Orangery, door to kitchen
Kitchen - 7.56m x2.36m (24'10" x 7'9") - Stunning range of wall and base units in high gloss black, black granite works surface and stainless steel splash back. 1 1/2 electric cooker, induction hob with overhead extractor. Integrated fridge, integrated freezer, integrated dishwasher and washing machine. 1 1/2 bowl stainless steel sink with mixer tap. UPVC windows to rear elevation and views toward Winter Hill
Orangery - 3.4m x3.4m (11'2" x 11'2") - Commanding views towards Rivington and Winter Hill, with bi-folding uPVC double glazed windows onto terrace.
Stairs To First Floor Landing -
Bedroom One - 3.98m x 3.26 m (13'1" x 10'8" m) - UPVC double glazed window to front elevation. Range of fitted bedroom furniture
En-Suite - Walk in shower and separate wash basin
Bedroom Two - 4m x2.4m (13'1" x 7'10") - UPVC double glazed window to rear elevation
Bedroom Three - 3.26 x 2.78m (10'8" x 9'1") - UPVC double glazed window to front elevation
Bathroom - Four piece suite in white, with Jacuzzi bath, incorporating TV, double shower cubicle, wash basin and WC
Outside - To the front there is a block paved area - allowing off road parking for two cars. There is an area of artificial turf.
To the rear garden is a terraced patio in black, grey and white granite. There is a decked seating area capturing the majesty of the views and the summer sun. Stainless steel fencing adds improved safety for both children and pet safe, whilst giving the whole area a continental feel. Outdoor lighting completes the perfect outdoor entertaining area.
To the side is an additional storage area - accessed by double gates.
Other - The property has the additional benefit of solar panels, stunning views and it is in Blackrod
The particulars on these properties are set out as a general guidance for intended purchasers or tenants, and do not constitute part of an offer or contract. The Agent has not tested any apparatus, equipment, fixtures and fittings or services and so cannot verify that they are in working order or fit for the purpose. A Buyer is advised to obtain verification from their Solicitor or Surveyor. References to the Tenure of a Property are based on information supplied by the Seller. The Agent has not had sight of the title documents. A Buyer is advised to obtain verification from their Solicitor. All dimensions, descriptions and distances, reference to condition and necessary permissions for use and occupation, and other details are given without responsibility. Any intending purchasers or tenants should not rely on them as statements of fact, but must satisfy themselves by inspection or otherwise as to the correctness of each of them. Items shown in photographs are NOT included unless specifically mentioned within the sales particulars. They may however be available by separate negotiation. Measurements have been taken using a laser distance meter and may be subject to a margin of error. For further information see the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.Actor J.K. Simmons has been confirmed as the voice as Aperture Science president and founder Cave Johnson in Portal 2.
The Law & Order, Red Alert 3, and Spider-man actor will be delivering lines such as the following from the game:
“Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I’ve got some goods news and some bad news. The bad news is we’re postponing those tests indefinitely. The good news is we’ve got a much better test for you: Fighting an army of Mantis Men.”
Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw told Joystiq that the original voice for Johnson was envisioned with a southern accent, but the team decided to go with a midwestern character instead.
You will apparently be hearing “a lot of him,” in the game as well, according to Wolpaw.From the creators of the wildly popular WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves – no matter where we live. WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE: A NOVEL will be released on 20th October in hardback, audio and ebook, but you can preorder your copy now.
We’re delighted to launch the UK and Australian cover today, wonderfully illustrated by Rob Wilson, designer of the original Night Vale logo. We asked Rob to tell us a little about the project:
“I’ve been involved with WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE since its inception, when Jeffrey Cranor asked me to design the original icon for the podcast. The writers and I worked together to create a simple, mysterious image that would convey the atmosphere of the show, without giving away any of its secrets. Years later, I’m amazed how the graphic has taken on a life of its own, with the hundreds—if not thousands—of creative interpretations of fan art it inspired. And now I’m thrilled to have been asked to design the cover of the new WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE novel and expand upon the art of the original graphic—just as the book broadens the world of the podcast. Like the original icon, the new book cover has secrets of its own.”
Find out more about Rob Wilson and his designs at RobWilsonWork.com.
Find out more about the novel and preorder today: commonplacebooks.com/novel.THQ has announced that plans for the next round of Saints Row: The Third DLC have been scrapped in favor of an all-new game. The next game expansion, Enter the Dominatrix, will be rolled up into a sequel that's set to launch in 2013.
"When I looked at the Enter The Dominatrix expansion in production at Volition, I was blown away by the ideas and desire to expand the fiction of the franchise," said newly appointed boss Jason Rubin. "I asked the team what it could achieve given more time, more resources, and a broader scope for the project. We all agreed we wanted to play that game.
"When it comes to Saints Row, it's clear our fans want bigger, better, and even more over the top, and that's why Enter The Dominatrix will now be incorporated into a vastly expanded, full-fledged sequel, scheduled for calendar 2013."
The Third was set to have "forty weeks" of downloadable content, a plan that I felt reduced the quality of the main game. If Rubin's decision is indicative of games relying less on frankly ludicrous amounts of DLC exploitation, then I'm all for it. I hope that whatever Enter the Dominatrix becomes will be as ambitious and unique as The Third should have been.
You are logged out. Login | Sign upKotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
Um, thanks? I guess? This is Cocorobo-chan. It's an anime girl vacuum cleaner you can talk to.
The original Cocorobo launched a few years back, and it might look like a Roomba clone, but it's way smarter, featuring speech recognition software and the ability to utter a few phrases.
From Sharp's Cloud Labs, the idea behind this "premium Cocorobo," which is still in development, is voice acting meets manga meets home appliances. The result sounds like a more intelligent (and more kawaii) robot.
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According to NicoNico, it's possible for premium Cocorobo users to converse with the device. Sixteen year-old voice actress Ibuki Kido, who voices Asami Himuro on the popular anime Aikatsu!, brings Cocorobo-chan to life as a kid-sister type character in vacuum bot form. (Note that "Cocorobo-chan" is not a finalized name.) Artist Kinusa Shimotsuki is handling the character's illustrations.
You can apparently have conversations with Cocorobo-chan like...
User: "You have a cute voice." Cocorobo-chan: "Thanks. You're making me blush." User: "You're good at cleaning." Cocorobo-chan: "N-not really. I'm not cleaning so you can compliment me."
Sharp, NicoNico reports, is responding to consumers who said they wanted a robot appliance with an appealing voice—or something. Right now, GetNews adds, the company is looking for eleven trial users to test this vacuum bot with for about a month. No word yet as to when (or if) it will go on sale.
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「妹のような声」で会話できる"萌えCOCOROBO"シャープが開発 掃除能力をほめると喜ぶ [NicoNico]
ロボット掃除機×萌えキャラ!? [GetNews]
To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.
AdvertisementJohn Quincy Adams was the first President to be photographed.
Perhaps he is daydreaming about his morning dip.
Additional Resources
John Quincy Adams was a skinny dipper. Before pools and jacuzzis, having a river in your backyard was as good as it got. The sixth President of the United States took full advantage of the White House's proximity to the Potomac River by wading through the river nude almost daily at 5:00 a.m.In addition to being the first President known to skinny dip in the Potomac, Adams was also the first president to be photographed; luckily not nude (see picture below).One morning while skinny dipping, Adams was coerced into becoming the first President to grant an interview to a female reporter. Having been refused an interview in the past, a certain Ann Royall took matters into her own hands by acting on knowledge of the President's morning routine. One morning when Adams was skinny dipping, Royall sat on his clothes and refused to leave until granted an interview. History tells us that the President valued his physical decency above his scorn for Ms. Royall, as she became the first female reporter to interview a President of the United States (naked or otherwise).Skinny dipping in the Potomac seemingly fell out of favor among Adams' successors until Theodore Roosevelt took office some 75 years later. The president known for serving in 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry and later for his doctrine of "Speak softly and carry a big stick" also enjoyed nude baths in the White House backyard. In the current age of the White House Press Secretary and Secret Service, who is to say that presidents since Roosevelt have not continued the tradition? Let us only hope that they have learned from Adams' failure to follow the golden rule of skinny dipping: keep an eye on your clothes.(Harlow Giles Unger)Over his past four active years, Joakim Soria averaged nearly 36 saves, building a reputation as one of the finest young closers in the game. In the past, the Yankees have asked the Royals about Soria in trade discussions. Now, following a season off after Tommy John elbow surgery, Soria is a free agent.
Soria, just 28, would like to close, but he would be willing to go to the Yankees to learn from his idol Mariano Rivera.
Joakim Soria Peter G. Aiken/US Presswire
"If the Yankees call, we will be all ears," Soria's agent, Oscar Suarez, said by phone Monday. "If there is a fit, Joakim would be elated to work with Mo. He would close everywhere except there."
Suarez said Yankees GM Brian Cashman has yet to inquire. Eight other clubs, all contending teams, have already contacted Suarez about Soria. Soria could also return to Kansas City, which declined his $8 million option for next season, allowing him to become a free agent.
Suarez said that Soria will be ready for spring training, but probably won't be able to pitch in major league games until May of next season. Other reports have tabbed June as a more likely date.
Rivera has always had a high opinion of Soria and would likely love the opportunity to tutor him for a year. With Rafael Soriano expected to leave, Soria could step in to combine with David Robertson, Joba Chamberlain, etc., to form a bridge to Rivera.
Then the Yankees could decide who should replace Rivera, if he does retire after next season.
At one point during his past contract, Soria had the Yankees on his no-trade list, but that was because of strategic reasons, not because he did not want to play in the Bronx.
As for the timetable, Cashman, if interested, may want to contact Suarez soon. Suarez said he is not opposed to doing a deal quickly if the right opportunity comes along.
"Joakim is not a greedy individual," Suarez said. "He wants to win so if it is (the) right situation he is probably not going to be a guy to wait until February. If he goes back to Kansas City, he loves the people and he will be part of the rebuilding process."
As for Soria's health, Suarez said, "He's going to be fine. It is not like we are dealing with a guy who is 38. He is 28."
The Yankees are dealing with a closer who is about to turn 43. So Soria could be good insurance for now and the future. Now, it is up to Cashman to call.Special counsel Robert Mueller has charged President Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn with “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador.
A plea hearing has been scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on Friday.
According to the special counsel, Flynn lied when he told investigators that he did not ask Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to “refrain from escalating the situation” in response to sanctions that then-President Obama had levied on the Russian Federation. Flynn also lied, the counsel alleges, when Flynn said he did not ask the ambassador to either delay or defeat a related U.N. Security Council vote.
It is almost certain that Flynn will plead guilty, legal analysts say, citing the wording of Mueller’s short two-page filing.
Read moreProtesters rally outside the U.S. Capitol against the NSA's recently detailed surveillance programs June 13, 2013 in Washington, D.C. - Win McNamee/Getty Images
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The government's been getting data from phone carriers like AT&T and Verizon -- but not for free. “Virtually every company out there, technology company or telecommunications company charges the government, with the exception of Facebook -- which gives it away for free,” says Anne Flaherty, a technology policy reporter for the AP.
The law says that when law enforcement officers and security bureaus like the NSA need data from cell phone or Internet companies and “it puts the business out, [those companies] have a right to be compensated.” Flaherty says that since phone companies have had two decades of experience working with the law, “they’ve developed these really sophisticated fee lists.” Verizon, for example, charges $775 for the first month of wiretapping and $500 for each month after that. AT&T sets up its bill a bit differently, with a $325 “activation fee” per wiretap plus $10 a day to maintain it.
Flaherty says she asked the FBI how much they spent in total wiretapping “and they said we can’t give you a topline figure. We don’t know how much we spend on reimbursements because it’s divided up across the budget with every field office and every program.”
She says it seems unlikely that phone companies are making much, if any, profit from the federal government, even if the rates may seem high. But she also adds: there’s really no way to know.
“I think the best compliment I can give is not to say how much your programs have taught me (a ton), but how much Marketplace has motivated me to go out and teach myself.” – Michael in Arlington, VA As a nonprofit news organization, what matters to us is the same thing that matters to you: being a source for trustworthy, independent news that makes people smarter about business and the economy. So if Marketplace has helped you understand the economy better, make more informed financial decisions or just encouraged you to think differently, we’re asking you to give a little something back. Become a Marketplace Investor today – in whatever amount is right for you – and keep public service journalism strong. We’re grateful for your support. BEFORE YOU GOMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Video shot by Alhurra TV shows a part of the chase near the Capitol
A police chase in Washington DC has ended in gunfire, sparking panic at the White House and US Capitol and leaving a woman dead and two officers injured.
The chase and wreck that preceded the shooting were neither an act of terrorism nor an accident, police said.
A female driver was shot dead by police. A one-year-old girl was taken from the car by the officers.
The shooting happened two weeks after 12 people were killed and three injured in a shooting at nearby Navy Yard.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Chief Lanier: "There were shots fired in at least two locations"
The incident began at 14:12 local time (18:12 GMT) when a suspect in a black Infiniti sedan attempted to bypass fencing at the outer perimeter of the White House, police said.
The suspect fled the scene and led officers on a high-speed chase through Washington DC toward the US Capitol.
The driver, later identified as a woman by authorities, then attempted to bypass barriers along the western front lawn of the Capitol, where the Senate and House of Representatives sit.
News video shows officers surrounding the black car with guns drawn. The driver then sped away as officers appeared to open fire. Police gave chase.
During the chase, a police car struck a barrier and the suspect hit a US Secret Service vehicle.
At that point, the suspect's vehicle crashed near the Capitol.
'We heard pops'
Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier said both Capitol Police and Secret Service officers fired on the vehicle in two different locations during the incident.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Two US Senators 'heard gun shots'
"The suspect was struck by gunfire and... has been pronounced" dead, she said.
A one-year-old child was found in the vehicle after it crashed and taken to a local hospital, and is now in protective custody, police said.
Authorities declined to comment on the suspect. But multiple officials said they believed the incident was not related to terrorism.
Officials have not said whether the driver of the vehicle was armed.
"I'm pretty confident this is not an accident," Ms Lanier said, adding that the suspect attempted to bypass multiple barriers around heavily protected buildings.
A Secret Service officer and Capitol Police officer were injured during the pursuit.
Chief Kim Dine of the Capitol Police said the injured Capitol Police officer, a 23-year veteran of the force, was "doing well" as of Thursday evening.
Senators, congressmen, staffers and journalists reported hearing shots from inside the US Capitol building.
The surrounding buildings were briefly locked down and lawmakers and staffers were instructed to shelter in place.
"We heard pops, three, four, five pops," said Senator Sherrod Brown, who said he was outside the building and ordered to duck behind a car.Hypothetical form of matter comprising most of the matter in the universe
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that is thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe, and about a quarter of its total energy density. The majority of dark matter is thought to be non-baryonic in nature, possibly being composed of some as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles.[note 1] Its presence is implied in a variety of astrophysical observations, including gravitational effects that cannot be explained unless more matter is present than can be seen. For this reason, most experts think dark matter to be ubiquitous in the universe and to have had a strong influence on its structure and evolution. Dark matter is called dark because it does not appear to interact with observable electromagnetic radiation, such as light, and is thus invisible to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, making it extremely difficult to detect using usual astronomical equipment.[1]
The primary evidence for dark matter is that calculations show that many galaxies would fly apart instead of rotating, or would not have formed or move as they do, if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter.[2] Other lines of evidence include observations in gravitational lensing,[3] from the cosmic microwave background, from astronomical observations of the observable universe's current structure, from the formation and evolution of galaxies, from mass location during galactic collisions,[4] and from the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters. In the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 5% ordinary matter and energy, 27% dark matter and 68% of an unknown form of energy known as dark energy.[5][6][7][8] Thus, dark matter constitutes 85%[note 2] of total mass, while dark energy plus dark matter constitute 95% of total mass–energy content.[9][10][11][12]
Because dark matter has not yet been observed directly, if it exists, it must barely interact with ordinary baryonic matter and radiation, except through gravity. The primary candidate for dark matter is some new kind of elementary particle that has not yet been discovered, in particular, weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), or gravitationally-interacting massive particles (GIMPs).[13] Many experiments to directly detect and study dark matter particles are being actively undertaken, but none has yet succeeded.[14] Dark matter is classified as cold, warm, or hot according to its velocity (more precisely, its free streaming length). Current models favor a cold dark matter scenario, in which structures emerge by gradual accumulation of particles.
Although the existence of dark matter is generally accepted by the scientific community, some astrophysicists,[15] intrigued by certain observations that do not fit the dark matter theory,[16] argue for various modifications of the standard laws of general relativity, such as modified Newtonian dynamics, tensor–vector–scalar gravity, or entropic gravity. These models attempt to account for all observations without invoking supplemental non-baryonic matter.[17]
History [ edit ]
Early history [ edit ]
The hypothesis of dark matter has an elaborate history.[18] In a talk given in 1884,[19] Lord Kelvin estimated the number of dark bodies in the Milky Way from the observed velocity dispersion of the stars orbiting around the center of the galaxy. By using these measurements, he estimated the mass of the galaxy, which he determined is different from the mass of visible stars. Lord Kelvin thus concluded that "many of our stars, perhaps a great majority of them, may be dark bodies".[20] In 1906 Henri Poincaré in "The Milky Way and Theory of Gases" used "dark matter", or "matière obscure" in French, in discussing Kelvin's work.[20]
The first to suggest the existence of dark matter, using stellar velocities, was Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn in 1922.[21][22] Fellow Dutchman and radio astronomy pioneer Jan Oort also hypothesized the existence of dark matter in 1932.[22][23][24] Oort was studying stellar motions in the local galactic neighborhood and found that the mass in the galactic plane must be greater than what was observed, but this measurement was later determined to be erroneous.[25]
In 1933, Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, who studied galaxy clusters while working at the California Institute of Technology, made a similar inference.[26][27][28] Zwicky applied the virial theorem to the Coma Cluster and obtained evidence of unseen mass that he called dunkle Materie ('dark matter'). Zwicky estimated its mass based on the motions of galaxies near its edge and compared that to an estimate based on its brightness and number of galaxies. He estimated that the cluster had about 400 times more mass than was visually observable. The gravity effect of the visible galaxies was far too small for such fast orbits, thus mass must be hidden from view. Based on these conclusions, Zwicky inferred that some unseen matter provided the mass and associated gravitation attraction to hold the cluster together. This was the first formal inference about the existence of dark matter.[29] Zwicky's estimates were off by more than an order of magnitude, mainly due to an obsolete value of the Hubble constant;[30] the same calculation today shows a smaller fraction, using greater values for luminous mass. However, Zwicky did correctly infer that the bulk of the matter was dark.[clarification needed][29]
Further indications that the mass-to-light ratio was not unity came from measurements of galaxy rotation curves. In 1939, Horace W. Babcock reported the rotation curve for the Andromeda nebula (known now as the Andromeda Galaxy), which suggested that the mass-to-luminosity ratio increases radially.[31] He attributed it to either light absorption within the galaxy or modified dynamics in the outer portions of the spiral and not to the missing matter that he had uncovered. Following Babcock's 1939 report of unexpectedly rapid rotation in the outskirts of the Andromeda galaxy and a mass-to-light ratio of 50, in 1940 Jan Oort discovered and wrote about the large non-visible halo of NGC 3115.[32]
1970s [ edit ]
Vera Rubin, Kent Ford and Ken Freeman's work in the 1960s and 1970s,[33] provided further strong evidence, also using galaxy rotation curves.[34][35][36] Rubin worked with a new spectrograph to measure the velocity curve of edge-on spiral galaxies with greater accuracy.[36] This result was confirmed in 1978.[37] An influential paper presented Rubin's results in 1980.[38] Rubin found that most galaxies must contain about six times as much dark as visible mass; thus, by around 1980 the apparent need for dark matter was widely recognized as a major unsolved problem in astronomy.[34]
At the same time that Rubin and Ford were exploring optical rotation curves, radio astronomers were making use of new radio telescopes to map the 21 cm line of atomic hydrogen in nearby galaxies. The radial distribution of interstellar atomic hydrogen (HI) often extends to much larger galactic radii than those accessible by optical studies, extending the sampling of rotation curves—and thus of the total mass distribution—to a new dynamical regime. Early mapping of Andromeda with the 300-foot telescope at Green Bank[40] and the 250-foot dish at Jodrell Bank[41] already showed that the HI rotation curve did not trace the expected Keplerian decline. As more sensitive receivers became available, Morton Roberts and Robert Whitehurst[42] were able to trace the rotational velocity of Andromeda to 30 kpc, much beyond the optical measurements. Illustrating the advantage of tracing the gas disk at large radii, Figure 16 of that paper[42] combines the optical data[36] (the cluster of points at radii of less than 15 kpc with a single point further out) with the HI data between 20 and 30 kpc, exhibiting the flatness of the outer galaxy rotation curve; the solid curve peaking at the center is the optical surface density, while the other curve shows the cumulative mass, still rising linearly at the outermost measurement. In parallel, the use of interferometric arrays for extragalactic HI spectroscopy was being developed. In 1972, David Rogstad and Seth Shostak[43] published HI rotation curves of five spirals mapped with the Owens Valley interferometer; the rotation curves of all five were very flat, suggesting very large values of mass-to-light ratio in the outer parts of their extended HI disks.
A stream of observations in the 1980s supported the presence of dark matter, including gravitational lensing of background objects by galaxy clusters, the temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies and clusters, and the pattern of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. According to consensus among cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a not yet characterized type of subatomic particle.[13][45] The search for this particle, by a variety of means, is one of the major efforts in particle physics.[14]
Technical definition [ edit ]
In standard cosmology, matter is anything whose energy density scales with the inverse cube of the scale factor, i.e., ρ ∝ a−3. This is in contrast to radiation, which scales as the inverse fourth power of the scale factor ρ ∝ a−4, and a cosmological constant, which is independent of a. These scalings can be understood intuitively: for an ordinary particle in a cubical box, doubling the length of the sides of the box decreases the density (and hence energy density) by a factor of eight (23). For radiation, the decrease in energy density is larger because an increase in scale factor causes a proportional redshift. A cosmological constant, as an intrinsic property of space, has a constant energy density regardless of the volume under consideration.[46][47]
In principle, "dark matter" means all components of the universe that are not visible but still obey ρ ∝ a−3. In practice, the term "dark matter" is often used to mean only the non-baryonic component of dark matter, i.e., excluding "missing baryons." Context will usually indicate which meaning is intended.
Observational evidence [ edit ]
[48] This artist's impression shows the expected distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way galaxy as a blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy.
Galaxy rotation curves [ edit ]
A) and observed (B). Dark matter can explain the 'flat' appearance of the velocity curve out to a large radius. Rotation curve of a typical spiral galaxy: predicted () and observed (). Dark matter can explain the 'flat' appearance of the velocity curve out to a large radius.
Models of rotating disc galaxies in the present day (left) and ten billion years ago (right). In the present-day galaxy, dark matter—shown in red—is more concentrated near the center and it rotates more rapidly (effect exaggerated).
The arms of spiral galaxies rotate around the galactic center. The luminous mass density of a spiral galaxy decreases as one goes from the center to the outskirts. If luminous mass were all the matter, then we can model the galaxy as a point mass in the centre and test masses orbiting around it, similar to the Solar System.[note 3] From Kepler's Second Law, it is expected that the rotation velocities will decrease with distance from the center, similar to the Solar System. This is not observed.[49] Instead, the galaxy rotation curve remains flat as distance from the center increases.
If Kepler's laws are correct, then the obvious way to resolve this discrepancy is to conclude that the mass distribution in spiral galaxies is not similar to that of the Solar System. In particular, there is a lot of non-luminous matter (dark matter) in the outskirts of the galaxy.
Velocity dispersions [ edit ]
Stars in bound systems must obey the virial theorem. The theorem, together with the measured velocity distribution, can be used to measure the mass distribution in a bound system, such as elliptical galaxies or globular clusters. With some exceptions, velocity dispersion estimates of elliptical galaxies[50] do not match the predicted velocity dispersion from the observed mass distribution, even assuming complicated distributions of stellar orbits.[51]
As with galaxy rotation curves, the obvious way to resolve the discrepancy is to postulate the existence of non-luminous matter.
Galaxy clusters [ edit ]
Galaxy clusters are particularly important for dark matter studies since their masses can be estimated in three independent ways:
From the scatter in radial velocities of the galaxies within clusters
From X-rays emitted by hot gas in the clusters. From the X-ray energy spectrum and flux, the gas temperature and density can be estimated, hence giving the pressure; assuming pressure and gravity balance determines the cluster's mass profile.
Gravitational lensing (usually of more distant galaxies) can measure cluster masses without relying on observations of dynamics (e.g., velocity).
Generally, these three methods are in reasonable agreement that dark matter outweighs visible matter by approximately 5 to 1.[52]
Gravitational lensing [ edit ]
[53] Dark matter map for a patch of sky based on gravitational lensing analysis of a Kilo-Degree survey.
One of the consequences of general relativity is that massive objects (such as a cluster of galaxies) lying between a more distant source (such as a quasar) and an observer should act as a lens to bend the light from this source. The more massive an object, the more lensing is observed.
Strong lensing is the observed distortion of background galaxies into arcs when their light passes through such a gravitational lens. It has been observed around many distant clusters including Abell 1689.[54] By measuring the distortion geometry, the mass of the intervening cluster can be obtained. In the dozens of cases where this has been done, the mass-to-light ratios obtained correspond to the dynamical dark matter measurements of clusters.[55] Lensing can lead to multiple copies of an image. By analyzing the distribution of multiple image copies, scientists have been able to deduce and map the distribution of dark matter around the MACS J0416.1-2403 galaxy cluster.[56][57]
Weak gravitational lensing investigates minute distortions of galaxies, using statistical analyses from vast galaxy surveys. By examining the apparent shear deformation of the adjacent background galaxies, the mean distribution of dark matter can be characterized. The mass-to-light ratios correspond to dark matter densities predicted by other large-scale structure measurements.[ |
has co‑operated and who has defected, who has shared and who has been stingey.
Nor can you have formal moral systems without identity. The 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid observed that the fundaments of justice – rights, duty, responsibility – would be impossible without the ability to ascribe stable identity to persons. If nothing connects a person from one moment to the next, then the person who acts today cannot be held responsible by the person who has replaced him tomorrow. Our identity detector works in overdrive when reasoning about crimes of passion, crimes under the influence, crimes of insanity: for if the person was beside himself or out of his mind when he committed his crime, how can we identify who has committed the act, and hold him responsible for it?
If we had no scruples, we’d have precious little need for identities
Moral features are the chief dimension by which we judge, sort and choose social partners. For men and women alike, the single most sought-after trait in a long-term romantic partner is kindness – beating out beauty, wealth, health, shared interests, even intelligence. And while we often think of our friends as the people who are uniquely matched to our shared personality, moral character plays the largest role in determining whether you like someone or not (what social psychologists call impression formation), and predicts the success and longevity of these bonds. Virtues are mentioned with more frequency in obituaries than achievements, abilities or talents. This is even the case for obituaries of notable luminaries, people who are being written about because of their accomplishments, not their moral fibre.
The identity detector is designed to pick up on moral features because this is the most important type of information we can have about another person. So we’ve been thinking about the problem precisely backwards. It’s not that identity is centred around morality. It’s that morality necessitates the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison d’être. If we had no scruples, we’d have precious little need for identities. Humans, with their engorged and highly complex socio-moral systems, have accordingly inflated egos.
‘Know thyself’ is a flimsy bargain-basement platitude, endlessly recycled but maddeningly empty. It skates the very existential question it pretends to address, the question that obsesses us: what is it to know oneself? The lesson of the identity detector is this: when we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are.Well, I'd say that that was a bit of an overreaction. Didn't have to suck me into the Gameboy...Also, a bit of clarification on the rules:-Nuzlocke holy trinity of rules applies(obviously). Dead pokemon are dead, only catch the firstencounter per area, and nickname your pokemon.-The Dupes/Species Clause is on, but I'm only allowed 3 encounters per area. If my 3rd try isstill something I'd had, I need to either catch it or forfeit my encounter.-Using repels and/or running from any wild pokemon is strictly banned. I didn't enforce this rulelast time, even though I had it. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm in this predicament...-Do not grind any pokemon past the level limit. The limit is determined by the next 'big battle' I haveto face(Rival, Gym, or Giovanni). I'm not allowed to use any pokemon that are a higher level thanthat next battle's average level. For instance, Brock has a level 12 and a level 14. The averageis 13, so I can't grind past that.-The limit is guaranteed to increase by 2 after each big battle, even if the limit was supposed to belower. This is to stop the limit from decreasing during certain points of the game(like from Mistyto the rival on the S.S. Anne).---As of last night, the United Kingdom has decided to leave the European Union. This decision will have a cascade of effects: the decline of the pound, Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation, the potential for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom, and the end of the European Union itself.
To this New Yorker, grumblings of secession have usually come from either Texas or Quebec. Both of these have been mostly punchlines, with any actual movement toward making them reality never really taking hold.
This UK move is surreal. Major cairn alert.
With the UK leaving the EU, the world is waking up to a reality that millennials have felt for quite a while: the story we’ve been told about how the world works isn’t bearing out. The world is an uncertain place, becoming more so every day.
In terms of careers, millennials get a bad rap for not staying in a job for more than two or three years. We are lazy, entitled narcissists, the criticism says.
What this criticism misses is that we feel (or maybe just I feel?) distrustful of institutions that we were told would protect us and be stable. The church protected priests who raped children. The law protects police whose actions lead to the death of black and brown people. The cost and value of postsecondary degrees are at opposite ends. And on and on.
The underlying message is that you have to do you, boo boo, because Littlefinger ain’t coming to save you with the Knights of the Vale.
To me, the Brexit will signal a continued distrust of institutions. My guess is that the increased uncertainty about how the world works will lead to an increase in novel stimuli to fill that gap. Buy stock in short-term thrills like concerts and alcohol in 2016.
God save the queen.
AdvertisementsDear 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.
There will be no peace with the Palestinians until they recognize the Jewish right to a homeland in Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday night at Bar-Ilan University.
“A necessary condition to getting a true solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict was and remains clear as the sun: ending the refusal to recognize the right of the Jews to a homeland of their own in the land of their fathers,” he said. “That is the most important key to solving the conflict.”
Netanyahu’s words came at the start of a conference marking 20 years since the founding of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, the site of Netanyahu’s famous “Bar-Ilan speech” from four years ago where he stated his willingness for a two-state solution.Those who anticipated that he might use the same venue to again break new ground on the Palestinian issue were disappointed.Rather then present a “vision” speech of where he thought the negotiations with the Palestinians were headed, Netanyahu used the opportunity to emphasize that a Palestinian recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people was a necessary condition to any agreement.Since the first Arab attack on a home housing Jewish immigrants in Jaffa in 1921, the root of the conflict has not been the “occupation,” the “territories” or the settlements, but rather an Arab refusal to recognize the Jews’ right to a sovereign state in their historic homeland, he said.Netanyahu said that the Arab revolutions of the past two years – which he called the most significant events in the region in 20 years – have laid to rest the “sacred cow” that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the heart of the instability in the Middle East.Today, he said, it is “tough to say this without sounding absurd.”It is now also the time, he said, to kill the “sacred cow” that the “occupation” was the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Netanyahu spent a number of minutes during his address, which lasted some 30 minutes, discussing the links of the head of the Palestinian national movement in the pre-state days – Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini – with the Nazis. He reminded his listeners that the mufti visited Adolf Hitler in 1941 and promised his aid in getting Muslims to enlist in the SS in the Balkan states, and in the Nazi propaganda efforts.Husseini, he said, is still an admired figure among Palestinians.“That is what needs to be uprooted,” he said.Netanyahu brought up the mufti, however, more to refute comments Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made in New York two weeks ago than to slam the current Palestinian leadership.During a television interview, Rouhani acknowledged Nazi crimes against Jews, though he would not use the word “Holocaust.”Netanyahu pointed out that Rouhani then quickly pointed out that it was forbidden to let the Zionists exploit the Nazi crimes to oppress the Palestinians.“Despite what Iranian representatives and others say,” the prime minister said, “Zionist leaders did not use the Holocaust to destroy the Palestinian national movement.The opposite is true. The leader of the Palestinian movement at that time, Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, is the one who preached and worked to carry out the Holocaust to destroy the Zionist movement.“And it almost worked,” Netanyahu said. “European Jewry was destroyed, with the help of the mufti, but Zionism was not destroyed; Israel was established.”The goal of Iran today was to control the Middle East and beyond, and to “destroy the State of Israel. That is not speculation, that is the goal,” he said.Repeating arguments he made last week at the UN, Netanyahu dismissed the notion that Iran was merely seeking nuclear energy for peaceful means, saying that countries that want to harness nuclear energy for civilian needs do not insist on enriching uranium and building plutonium reactors, elements not needed for civilian nuclear purposes but only to build nuclear weapons.“The international community’s position toward Iran needs to be: We are willing to come to a diplomatic solution – but only one that will dismantle from Iran its capabilities to develop nuclear weapons. That means no centrifuges for enriching uranium and no plutonium reactor,” he said.Earlier in the day, at the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu stressed he was not against diplomacy with Iran, but rather wanted to ensure that negotiations with Iran will lead it to a halt of uranium enrichment.Netanyahu, in his first meeting with his cabinet since meeting US President Barack Obama in Washington and saying a day later at the UN General Assembly last week that Israel would “stand alone” against Iran if need be, said he had a long, in-depth conversation with Obama about Iran and that they agree on the need to halt the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment.“Iran claims that it wants this capability for nuclear energy for peaceful needs,” he said. “Seventeen countries in the world produce nuclear energy for peaceful needs without one centrifuge or enriching uranium.”Netanyahu, who only recently began publicly saying that the sanctions on Iran were making a serious dent, said that the sanctions were “working,” and were “just a moment before achieving their goal.”Sanctions must not be removed before Iran dismantles its enrichment capabilities, he said.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Since I’ve dissed patterns and OOP recently (and rightly so) I thought I’d be a little positive and recycle an email I sent a friend a while ago. This someone was curious about functional languages after I had mentioned them over dinner as he had no experience with them. I absolutely think that if all you have ever used is an imperative language (exemplified by C++, Java, C# and other similar crap) I highly recommend spending (at least) several days learning a functional language. You’ll be a better programmer for it. (And why not learn some logic programming too, while you’re at it.)
What follows is a somewhat edited version of the 30-minute stream-of-consciousness crash-course email I sent to my friend. (So it’s not the best tutorial in the world, but hopefully it gets someone interested in playing around with a new language.)
Over the years I’ve played around with a lot of different functional languages (including Miranda, Standard ML, Haskell, FP, LISP, and Scheme). Here I’m using Standard ML (SML) because it nicely illustrates some of the cool concepts I wanted to outline (and other than LISP, is the one I know best). Haskell is another good choice for a first functional language and would be worth exploring in addition to SML, notably because Haskell features lazy evaluation (as well as several other important concepts).
To follow along, begin by downloading and installing an SML interpreter.
A smattering of SML
First, some fundamentals. In SML we bind values to variables using “val” and functions to variables using “fun”.
- val m = 42;
val m = 42 : int
- fun inc x = x + 1;
val inc = fn : int -> int
The “- ” is the prompt, so the rest of the line is what was typed. Note that as we type a line and hit return, the system interactively responds with a result on the following line. Note also how SML derives types automatically (known as type inference). “1” is an int and “+” takes two arguments of the same type (both ints or both floats) so “x” must be an int and therefore “inc” must be a function that takes an int as an argument and returns an int (“int -> int”).
The other thing we need to know is that SML natively supports tuples:
- val n = (1,2,3);
val n = (1,2,3) : int * int * int
Note again how it derives the types, using “*” to denote a tuple (or cartesian product if you prefer).
What I want to get to is one of the more powerful concepts of SML: the ability to define recursive data types, by cases. So, diving right in, let us define a binary tree data structure:
- datatype 'a BinTree = Leaf of 'a | Node of 'a BinTree * 'a * 'a BinTree;
datatype 'a BinTree = Leaf of 'a | Node of 'a BinTree * 'a * 'a BinTree
This oneliner(!) says that a data type “BinTree” that contains elements of type “‘a” (a special notation of a polymorph type; think templated type) is either (|):
a “Leaf” of one element, or
a “Node” of a 3-tuple, where the first value is a BinTree of the same type, the second value is an element of the type, and the third value is a BinTree of the type.
But more than that, we can now also use “Node” and “Leaf” as constructors to create a tree on the fly:
- val t = Node(Leaf(1), 2, Node(Leaf(3), 4, Leaf(5)));
val t = Node (Leaf 1,2,Node (Leaf #,4,Leaf #)) : int BinTree
Note how the SML interpreter prints the structure for us, but caps it at a certain depth (showing “#” to show it capped it).
We can also construct a tree with floats
- val u = Node(Leaf(1.0), 2.0, Leaf(3.0));
val u = Node (Leaf 1.0,2.0,Leaf 3.0) : real BinTree
which nicely shows how the data type is polymorphic (“type abstracted”). And again it derived the type (“real” as floats are called in SML).
We can now e.g. declare a recursive function “height” that computes the height of a BinTree using declaration by cases:
- fun height (Leaf(x)) = 1
| height (Node(lft, x, rht)) = 1 + Int.max(height lft, height rht);
val height = fn : 'a BinTree -> int
The first case (the first line) is that height is called with an argument that pattern matches “Leaf(x)”, i.e. something constructed using “Leaf” and with a single argument “x”. The second case is that height is called with an argument matching “Node(lft, x, rht)” where lft, x, rht are arbitrary variable names that will bind to the actual values in the supplied Node argument. In the first case, we just return 1 (as a tree with just a leaf has height 1). In the second case, we recursively compute the heights of the subtrees, take the maximum, and add 1. Again the system infers the type, saying height is a function that takes a BinTree of whatever type and returns an int.
We can try height now on “t” and “u”:
- height t;
val it = 3 : int
- height u;
val it = 2 : int
SML also has lists built in:
- val r = [1,2,3];
val r = [1,2,3] : int list
- val s = [4];
val s = [4] : int list
- r @ s;
val it = [1,2,3,4] : int list
The “@” is the built-in append function.
We can now e.g. write a function that takes a BinTree, visits it in depth-first order, and collects all the node values into a list:
- fun values (Leaf(x)) = [x]
| values (Node(lft, x, rht)) = (values lft) @ [x] @ (values rht);
val values = fn : 'a BinTree -> 'a list
(This function usually exists in functional languages, normally known as “flatten.”) And we can use it directly:
- values t;
val it = [1,2,3,4,5] : int list
Note how if we don’t bind the value, the system always binds the last result to “it”. We can use “it” directly if we want.
Now lets create a function “sq” that squares its argument, and we’ll “map” this sq function across every element of the list that is the flattened tree:
- fun sq x = x * x;
val sq = fn : int -> int
- map sq (values t);
val it = [1,4,9,16,25] : int list
“map” is a built in function that takes a function (of type “‘a -> ‘a”) and a list (of type “‘a”) and then applies the function to every element of the list. It is a very useful function that you can now find in a lot of languages, not just functional languages (e.g. in Python and several others.)
BTW, we don’t need to actually bind the function. We can create the sq function on the fly (a so-called lambda function) too, using “fn”:
- map (fn x => x * x) (values t);
val it = [1,4,9,16,25] : int list
And for the last example, SML also handles higher-order functions in the sense we can apply just partial arguments. To show this, first we define a function in two arguments:
- fun add x y = x + y;
val add = fn : int -> int -> int
Note how the type is “int -> int -> int” which is really saying that we have a function that takes an “int” and returns as result a function of type “int -> int”! We can see this is the case by passing only one argument to “add” and bind it to the variable “inc”:
- val inc = add 1;
val inc = fn : int -> int
Lo and behold, inc is a function, of type “int -> int”.
We can now use “inc” in e.g. the map function we used earlier:
- map inc [1,2,3];
val it = [2,3,4] : int list
Yup, it works!
To recap, these 4(!) lines of code implements a (templated) binary tree, declares an instance of a binary tree, and defines a function to compute the height of a binary tree:
datatype 'a BinTree = Leaf of 'a | Node of 'a BinTree * 'a * 'a BinTree;
val t = Node(Leaf(1), 2, Node(Leaf(3), 4, Leaf(5)));
fun height (Leaf(x)) = 1
| height (Node(lft, x, rht)) = 1 + Int.max(height lft, height rht);
How many lines of code do you need in C++ to do the same thing?!
In SML we can encapsulate the data type and the operations on it, just as is done with classes (objects) in object-oriented languages. In SML, such an encapsulation is called an abstract datatype (and created with the keyword abstype). I recommend following the link and reading about abstract data types if you are not familiar with them (and also reading the SML link at the top, to see how they relate to the module concept in SML). OO is not the be-all end-all of encapsulation if you ever thought that.
Edit: Based on a comment that was made (hi Vesa), I should mention that SML in addition has an advanced module system that can be used in preference of abstype. The point of mentioning abstract data types is that they’re an important concept (outside of their use in SML), so they are worthy of a study on their own.
In real life
Sadly, most functional languages are not industrial strength, in part because they never received industry financial backing (like Sun pushing Java, and Microsoft pushing C#). Functional languages in general lack IDEs, debuggers, libraries, and all those other things you need for real development, so the information provided here is mostly for expanding your mind and not for direct practical use. (Yes I know about F#, which is a commendable effort.) A notable exception is Erlang, which has been used and developed by the Swedish phone giant Ericsson (no relation) for many many years and is known to be very robust. This comparison between Erlang and Haskell is quite interesting. Overall, Erlang seems to be an up-and-coming language, which is cool, because we need something to break the dominance of the imperative crowd of languages. Erlang is also very interesting for its support for concurrency, which is highly relevant to this increasingly parallel world.
Further readings
Another few posts worth reading about learning more languages are Jim Tilander’s Are you bilingual and David Pollak’s Functional languages will rule. There’s also several quite good books available for learning more about functional languages (many free for the download):
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None Found My recommended booksThe original embedded journalist, reporter Ernie Pyle wrote intimate, distinctive stories about American soldiers during World War II. He worked for the Scripps-Howard wire service and his articles were carried in more than 300 newspapers.
His extraordinarily vivid reporting concentrated on the foot soldiers with whom he spent most of his time. Old enough to be the father of most of the men he covered, Pyle managed somehow to write about his callow subjects with a tender—but never sentimental—honesty, and the day-to-day reality he captured in a thousand little details has retained its immediacy even as it has proven immortal.
Here is an example of the kind of work Pyle routinely delivered, bringing American readers close to the excitement, danger, and terror of the war. “Dispatch from Normandy” was originally published on July 13, 1944—and is featured in The Library of America’s sterling anthology, Reporting World War II: Part Two: American Journalism 1944 ‒ 1946, published by The Library of America. Nine months after filing this story, Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gun fire while covering the battle of Okinawa. He was one month shy of his 45th birthday.
The article is reprinted here courtesy of the Scripps Howard Foundation. Please take a moment to appreciate Pyle’s formidable storytelling talent.
—Alex Belth
IN NORMANDY—(by wireless)—Lieut. Orion Shockley came over with a map and explained to us just what his company was going to do.
There was a German strong point of pillboxes and machine-gun nests about half a mile down the street ahead of us.
Our troops had made wedges into the city on both sides of us, but nobody had yet been up this street where we were going. The street, they thought, was almost certainly under rifle fire.
“This is how we’ll do it,” the lieutenant said. “A rifle platoon goes first. Right behind them will go part of a heavy-weapons platoon, with machine guns to cover the first platoon.
“Then comes another rifle platoon. Then a small section with mortars, in case they run into something pretty heavy. Then another rifle platoon. And bringing up the rear, the rest of the heavy-weapons outfit to protect us from behind.
“We don’t know what we’ll run into, and I don’t want to stick you right out in front, so why don’t you come along with me? We’ll go in the middle of the company.”
I said, “Okay.” By this time I wasn’t scared. You seldom are once you’re into something. Anticipation is the worst. Fortunately this little foray came up so suddenly there wasn’t time for much anticipation.
***
The rain kept on coming down, and you could sense that it had set in for the afternoon. None of us had raincoats, and by evening there wasn’t a dry thread on any of us. I could go back to a tent for the night, but the soldiers would have to sleep the way they were.
We were just ready to start when all of a sudden bullets came whipping savagely right above our heads.
“It’s those damn 20-millimeters again,” the lieutenant said. “Better hold it up a minute.”
The soldiers all crouched lower behind the wall. The vicious little shells whanged into a grassy hillside just beyond us. A French suburban farmer was hitching up his horses in a barnyard on the hillside. He ran into the house. Shells struck all around it.
Two dead Germans and a dead American still lay in his driveway. We could see them when we moved up a few feet.
The shells stopped, and finally the order to start was given. As we left the protection of the high wall we had to cross a little culvert right out in the open and then make a turn in the road.
The men went forward one at a time. They crouched and ran, apelike, across this dangerous space. Then, beyond the culvert, they filtered to either side of the road, stopping and squatting down every now and then to wait a few moments.
The lieutenant kept yelling at them as they started:
“Spread it out now. Do you want to draw fire on yourselves? Don’t bunch up like that. Keep five yards apart. Spread it out, dammit.”
There is an almost irresistible pull to get close to somebody when you are in danger. In spite of themselves, the men would run up close to the fellow ahead for company.
The other lieutenant now called out:
“Now you on the right watch the left side of the street for snipers, and you on the left watch the right side. Cover each other that way.”
And a first sergeant said to a passing soldier:
“Get that grenade out of its case. It won’t do you no good in the case. Throw the case away. That’s right.”
***
Some of the men carried grenades already fixed in the ends of their rifles. All of them had hand grenades. Some had big Browning automatic rifles. One carried a bazooka. Interspersed in the thin line of men every now and then was a medic, with his bags of bandages and a Red Cross arm band on the left arm. The men didn’t talk any. They just went.
They weren’t heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time, a few seconds apart. You think of attackers as being savage and bold. These men were hesitant and cautious. They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety in their faces.
They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice.
They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys.
And even though they aren’t warriors born to the kill, they win their battles. That’s the point.Image copyright Michigan Department of Corrections Image caption Christopher Mirasolo is a registered sex offender who assaulted another underage victim
The case of a Michigan man awarded joint legal custody of a child whose mother he sexually assaulted when she was 12 has provoked outrage.
Many are incredulous that Christopher Mirasolo, 27, could be granted parental rights after a DNA test established his paternity.
The victim's lawyer said the case was set in motion after her client received child support from the state.
The case is thought to be the first of its kind in Michigan and maybe the US.
Attorney Rebecca Kiessling filed objections on Friday after Judge Gregory Ross ruled that Mirasolo had parental rights to the boy, who is now eight years old, reports the Detroit News.
Judge Ross also provided Mirasolo with the victim's home address.
The woman, who now lives in Florida, has been told to move back to Michigan.
Judge Ross also ordered Mirasolo's name to be added to the birth certificate without the mother's consent, her attorney added.
What's the case's background?
A 21-year-old woman told police Mirasolo forcibly raped her while holding her captive when she was 12 in September 2008.
The victim's ordeal began when she, her 13-year-old sister and a friend sneaked out of their house to meet an older boy and his friend, Mirasolo, who was 18 at the time.
Mirasolo held them captive for two days before releasing the older sister in a park.
He was arrested a month later when the woman became pregnant, Ms Kiessling added.
The charge is a first-degree felony in Michigan, but Mirasolo instead received a plea deal from the Sanilac County Prosecutor's Office for attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct.
He was sentenced to one year in county jail, but only served six-and-a-half months before he was released early to care for his sick mother.
In 2010, he sexually assaulted another victim between the ages of 13 and 15 and was jailed for four years, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Mirasolo was released in March 2012 and is a registered sex offender.
His supervision conditions include having a "responsible adult" present if he is with a minor.
How could this happen?
According to Ms Kiessling and the victim, the case was prompted after the mother sought child support.
Mirasolo's attorney, Barbara Yockey, told the Detroit Free Press that her client "never initiated" the custody case.
She said it was "routinely done by the prosecutor's office when a party makes application for state assistance".
"Chris was notified of the paternity matter and an order of filiation was issued last month by the court saying he had joint legal custody and reasonable visitation privileges," she said.
Ms Yockey said her client has not suggested he planned to act on his parenting rights and he had no scheduled court appearances.
"I don't know what his plans or intentions might be regarding any future relationship with the child," she said.
Ms Kiessling said the case violates the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act, which allows courts to dismiss the parental rights of convicted rapists over a child conceived as a result of rape.
What is the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act?
The law, championed by the Obama administration in 2015, gave states access to more funding for victims of sexual assault if they allowed courts to terminate the parental rights of an individual found to have committed rape against another person that resulted in the conception of a child.
About 5% of rape victims ages 12 to 45 become pregnant as a result of rape, according to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. A version of the law exists in 43 states and the District of Columbia, but the measures vary from state to state.
In 20 states and the District of Columbia, a rape conviction is required before termination of parental rights is allowed.
Critics argue this leaves victims vulnerable in cases that are not prosecuted.
Seven states have no laws barring rapists from asserting their parental rights over a child.This question originally appeared on Quora.
Answer by Paul Mulwitz, Official Election Observer and Retired Electrical Engineer
Two forces are at work to make election outcomes known quickly. Of course these only work when the voters actually make a clear selection with their votes. In the cases where the voters are unclear because of a nearly equal number of votes for two candidates for the same office, then the system fails to find a quick solution.
After the fiasco in the presidential election of 2000, the USA decided it would get rid of punched card voting systems. In my county, the punched card system was replaced with a new optical scan paper ballot system.
This new technology allows for ballot processing before election day. When the time comes to actually add up the votes (which cannot be done before the polls close), all the hard part is already done and the results for those ballots already prepared are nearly instant. Our county decided to go to all mail (i.e. optical scan) ballots because of the unintended consequences of the federal law demanding replacement of punched card ballots. I won't go into the details if I can avoid it, but the all mail ballot approach we chose meant we have nearly instant results within minutes of the time the polls close. We don't have all the ballots counted at that point, but we do have all the ballots received by the morning of election day counted. The remaining ballots dropped into collection boxes on election day and those post marked on election day or before will all be counted within a few days. Still, we knew the results from approximately seventy percent of all voted ballots shortly after the polls closed. These results are enough to indicate the outcome of most of the races taking place.
The second force at work is the ability many experienced election observers have to project the outcome of a race with a relatively small number of ballots known. This uses well established trends for each election district to make an educated guess how the remaining ballots will come out given knowledge of the first ballots results. It turns out that each election district has a history of Republican vs. Democrat preference. It is also known that the ballots processed later (after election day) will trend a certain way for a given election district. In cases where the first ballots counted give a moderate lead to one candidate, it is pretty easy to guess how the final vote count will come out a few days later.
Let me give a couple of examples for my election district - Clark County, WA.
In one race for County Commissioner, there were two Republican candidates running against each other and no Democrat on the ballot. The leader received 60 percent of the votes counted at the close of election day. It is clear to everyone that he will win the race when all the votes are counted.
In another race for State Senator, the Republican was behind the Democrat by only 200 or so votes out of 35,000 cast for that position. The outcome of this race seems to be in doubt, but the experience in this particular voting district is the later ballots will always favor the Republican. Republicans in this district tend to vote later than Democrats. That means this Republican will probably win the election even though he is behind by a small margin after the first ballots are counted.That is according to ESPN FC’s Italian football expert Gabriele Marcotti. Sandro was linked with a move to Chelsea last summer, with a fee around £65million mooted for the Brazilian. However, the deal failed to materialise and the 26-year-old has since suffered with a lack of form. He has been left out of Juventus’ Serie A side on a number of occasions this season, with Kwadwo Asamoah often preferred to him.
How Chelsea could look with Alex Sandro Sat, December 16, 2017 Is this how Chelsea could line up if they sign Alex Sandro? Play slideshow GETTY 1 of 12 How could Chelsea look with Alex Sandro?
ESPN Chelsea news: Antonio Conte will not pursue Alex Sandro in January, says Marcotti
I think there is a very, very small chance and certainly no-one in England who has watched him play this year are going to offer those kind of sums Gabriele Marcotti on Juventus star Alex Sandro
Despite that, Marcotti does not think Juventus are keen on allowing him to leave Turin. But he does not believe the likes of Chelsea would still stump-up that amount of money anyway. “Alex Sandro of course in the summer, a lot of talk about Chelsea offering vast sums,” Marcotti said. “You’re talking £65, £70, £75million and a year ago he certainly was on that level.
ESPN Chelsea news: Alex Sandro was linked with a move to England last summerAn Indianapolis firefighter who shot his neighbor four times in the chest after a dispute over a fence acted in self-defense and will not face charges, the Johnson County Prosecutor's Office said.
The shooting was captured on video, which was released by the prosecutor's office and shows firefighter Dean Keller and his neighbor Jeffrey Weigle engaged in a heated argument on June 27 along a "small section of fence which ran along Dean Keller's property line," the office said in a statement.
The office said the situation escalated when Weigle "adjust[ed] a portion of the fence," drove away on his lawnmower, then, when Keller approached the fence, reversed the mower and drew a gun from his pocket.
"Upon seeing Weigle's handgun, Keller drew his handgun and fired at Weigle," the prosecutor's office said, adding that Weigle fired back.
"Given the aggression shown by Weigle... it was reasonable for Keller to believe deadly force was necessary to prevent serious bodily injury to himself and/or his wife, who was standing nearby," the statement added.
Indiana man shot 4 times in neighbor dispute
The |
preferring a duplicitous P.A. to Hamas or Islamic State. Lamentably, those familiar with the corrupt P.A. know that expectations of reforming it anytime soon are fantasy.
But surely funding a Palestinian terror program that kills Americans and Israelis cannot serve the long-term interests of the United States or Israel. Cutting off aid to the P.A. is a move in the right direction, but it is inadequate, since it doesn’t address the Palestinian culture of Jew hatred and denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, both of which beliefs make any notion of peace impossible.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian government perpetuates in its media, mosques and schools the myths that Jews have no rights to sovereignty in the Holy Land and that all non-Muslims, even innocent civilians, are laudable targets for terrorist attacks.
In order to achieve a secure and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, convicted terrorists or who those die while committing terrorism must not compensated by the Palestinian government for these crimes. It is a travesty that American taxpayer dollars subsidize this hateful practice, and Congress should move urgently to stop it.Marilli
1983 Michel Banabila
Something New
1981 Space Cats
In the summer of 2014, Tako Reyenga travelled to Greece and spent time with friends in a tiny wooden shack in the shadow of Mount Olympus. They prepared fresh fish, drank wine and cooked whole onions over a fire. They listened to rebetiko music—a style of Greek folk that dates back to the 1920s and '30s—on a small, black transistor radio. "I think back to it and get goosebumps," Reyenga says. "You throw an onion on the fireplace, you chat, the onion comes out—you eat it, get blown away, and the whole evening, from 8 PM till 6 AM, you listen to music and get drunk."The basic components of this experience—good company, music, food and drink—are central to Reyenga's own listening sessions, which have assumed a legendary status among his circle of friends. Many of these sessions were held at Reyenga's old apartment on Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. "At the time I didn't have a job, and people would drop by and we'd spend all night smoking, drinking and listening," he says. The apartment was tiny, but its central location among Amsterdam's bars, hostels and coffeeshops meant Reyenga could get full use out of his high-end soundsystem. He and his friends listened to all kinds of records, though the focus was mostly on ambient, new age and oddball disco.Alongside Abel Nagengast and James Pole, Reyenga runs Red Light Records, a small, specialist vinyl shop hidden in a seedy, tangled neighbourhood of the kind you'll only find in Amsterdam, where brothels, pubs and bike shops share space with an imposing church. The shop grew from Red Light Radio, a successful online station that operates out of the same complex. Since 2013 he has also run the Music From Memory label with Nagengast and Jamie Tiller. The label's success has surprised even Reyenga—records from the likes of Gigi Masin, Vito Ricci and Gaussian Curve have earned Music From Memory a strong following.These days Reyenga lives in an apartment in Amsterdam's east, with one high-ceilinged wall filled with records. There is sleek, modern furniture, an indoor plant and no TV. His records are ordered by genre (soul, funk, disco, ambient, etc.) and country (Greece, Japan, Italy, Holland, France, Spain and South Africa each have their own section), and then further refined according to the colour and design of the sleeve. It was here that I spoke with Reyenga about a few of his favourite records. Most of them were rare; all of them were interesting.It's funny, we found a copy of this a while back and sold it in the store. It had a note written on the sleeve by Michel himself. It was a note to a friend of his and it said: "This music really sucks. I'm drunk. Have a listen and see for yourself." Something along those lines. And I've heard through someone who has spoken to him that he hates this record. But it's so good!Yeah. It happens a lot—it was the same with Leon Lowman. [Music From Memory issued a Lowman retrospective in 2013 called.] He said to us: "Why are you interested in this middle-of-the-road music that I made in the '70s?" But after the record came out, he listened to it with his girlfriend and got in touch and said it sounded nice.A lot of music that was made back in the day has more meaning or resonance now. This is what fascinates me with '70s and '80s music: it's just a vast landscape of oddities. You can find so much weird music. It circles back, too, and people have started making this style of music again. You could easily release this in 2015.
Antico Adagio
1978 Lino Capra Vaccina
Alister Johnson, a friend of Brandon [Hocura] and Gary [Abugan, AKA Invisible City], went to DJ in South Africa some years ago and he had a dig there and found this record. He put it in a mix that I really liked. That's how I know it. I was lucky—I contacted a South African record dealer and it popped up so I bought it, but it really never turns up anywhere, and I don't think it's even on Discogs. Another friend of Brandon and Gary, his name is Dene, he's now in South Africa digging for all the bubblegum stuff. Some of these records are pretty interesting musically, and also because they never left the country, I think because of the anti-apartheid boycott or something. They are so hard to find, you just don't see them really.Dene has been living in South Africa for six months trying to dig. There are no real record stores there anymore. But if you find it, you'll find tons of copies, or you'll find backstock. I think the South African stuff is pretty hip at the moment among diggers. Before that it was, and I guess still is, Nigerian boogie. I'm really into African music, and I have a lot of it, but it's not as much fun anymore. Whenever I see a record I'd like to have, it's like €300 for a decent boogie record. The prices are out of control. It's the same with any music nowadays: there are so many chancers.You see it with new music as well. After the third repress of Gigi Masin's, we had a period where it was sold out everywhere, and immediately there were copies for €70 on Discogs. I had to make a note on Discogs: "Don't buy this, we want to keep things in press." As long as there is demand, we'll repress, for the artist and for everyone's sake.
Disillusioned
1987 Rex Ilusivii
This is a very special record to me. This track is so emotional. I'll listen to this until I die. This is coming out of the period when me and Jamie [Tiller] were really interested in dusty experimental and new age music. We worked our way through Spanish, German and Greek music, then Italy.It's not like we only do one country at a time—you always look for records from any place, made at any time—but we have phases. With the Italian stuff, a lot of these things were available on websites for cheap. Gigi Masin's, for example, we bought that for €20 from an Italian website. And it's super rare. It was never commercially released. So we had our Italian period, which Gigi came out of, and this is another one of records from that time.—get high on your own supply?To give you an indication, I did this one digging trip with Jamie Tiller. We drove through Germany all the way to Vienna. We bought about 600 records on that trip. And maybe we both kept five records each from that batch.I'm not a hoarder. I have sold lots of records from my collection over time. I sometimes bring a little batch of stuff I don't listen to anymore to the shop. At some point I had maybe 8000 records. Now I have about 4000, which is still so much music. I tend to go for things that are close to my heart rather than having shitloads of vinyl. And I'm not a professional DJ, so I don't need to buy new records for dance floor purposes every week.Since I've had the store, I've thought about what I actually listen to, what I actually play out. Sometimes you have an emotional attachment with records you played out in the past, but maybe five years down the line they don't do the same thing to you anymore. I've sold so many house records. When I do play out, I'll take the same Larry Heard records I always bring []. And what I like so much about DJs like Beautiful Swimmers is they play killer house records, but they're often $2 house records.
Kakashi
1982 Yasuaki Shimizu
Yes. This guy made some incredible music. This one that's playing now, "Facedance," I think people like Madlib would die for this. He made this in Yugoslavia in the late '80s. Vladimir's knowledge of music from this era is second to none. His parents had a nightclub in Belgrade, and he was able to access to Rex Ilusivii's archive because he is a trusted family friend.It's the same with any genre. Psych rock from Thailand. Every country had its jazz-funk scene, its wave or electronic scene. There's new wave from Argentina, you know, and crazy electro-acoustic avant-garde stuff from countries like Cuba and so on.
Implosion
1988 Implosion
Yep. The marimba on this track ["Umi No Ue Kara"] was played by hand, which is kind of insane. I know this from Jamie Tiller—he used to live in Japan, and he made some amazing discoveries there around the time we got to know each other. I also had Chee Shimizu visiting me in Amsterdam. We used to do digging tours through Germany, and he'd always bring me these really good Japanese records every time. So Chee and Jamie were both showing me crazy Japanese records. This is eight minutes long and it's so tight.Not that much. A bit. But when I DJ out I'm usually pretty straightforward, party-focused. The Salon [Des Amateurs] was always very wild, you could play whatever you want there.That track was made six or seven years ago. It has always been big in the Salon. I got the file really early on, so I've always been playing it. I forgot about it, then I was DJing in Manchester and I played it and people were climbing the walls and jumping on top of each other to this track. I told Jan Schulte we have to put this out. So that's basically why we started Second Circle.I also have loads of early Stabil Elite stuff, which they made in their basement, that never got released and probably not many people have heard. The Düsseldorf scene was amazing at that time. When I would DJ at the Salon I'd mostly stay at Gordon Pohl's house. He was jamming with the Stabil Elite kids, who were 19 or 20 at the time. They are massive talents. That's what I like so much about Düsseldorf: there is this generation, this scene of heads and kids who make music.It all comes back to Detlef [Weinrich, AKA Tolouse Low Trax]. He was way ahead of the curve with booking live acts and DJs at the Salon. And he's the guy who plays records where it's like, "What is this?" He has an extreme curiosity.
Sentrall 006
2005 Mingmad Jimsu / Project Sandro
I'll use the filter to just search through Discogs' "explore" option, where you can use these all these settings, like every experimental/minimal record released in the UK in 1986. This one was a total guess—a €70 guess. I got lucky. It is an incredible record the whole way through. It's from 1988, but it sounds a bit like a late-'70s prog record. I tried to get in touch with the Implosion guys, perhaps for a reissue, and I found a didgeridoo player in Venice with the right name. It was the same guy. He said he was going to reissue it on his own label, but it never happened. Still, I hope this can happen via Music From Memory as more people need to hear it.When I saw, and that it dated to Venice in 1984, I thought they must know Gigi [Masin]. I asked [Antinote founder] Zaltan, and yeah, it turns out they do know each other.It's so amazing for him. When we were planning to release, we thought, this is amazing music, but can we sell more than 500? After the third repress, we hit 2500, and I thought we'd hit the roof, but the demand was still there, so we did another run. And then another.And he worked with Tempelhof [on 2014 album]. He's out there now.When we met him he was saying, "I have my family life, I have my job, and when I make music, I make it in the attic for myself." For 15 years he did that. After, he didn't want to work with people anymore, he didn't want to deal with the music business. He did it for himself. And that's the beauty of it. It's so honest and raw, and that makes it beautiful.Vito, he's in heaven. He released one obscure record in 1983 and now he's gotten lots of attention. Everyone knows about him, 20 years after he made his music. For me, that's the main reason to do what we do.
Música Esporádica
1985 Música Esporádica
This takes me back to a really cool time. From the early 2000s onwards, internet communities sprung on, well before Facebook started. There was Dream Chimney, a small website with an amazing database that was really nice graphically.It was run by Ryan Bishop, a guy from San Francisco. And the Sentrall label was linked to California and Dream Chimney. For a while everyone was on there—Lovefingers, lots of European collectors. There's a wealth of information. It's a funny forum as well. I'm not really visiting the site anymore, but there was something like a golden period, I guess. Same with CBS, which was great. I met some amazing people through that forum but it was also very nerdy. I think they invented internet trolling. There were these really gnarly guys giving you shit [].It was when I went to Japan in 2006. It was only for sale in Japan, and when I was there this was in the shops. That bell-y loop was wonderfully taken from Al Di Meola's "Sequencer."
Celestial Ocean
1983 Brainticket
This is an all-time favourite. Phenomenal deepness. I still remember being at the Utrecht Record Fair, buying this, and listening to this back at my house with Jamie, Chee and my good friend Basso from Hamburg who were all there digging at the fair and staying with me.With listening sessions, anything strange or otherworldy really works. When you're together with someone, you have an interaction. You play records in a way you wouldn't normally play if you were on your own.Exactly. Today I had all these records planned [to play], but it has ended up going in a different direction. I think it's kind of fun that way. It all has to do with the way you listen to stuff and the way you get together and focus on listening. It's not one record or one track on a record that influences someone, it's more the vibe of having a place where you could listen to records all night long. And don't get me wrong, I love to party, too, I love to get completely lost on a dance floor, that's what everyone wants—it's the essence of dance music. But with listening sessions you can listen with likeminded people. And with clubs and parties, it's never about the DJs, it's about the crowd. A party is as good as the people who come to dance. And the best DJs play records like they are playing them to a bunch of friends.
Homowo - Highlife Music
1983 Basa Basa
This is incredible. It has a spoken word on top that's done in three or four languages. I played this at Brilliant Corners in London recently. To hear this on the Klipschorns there was a revelation. This guy, Joel Vandroogenbroeck, did a lot of amazing stuff. He did tons of the Coloursound Library records, Detroit techno sounding stuff, everything. Brainticket was a pretty well known krautrock band. I think this one was only released in Italy.In Brilliant Corners it was swirling around the room. There's a really good message to the lyrics as well. Super psychedelic.
This is a €10 find here in Amsterdam.It was released on a Dutch label, that's why you can find it here. James Pole, my colleague at Red Light Records, found this locally the other day. He's new to the shop, and he goes out and he digs hard. He's like me when I first moved to Amsterdam. He goes to all the shops and flea markets constantly.Another tune on this record, "African Soul Power," is a big I-F tune. He plays it a lot.No, the whole thing is great. The African stuff, it's amazing, it's endless. That's the beauty of music: it never ends. You can spend your life discovering new music. I remember speaking to Beppe Loda once and he said those words: "It never ends." He was like, "Tako, I've had two million records in my hands in my life, and it never ends." Nowadays, there's so much amazing new music coming out, too. There's so much great experimental and avant-garde or just beautiful music out there. My girlfriend, she made an amazing mix entirely out of recordings made under the ground, and in caves and shit. It really interests me, stuff that exists outside the pragmatic realm of music, outside of DJing, pure sound or music. It draws me in. If you imagine the body of music with no obligation to make people dance, there's a lot to explore.Monica Banks feels like she's been slapped in the face by the East Pennsboro Area School Board – and it's not the first time she's felt this way.
After Banks, a single mother, moved out of the district into government-subsidized housing over the summer, the board, quoting policy, denied a waiver request she filed to allow her son, James Mitchell, to finish his senior year at East Pennsboro Area High School tuition free.
Claiming the decision flies in the face of the district's policy and involves race discrimination, Banks, who couldn't find similar housing in Enola, filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission to overturn the decision in October.
The district must respond to the complaint this month. And while there's been no official movement on the matter, on Wednesday, about two weeks after the board approved a tuition-waiver request for another student, Banks received an email from the commission.
The investigator handling the case who is attempting to negotiate an agreement between Banks and the school board, told her in the email that the board would reconsider its decision at its Jan. 8 meeting, but only if Banks agrees to a number of terms outlined by the board.
However, the pact, which she and her son would both have to sign, doesn't guarantee approval of the tuition waiver. It only says the board would reconsider the request at its Jan. 8 meeting.
It also requires Banks to drop her complaint with the commission, exempting the district from any wrongdoing or unlawful conduct.
The next part of the proposed pact, which forbids her from speaking with the media or posting anything about the situation to social media sites, is what Banks said irks her the most. And she said she would not sign the agreement.
"All I want is for James to be able to finish the year out. I was so upset when I got" the email, said Banks, who now is considering hiring an attorney. "They're not guaranteeing me anything. But they want me to shut up and stop talking about it. They're bullying me."
District spokeswoman Katie Gouldner said the issue is a legal matter and that she could not discuss it. Gouldner said she forwarded PennLive's questions to district solicitor Carl P. Beard, who would be in touch with the reporter working on this story.
Beard said he could not discuss a matter under investigation with the Human Relations Commission. And he said Banks should not have shared information with PennLive regarding "confidential discussions" between the school board, the commission and herself.
The Human Relations Commission has told PennLive it could not discuss cases under investigation.
School board policy requires nonresident students to pay tuition. Parents/guardians can request tuition-waivers, however.
Not wanting the move to disrupt her son's senior year, Banks kept him enrolled at East Pennsboro and reached out to Superintendent Jay Burkhart and the school board to see if Mitchell could finish the school year without paying tuition.
When Banks approached the school board with such a request in October, the answer was no.
At the time, Gouldner said she couldn't go into specifics on the decision because it involves a student. The matter came down to policy and past practice, she said.
Gouldner told PennLive that per board policy, if a student moves prior to Sept. 30, 2014, a waiver request is denied. If a student moves after the same date, the request would be granted, she said.
That isn't stipulated in the board's policy governing seniors who live outside the district, however.
The policy reads: "for students in grade 12 - after Sept. 30 of the student's senior year, the parent/guardian shall make a written request to the superintendent or designee indicating the request for continued attendance for the 12th grade student in the district without payment of tuition. The superintendent may grant the request provided the student has not violated the code of student conduct at levels II, III or IV, has a demonstrated acceptable academic and attendance record."
Gouldner said the school board interprets the policy to mean "if a student moves prior to Sept. 30, 2014, the matter will be taken to the board of school directors. This is past practice and what our superintendent feels is best practice."
Meanwhile, Mitchell, who has been a student in the district since the second grade, has been able to continue attending East Pennsboro Area High School with help from the community.
Banks has paid her son's nearly $1,000 monthly tuition with money raised through a community fundraising website. Two East Pennsboro Township families even offered their homes to Mitchell so he could live in the district and finish out the year tuition free. One even said Banks and her two children could live in their house because they were moving to another home.
An honors' student who played for the high school football team, the situation has become a strain for Mitchell, his mother said.
The 17-year-old was unsure he would be able to continue attending school with his classmates during the first half of the year, she said. And he has a co-op position at McDonald's, which he worried he would have to drop, she said.
His grades have faltered a bit, too. Mitchell, who plans to study music recording engineering at Full Sail University in Florida next year, didn't make the honor roll during the second marking period, which Banks said isn't like her son.
Banks said there is no way she will sign an agreement with the board with no guarantee it will approve the waiver. She said she was told the board president and vice president agreed to take the request to the board again, but couldn't guarantee approval because she had intimated the board denied the request because her son is black.
Banks said the board's decision should have nothing to do with her or what she said, "this is supposed to be about my son."
Proposed Agreement
The following are terms proposed by the district, as outlined in an email from the Human Relations Commission to Banks:
The District would waive any tuition moving forward.
The parent would not need to make any payment in the month of December or January.
The Board of School Directors would entertain an agreement to resolve the case; however, the matter had to be discussed with the Board in executive session prior to the January 8, 2015 meeting.
There would be no admission of wrongdoing or unlawful conduct on the part of the District, the Board or District employees.
Both the parent and her son (student) would need to sign the Waiver and Release.
The parties would refrain from commentaries to the media, FaceBook, etc.
The parties would consider a joint release on the matter.
"Please bear in mind that the confidentiality terms are mutual, binding on both. You can't make public comment or talk to the press. Nor can Respondent. It's part of the package and if you want your son to finish the year, then the terms have to be accepted. Remember that if we do not settle, and are able to find cause in this case nevertheless, these likely would be the terms of resolution, but it will likely be months later."North Korea: VICE Guide on The Darkest of Countries
North Korea has had it’s share of coverage on Weird Asia News for being so… well… weird. We have reported on North Korea publicly executing people for using cell phones, eating dog meat to help deal with summer heat, and how their own leader is a better golfer than Tiger Woods.
North Korea has always been somewhat a place of mystery, due to strict rules against media and journalist entering, or reporting, about anything within their country. Even when foreigners are allowed to enter the country, they must be escorted by secret police and government officials at all times.
Even North Koreans themselves are extremely controlled. There is a cable radio system that is wired into almost all establishments and provides the news and commentary to most North Koreans. There is a limited number of radio stations or television stations, all of which are controlled by the government. So much is the control on media that most North Koreans do not even have cameras or internet access at all.
So when the opportunity came up for a small group of reporters to be allowed entrance into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang, VBS decided to step up and take the risk to hopefully bring back some insights on the infamous communist country of North Korea.
VBS, an online broadcast network from VICE magazine, had issues from day one.
“Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes…” “They finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.†Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.†They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea.”
VBS finally got the “go ahead” to visit North Korea and brought back a series of 14 videos on North Korea, which they are releasing on their website – The VICE Guide to North Korea. So risky was their endeavor that they were almost charged with a criminal offense for recording when they were not supposed to.
Here are a few of our favorites and make sure to head over and catch the whole series. You will not be disappointed:
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RedditMisconception: Juice cleansing can remove toxins from your system.
Actually: To say that drinking juice detoxifies the body isn’t quite the same as claiming leeches suck out poisons, but it’s fairly close.
The practice of cleansing has become as ubiquitous as the use of hand sanitizer. Celebrities do it. Spas offer it. Fancy food stores sell pricey bottles of juice to accomplish it, and a $700 juicer will soon facilitate the process for those who are not satisfied with the current D.I.Y. options. But what is it that everybody is trying to remove from their bodies? Is there any science behind it?
“People are interested in this so-called detoxification, but when I ask them what they are trying to get rid of, they aren’t really sure,” said Dr. James H. Grendell, the chief of the division of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y. “I’ve yet to find someone who has specified a toxin they were hoping to be spared.”
Toxins exist. Doctors typically define them as something that enters the body that has a damaging effect on its own — like pesticides, lead or antifreeze — or in large quantities, like alcohol or medications such as acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.Indeed Brewing Company announces the release of Shenanigans Summer Ale, a seasonal honey wheat beer brewed with Sorachi Ace hops, regionally produced honey, and locally malted red wheat.
“Shenanigans is Indeed’s tribute to summer, perfect for days spent sipping pints on the patio,” co-founder Nathan Berndt said. “We really wanted a thirst-quenching beer for those long and hot summer days in Minnesota.”
Shenanigans will be available from May–September on-draft and in liquor stores throughout the Twin Cities metro. A draft release event is planned for May 11 at Sea Salt Eatery in Minneapolis. In addition, the brewery will roll-out 6-packs and 12-packs of 12 oz. Shenanigans Summer Ale cans beginning May 21 in time for Memorial Day weekend.
“We’re really excited to introduce this beer in 12-packs because it’s such a great beer to grab for outdoor activities and share with friends,” Bernd said. “There aren’t any other local craft breweries that offer 12-packs of 12-oz cans, so we feel like we’re filling a need.”
For a complete list of locations that offer Indeed beer, visit: www.IndeedBrewing.com.
Shenanigans Stats:
ABV: 5%
IBU: 14
Original Gravity: 11.5º Plato
Hops: Sorachi Ace, Willamette
Malt: Two-row Pale and Red Wheat
Available: 6-packs & 12-packs of 12-oz cans, on-draft, May-September
Description:
A warm day, great friends and a good beer–It doesn’t get any better. In that spirit we present Shenanigans Summer Ale, our ode to the season. Brewed with Sorachi Ace hops, regionally produced honey and locally malted red wheat, Shenanigans Summer Ale has a zesty citrus aroma, refreshingly dry body and notes of honey. So on those long hot days, remember that summertime is time for Shenanigans. (5% ABV, 14 IBU)
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Founded in 2011 by Tom Whisenand, Nathan Berndt and Rachel Anderson, Indeed Brewing Company continues to brew quality handcrafted beer. In addition to their two flagship beers Midnight Ryder American Black Ale and Day Tripper Pale Ale, Indeed offers a growing rotation of seasonal and specialty beers. As an invested member of the community, Indeed Brewing Company donates at least one percent of its annual sales to local and national non-profit organizations through One Percent for the Planet, a movement that encourages corporate philanthropy for the preservation and restoration of the natural environment.Image caption Mr Laws, left, is said to be "absolutely furious"
The row over the removal of the head of Ofsted has intensified with Lib Dem minister David Laws accusing his boss, Education Secretary Michael Gove, of doing it for political reasons.
It comes after Baroness Morgan said she was the victim of a "determined effort from Number 10" to appoint more Tories.
A source close to Mr Laws said he was "furious" at "attempts to politicise" the schools inspectorate for England.
Tory Mr Gove has not commented on claims he dismissed the Labour peer.
Downing Street, which said the decision not to reappoint Baroness Morgan for a second three-year term had been made by Mr Gove, insisted the government "appoints people on merit".
'Game-playing'
The decision to get rid of Sally Morgan had absolutely nothing to do with her abilities Source close to Mr Laws
The outgoing chairwoman, who was appointed by the coalition in 2010 as chair of the education inspectorate for England, told BBC News her removal was part of a pattern which had seen a series of non-Conservative supporters on bodies like the Arts Council and the Charity Commission replaced with loyal Tories.
"I really do think it's just I am the latest of a fairly long list of people now who are non-Conservative supporters who are not being reappointed," she said.
"Often they are people who have been working really well with their organisations and, indeed, with their host departments, so I do think this is coming from Number 10.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Baroness Morgan on not being reappointed to head Ofsted
"I don't think it is coming from individual departments."
A source close to Mr Laws told the BBC: "David is absolutely furious at the blatant attempts by the Tories to politicise Ofsted.
"The decision to get rid of Sally Morgan had absolutely nothing to do with her abilities, or even education policy, and everything to do with Michael Gove's desire to get his own people on board.
"David Laws is absolutely determined not to let Michael undermine the independence of this vital part of the education system.
"David's primary concern now is not to let Conservative game-playing destabilise Ofsted and he'll be working closely with them as schools minister to make sure that doesn't happen."
'Michael Gove's decision'
Meanwhile, a senior Lib Dem source accused Mr Gove of attempting to "reward Tory cronies".
Downing Street said the claim it was involved in an effort to recruit Conservative sympathisers to public bodies was baseless.
"Michael Gove has thanked Sally Morgan for her effective and long service as chair of Ofsted. The decision not to reappoint her was his decision," a Number 10 spokesman said.
Image caption Baroness Morgan is a former aide to Tony Blair
"This government appoints people on merit: for example, Sally Morgan was herself appointed under this government; and the former Labour adviser Simon Stevens is about to take up the post of Chief Executive of NHS England."
The spokesman said Downing Street had also asked former Labour cabinet ministers to carry out independent reviews on key public policy issues, including Alan Milburn on social mobility and John Hutton on public service pensions.
In a statement, Ofsted said Baroness Morgan's term of office "has been extended until the autumn of 2014 by the secretary of state while the process is put in place to find a successor".
The row comes days after the education secretary denied claims by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools in England, that the Department for Education had briefed against Ofsted.NEWSFLASH!! (As seen on a website (or three) near you.) – If you want to be healthy, lose body fat, kick ass in the gym, gain muscle and dominate the world then you better make sure you’re drinking Bulletproof coffee, bone broth and kombucha; eating liver (and other organ meats), coconut oil, MCT oil, sauerkraut (and other fermented foods), seaweed, cold potatoes (for the resistant starch – duh…) and copious amounts of _____________ (insert vegetable that you cannot stand here); and you’ll also need to take Fermented Cod Liver Oil, and roughly $300-$500 worth of miscellaneous supplements with varying functions. But that’s not all! Intermittent fasting, carb backloading, carb cycling, and very low carb/keto protocols should be incorporated liberally (because 2 out of 3 internet experts recommend them…). **DISCLAIMER** Results received from following the above procedures may vary. Success is not guaranteed and results seen in internet testimonials are not typical. Additionally, if you can’t stomach the thought of any or all items listed or if you are completely miserable following the above protocols, suck it up or be unhealthy.**
Okay, that scenario might be a little over the top, but I think you get the idea. There are SO MANY ‘expert’ voices telling us what to do and what not to do – in terms of food, exercise, diet type, etc. Some of the advice might sound like something you can get behind – I mean eating eggs and bacon for breakfast doesn’t sound too shabby, and maybe you REALLY like coconut oil or liver; but there are some other things that maybe trigger your gag reflex a bit or that make your life kind of miserable. Case in point: You’ve started doing the intermittent fasting thing – you wake up a little hungry, but your ‘fasting window’ doesn’t end until noon; by 10:30 am you can’t concentrate, your stomach is growling and your left hand is starting to look like a nice snack. Yeah, you’re miserable –but you’re gonna do it again tomorrow because that’s what’s ‘healthy’. Does anyone, besides me, see the irony in that? Isn’t the goal of this to optimize your health and doesn’t that include physical, mental and emotional aspects? And who are these experts and gurus? Just because it ‘works for them’ it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s right for you and that, my friends, IS OKAY. There’s nothing wrong with you if eating low carb makes you feel like crap, you can’t stand Cross Fit style workouts or if the thought of eating liver brings to mind images of projectile vomit.
There isn’t one perfect definition of what eating well and living a healthy lifestyle is. But when it comes to food especially, there are a lot of people that think they have the correct answer. And if you’re one of ‘those people’, I’m sorry, but, you’re WRONG! I’m not going to try to tell you what you should or shouldn’t eat – and I’m the last person that is going to judge you for your choices. I’ve spent two-thirds of my life villianizing food; lost in rules of what was and wasn’t okay. It’s an obsession that only distanced me from optimal health, isolated me and made me miserable. While I’m not going to outline the perfect |
uchi said. Invisible tracking brings to mind science-fiction-inspired uses, or even abuses, such as unknowingly getting sprinkled with smart-tag powder for Big Brother-like monitoring. “We are not imagining such uses,” Takeuchi said, adding that the latest chip is so new — and so miniature — Hitachi is still studying its possible uses.
Contrary to some versions of this item, however, we have not yet seen any official mention of such “smart dust” technology having GPS capabilities or being able to survive in a functional state after being ingested.A proposed US$200-million deal that would see SMART Technologies acquired by Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn Technology Group is being hailed by the Calgary-based company as a “new chapter” that will bring with it financial stability and future growth.
The agreement, which will be put to a shareholder vote in July, will see Foxconn — the world’s largest electronics contractor manufacturer — acquire all of the outstanding common shares of SMART for a cash payment of US$4.50 per share, a 21 per cent premium to the stock’s volume weighted average price over the past 90 days.
SMART, best known for its patented interactive whiteboards used in school classrooms around the globe, announced in October that it would undertake a strategic review given slower-than-anticipated sales growth and a weaker-than-expected fiscal outlook for 2016. It said at that time one option it was considering was the sale of the company, and has been actively courting potential buyers since then.
Jeff Lowe, SMART’s vice-president of marketing, said in an interview the Foxconn deal will give SMART the ability to tap into the Taiwanese company’s “significant resources” and global expertise. Foxconn had revenues of over $150 billion last year and employs well over 1 million people. Some of its major customers include Apple, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia and Sony.
“It just really opens up access to us to all kinds of different opportunities and also provides us with a great deal of stability moving forward,” Lowe said. “I think this will significantly improve our supply chain, and just overall corporate stability — financial stability.”
SMART has more than 600 employees worldwide, with 400 of those based at its Calgary headquarters. Lowe said an acquisition by Foxconn will not result in the closure of the Calgary office and will not mean any job losses “at this time.” He declined to speculate about what the deal would mean for chief executive Neil Gaydon and the rest of SMART’s executive team, saying only that for now, it is status quo.
“It is business as usual while we work through this process. But we see nothing but upside and growth for SMART looking forward,” Lowe said.
One of Calgary’s biggest non-oil and gas business success stories, SMART Technologies grew from a two-person startup into a global presence with sales in 170 countries that, at one time, had annual revenues just under $800 million. But the company crash-landed shortly after going public in a high-profile IPO in 2010 that coincided with a global economic downturn. School boards that once clamoured for SMART products stopped spending, the company’s sales slowed and its stock plummeted — from $17 in 2010 to $1.30 in 2012.
In April 2012, David Martin and Nancy Knowlton — the husband-and-wife founders of SMART — resigned their roles as executive chair and CEO, respectively. Gaydon, the former head of U.K.-based television set-top box manufacturer Pace, was brought in as CEO and tasked with turning the faltering company around. He immediately embarked on an ambitious agenda of cost-cutting that included layoffs, the sale of its Calgary building and the closure of its Ottawa product assembly facility.
Gaydon also refocused the company’s efforts around new technologies and products, especially ones aimed at a business clientele.
“But that transition takes time, and that’s been the story of SMART over the past few years,” Lowe said, adding the Foxconn deal will help SMART accelerate its new strategy. “This allows us, I think, that ability to turn a new page and have a new chapter for SMART — and be that success story.”
Carmi Levy, technology analyst for CTV, said the acquisition by Foxconn has the potential to be a game changer for SMART if it plays out something like the 2010 acquisition of Swedish carmaker Volvo by the Chinese automotive company Geely. Volvo’s headquarters remain in place in Sweden and its brand remains unaltered, but the company has been able to invest in new technology thanks to the access to capital brought about by the acquisition.
“To Geely’s credit, Volvo has remained largely untouched. So if that’s how this Foxconn deal plays out, then this is a very good news story for SMART, because it essentially gives them access to the resources they need to lift themselves out of the doldrums they currently find themselves in,” Levy said. However, Levy added that until more details of the acquisition become public, there is no way to know for sure.
“If this is basically a borg-like acquisition on the part of Foxconn, this story is going to have a very different — and sadly for SMART — much darker ending,” he said.
On Thursday, SMART announced fourth-quarter 2016 revenues of $68 million, a decline of $17 million year-over-year. For the full fiscal year 2016, SMART’s revenues were $348 million, a decrease of $83 million from 2015. The company said the decrease was due to lower sales of its interactive whiteboards and projectors. It reported an adjusted net loss for the year of $37.4 million.
SMART’s shares closed at $5.77 Thursday, down 11 per cent.
astephenson@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/AmandaMstephThe dark shapes are dying/dead neurons filled with tau tangles in an Alzheimer's diseased brain. (credit: QBI)
QBI researchers are a step closer to understanding why a toxic protein builds up in brain cells dying from Alzheimer's disease.
Scientists in QBI’s Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research discovered that an enzyme, Fyn, plays a key role in the accumulation of toxic tau protein inside neurons.
CJCADR director Professor Jürgen Götz said Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by the build-up two types of proteins in the brain: amyloid-beta, which forms plaques, and tau.
“Previously, it wasn’t fully understood why tau accumulates in dying neurons in Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.
Tau normally plays an important role in maintaining the structure of a neuron’s axon, the long cable part of a brain cell that transmits signals. In Alzheimer’s disease, it forms large deposits known as ‘neurofibrillary tangles’ – clumps in the cell body where normally very little tau is found. The tangles interfere with the neuron’s function, eventually killing it.
Previously, it was thought that tau undergoes a change in its structure in the axons of neurons and then migrates to the cell body of a neuron, where it then accumulates.
New theory for tau accumulation in Alzheimer's disease
“Dr Chuanzhou Li has come up with a new mechanism to explain why tau accumulates in the cell body of neurons,” said Professor Götz.
“Excitingly, we’ve found that an important enzyme, Fyn, activates enzymes that trigger the synthesis of tau in the cell body where tau then accumulates and forms tangles."
The discovery opens up new potential avenues for treating Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding why these toxic proteins build up will enable QBI researchers to find new ways of preventing it from happening.
Earlier this year, CJCADR researchers, led by Professor Götz, built on their breakthrough using ultrasound technology to treat Alzheimer’s disease and restore memory in animal models.
They found that ultrasound enhances the effectiveness of immunotherapy in reducing toxic tau protein build-up – combining ultrasound with an antibody fragment was more effective than either treatment alone in removing protein clumps and reducing Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice.
Understanding why tau accumulates and uncovering what happens in the brain at a cellular level is crucial to QBI’s goal of preventing and treating of dementia.
The research is published online in EMBO, and was made possible through the support of the Federal government, the Queensland government through the Department of Science, IT and Innovation, and philanthropic support led by the Clem Jones Foundation.Tesla, energy companies concerned prices won't drop under South Australian Government's plan
Updated
Battery giant Tesla has joined power generators, retailers, major energy users and experts in voicing concerns about a central component of the South Australian Government's $550 million energy plan.
The Energy Security Target (EST) was one of six key measures announced by Premier Jay Weatherill in March.
Submissions about the Government's policy range from urging caution because it may not lower wholesale prices, to killing off plans for a new interconnector to feed power into the state.
The SA scheme operates in a similar way to the Federal Government's Renewable Energy Target (RET). But instead of incentivising new renewable projects, it would require retailers to source 36 per cent of the state's electricity needs from gas generators and other synchronous power sources.
According to the scheme's designer, economist Danny Price, the energy security target would create more wholesale market competition and put downward pressure on prices, offsetting the direct costs of the scheme.
But renewable energy companies have voiced concerns about the EST saying it would create an effective cap on the volume of renewable energy within the state and lock out renewable generators.
'Lower wholesale prices may not be achieved'
Tesla, which has won money from the Government's energy plan to build the world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia, is concerned the scheme will favour traditional generators over batteries.
"We do not feel that the draft regulations and supporting consultation paper are representative of the current South Australian position as leaders and innovators in the renewable energy space," Tesla's Mark Twidell wrote in a submission to the Government's plan.
"We hope that the South Australian Government reconsiders their current position, and adopts an approach which will allow global technology leaders such as Tesla to continue to grow their presence in South Australia."
Even the owners of gas power plants set to benefit from the Government subsidy have urged caution.
AGL's wholesale markets general manager Richard Wrightson said the state's biggest electricity generator and retailer supported the principle of the EST "and believes it may encourage more inertia and fault resilient generation, to support system security".
"We remain concerned, however, that as the scheme aims to replace imported electricity with locally generated power, the desired effect of lowering wholesale prices may not be achieved."
Fellow power retailer Alinta said while it supported the Government's pursuit, it was not convinced and thought it "would lead to inefficient pricing outcomes [at least in the short term], sub-optimal dispatch outcomes, increased uncertainty and deter new investment in generation in the South Australian market".
Plan would reduce economic case for interconnector
One of the state's heaviest energy users, Nyrstar, which owns the Port Pirie smelter, said it was "debatable whether the scheme will be effective at reducing wholesale prices" and may decrease competition in the retail energy market.
"Prospective new retailers may abandon entry to the SA market as the proposed new scheme may be seen as another level of compliance or obstacle to surmount in addition to the existing competitive landscape and market structure," Nyrstar's vice president Bertus De Villiers said.
Energy Users Association of Australia (EUAA) chief executive Andrew Richards echoed those concerns by writing "we believe it will add significant cost to the annual electricity bills of South Australian energy users without necessarily altering the nature or structure of the local market to provide greater system security".
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said there were "better ways" of dealing with generation deficiencies and the National Electricity Rules were expected to change, potentially modifying the market.
The owner of South Australia's transmission network Electranet warned its introduction would likely kill off plans for a new interconnector.
"The Energy Security Target can be expected to substantially reduce the economic case for increased interconnection from South Australia by removing the benefits of increased imports and the resulting lower wholesale electricity prices," Electranet executive Rainer Korte said.
The State Opposition's energy spokesman Dan Van Holst Pellekaan said the public consultation process revealed the Government's policy for an EST was friendless.
"The Government is all at sea when it comes to their energy policy," he said.
"They change their plans almost weekly and it's very clear that people from the smallest household to the largest employer do not believe them."
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis told Parliament the EST remained "a key and vital plank of our energy plan".
"It will incentivise more generation, produce more electrons here in South Australia," he said.
The Government has delayed the scheme from July to January next year.
Topics: government-and-politics, states-and-territories, adelaide-5000, port-pirie-5540, sa
First postedThis US Navy photo obtained April 20, 2015 shows the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Carl Vinson in the Gulf (AFP Photo/Anthony N. Hilkowski)
Washington (AFP) - A US aircraft carrier was steaming toward Yemeni waters on Monday, joining other American ships in the area amid a worsening conflict.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, which was in the Gulf to launch strikes against the Islamic State group, passed through the Strait of Hormuz headed for the Gulf of Aden and the southern Red Sea.
It is being escorted by the USS Normandy, a guided missile cruiser. The US Navy said the pair will "ensure the vital shipping lanes in the region remain open and safe."
Nine US ships are now near Yemen, where last month Saudi Arabia and a regional coalition launched air strikes targeting Huthi rebels.
The United States says it is not taking part directly in the Saudi-led strikes, but provides intelligence and logistical support.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren denied reports the US ships have orders to intercept Iranian vessels carrying weapons for the Huthis.
"To speculate on boardings would be premature," a US official told AFP on condition of anonymity.A sample-kit of the 20 notes a Stylophone produces
Recorded by using the Stylophone’s headphone out connected to a M-Audio Fast Track Pro at 96000Hz with 24-Bits of resolution. Carefully cut and tested by yours truly. And I’ve even included patches for Ableton’s Simpler and Sampler! During the recording the pitch of the Stylophone was tuned all the way down to get the most out of the bass.
Find the download below, but please take notice of the install instructions!
To install the Ableton Simpler and/or Sampler, check the following steps:
1. Locate the Ableton library.
2. Open the “Samples” folder located within the Ableton library.
3. Place the folder “JordyVision” in the “Samples” folder.*
4. Go back to the library and find a folder named “Presets”, open it.
5. Open the folder labeled “Instruments”.
5. Place the file named “Stylophone by JordyVision.adg” in the folder titled “Instrument Rack”, and “Stylophone by JordyVision.adv” in the “Sampler” folder.**
*If you’ve already installed the TR-505 and TR-606 samples before, just place the folder named “Stylophone” in the “JordyVision” folder.
**You can also double click the file(s) to open them in Ableton, then save them to the library within the application.
Download here.
All done! You can now find the instruments among the other Instrument Racks and and Sampler patches for Ableton. Any questions? Ask them in the comments below!In a world with no shortage of floundering states, the growing turmoil in Venezuela seems sadly familiar. Protesters riot in the streets and security officers reply with sometimes-deadly force, as the country suffers through sky-high inflation, a record-setting murder rate and scarcity of basic items.
Even toilet paper has become a hot commodity on under-stocked grocery shelves.
Yet there is a striking difference between Venezuela and many of the globe’s other basket cases. Boasting the world’s largest reserves of oil and already out-stripping all but a handful of countries in crude production, it is uncommonly blessed with a highly lucrative natural resource.
The protests that have wracked the capital Caracas and other cities are complex, partly the result of an opposition faction reluctant to wait for the next election to try to unseat the government. But analysts agree the unrest is largely driven by the country’s chaotic economy.
One undeniable reason for Venezuela’s dire straits is the way that oil windfall has been used — or misused. Much of the fuel is, in essence, being given away.
Domestic subsidies make filling a car with gasoline “cheaper than a bus ticket.” This deprives the state-owned oil firm of billions, while Venezuela is indirectly underwriting the cost of oil it sells to Cuba, Jamaica and a host of other Caribbean countries, to the tune of billions more dollars.
“The guy with an unstabilized economy is subsidizing the guy that has better roads, better inflation and better fiscal figures,” said Alejandro Grisanti, an oil analyst with Barclay’s Capital in New York.
“This does not make any sense. The economic and political cost for Venezuela … is huge.”
Some critics attribute much of the country’s economic misfortune to the socialist governments of the late Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, who have invested vast sums in social programs and nationalized countless businesses.
Yet almost since it was discovered in the 1920s, oil has shaped a nation that produces little else but crude and the public largesse stemming from it, said one long-time observer.
“The oil economy causes tremendous distortions, and also raises expectations of what the government does,” said U.S.-based historian Miguel Tinker Salas, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture and Society in Venezuela. “Everything in Venezuela is touched by oil.”
Against that backdrop, the current protests started a month ago among university students upset over poor security. They then spread to other cities with broader grievances voiced and increasing violence, in which at least 39 people have died. Citing safety concerns, Air Canada suspended flights to Venezuela recently.
Just this week, the mayor of San Cristobal, an opposition stronghold, was sentenced to a year in jail for failing to stop anti-government protests, while Mr. Maduro sent in National Guard troops to break up barricades and disperse demonstrators in the Andean city.
Demonstrators have been propelled onto the streets in part by the country’s eye-popping 56% inflation rate, the growing scarcity of basic goods, student unemployment and currency manipulation that has created a yawning gap between official and black-market exchange rates, said Harold Trinkunas, head of the Latin America initiative at the Washington-based Brookings Institute.
The latest crisis, though, paints only part of a complex picture. Like or hate the government’s socialistic approach — and its troubling human-rights record — the “Bolivarian revolution” has had a tangible impact.
Subsidies have made food, electronic goods and even traveling abroad more affordable, health care is available in neighbourhoods that never had a doctor, and 500,000 more university students are being educated — for free — than before Mr. Chavez came to power, says Prof. Tinker Salas, a Latin American historian at California’s Pomona College.
The poverty rate has fallen to about 27%, from 50% when Mr. Chavez was first elected in 1999, while per capita gross domestic product has doubled.
“The consumer class here in the last 15 years, because of the reforms of the government, has expanded dramatically,” said Prof. Tinker Salas.
Paradoxically for a country with a shortage of flour and diapers, Venezuela is the world’s ninth-largest purchaser of Scotch whisky.
That relative affluence has been funded almost entirely by oil, yet government spending is outstripping revenue by more than $50-billion a year. Then there are the propped-up official exchange rates of as low as 6.3 bolivars to the U.S. dollar, designed partly to make buying imported medicine and food cheaper for Venezuelans. The free-floating black market rate is 10 times that.
As the government keeps printing money, more and more bolivars are chasing fewer imports, fueling inflation and exacerbating shortages in a country that for decades has fallen far short of meeting even its food needs domestically.
Mr. Maduro blames the scarcities more on rapacious capitalists and consumers who buy and horde goods they do not need.
What happens to all that oil, however, would seem to explain at least some of the country’s troubles. As one of the world’s top producers, Venezuela pumps out about 2.5 million barrels a day (b/d), yet reaps full market value only from the one million it sells to the U.S., said Mr. Trinkunas.
The 700,000 b/d consumed domestically are virtually free, sold at a few cents a litre, costing the country about $12-billion — more than it spends on health or education. The subsidy keeps down the cost of goods and public transportation that everyone uses, but at the gas pump it is overwhelmingly a benefit for the rich, noted Mr. Grisanti.
Filling up a 23-metre motor yacht, for instance, costs under $50, versus $6,500 at world prices, he said. “It’s a very regressive subsidy.”
Then there is Petro Caribe, an unusual diplomatic and development program that supplies oil to 18 Caribbean countries. Most benefit from a generous credit scheme that provides long-term loans at just 1%. Countries also have the option of trading oil for goods, like the black beans supplied by the Dominican Republic and rice by Guyana.
Cuba, enjoying strong ties with Mr. Chavez and Mr. Maduro, is a special case, repaying most or all of its oil debt in the form of goods and services, including thousands of transplanted Cuban doctors, intelligence experts and even sports coaches.
The annual cost to Venezuela of the whole Caribbean initiative is $7.5-billion, estimated Mr. Grisanti.
While inspired partly by humanitarian motives, it also has greatly enhanced Venezuela’s political heft in the area. That became clear when the Organization of American States voted 29-3 this month to support the Maduro government’s response to the protests, with only the U.S., Panama and Canada lining up against it, noted Mr. Trinkunas.
“This is Venezuela’s special advantage and it uses oil to build diplomatic relations … in ways that are very helpful to it.”
Some observers now believe Petro Caribe has also created a precarious dependency among its recipients. General John Kelly, head of the U.S. military’s Southern Command, recently speculated the economies of countries like Cuba would likely collapse, triggering mass migration to the U.S., if Venezuela ended the program.
Venezuela is also now exporting 600,000 b/d to China, about 200,000 of which is being used to repay a debt at a cost of $7.5-billion a year. The arrangement benefits Venezuela, however, giving it access to a burgeoning new market and cheap credit, said Mr. Grisanti.
The country’s difficulties are exacerbated, in the meantime, by widespread corruption, bureaucratic inertia and rampant smuggling of cheap oil and consumer goods, said Prof. Tinker Salas. He estimates 40% of products end up in neighbouring countries like Columbia.
Ratcheting back the gasoline subsidy behind a lot of the smuggling would generate much-needed revenue for the heavily indebted government — and foreign currency. The assumption, though, is that doing so would be political suicide; an attempt in 1989 triggered mass riots that left hundreds dead.
“There are a series of birthrights that are part of the oil culture that saddle the economy in ways you don’t see in any other country,” said Prof. Tinker Salas.
“It’s very, very difficult for a government in a decade to unravel birthrights that have been in place for the last 50 years. That’s the challenge that any government would face.”
National Post
tblackwell@nationalpost.comSlovakia fails to spend EU funds by the end of 2015
About €1 billion will be unspent.
Slovakia has only a few days left to draw from the €11.5-billion package of EU funds designated for the 2007-2013 programming period. Vice-chair for Investments Ľubomír Vážny has indicated that Slovakia will draw 92 percent (€10.4-10.6 billion) from the allotted resources by the end of 2015. Thus there will remain about €1 billion not spent.
Vážny reiterated that the government has fulfilled its task to sign contracts with recipients covering the whole amount of the funds provided, adding that among recipients are also ministries.
“Measures adopted by the cabinet facilitated an increase in the rate of drawing EU funds in 2015 when compared to previous years,” said Vážny as cited by the TASR newswire. “This acceleration should continue, as the projects are in their final phase.”
Vážny expects that around €10.4-10.6 billion will have been drawn from EU funds by the end of this year, which represents almost 92 percent of the total.
As it was mostly Robert Fico who led the country during the 2007-2013 programming period media ascribe the failure of Slovakia to draw all the EU funds to him and his cabinets. The Denník N daily recalled that projects to be financed from EU funds were halted in 2007 when the Smer cabinet re-worked projects that the Mikuláš Dzurinda cabinet had agreed upon earlier. This meant a one-year delay in drawing EU funds. The EU funds and their drawing were also tarnished with scandals, for example, the so-called bulletin-board tender, in which over three billion crowns (€100 million) in EU funds were awarded to an apparently pre-selected bidder.
Slovakia has been among the weaker drawers of EU funds in the long run, the Hospodárske Noviny daily wrote, while thanks to this the country got two additional years, 2014 and 2015, to draw money allocated for the 2007-2013 period. In 2013, Slovakia drew only 60 percent of the funds.
Slovakia had drawn €10.29 billion or 89.64 percent of the allocated sum by December 18, TASR reported. The most exhausted projects were the following: Operational Programme (OP) Transport - 98.11 percent, OP Bratislava Region - 97.23 percent, OP Employment and Social Inclusion - 94.54 percent, OP Research and Development - 90.5 percent, Regional OP - 90.43 percent, OP Education - 86.14 percent, OP Informatisation of Society - 85.34 percent and OP Health Care - 85.24 percent.
Conversely, the least exhausted programme was OP Competitiveness and Economic Growth - 77.88 percent.
Vážny confirmed that all expenditures are already being reimbursed by the EU, apart from some parts that come under OP Employment and Social Inclusion, and they are expected to be unlocked by the end of the year. Vážny did not specify the amount that will not be reimbursed by the EU. This money is being withheld mainly due to clerical errors or erroneous public procurements.
29. Dec 2015 at 12:45 | Compiled by Spectator staffRobert Treat Hotel has added a seasoned executive chef to its staff as the downtown Newark establishment continues to upgrade its banquet facilities in the wake of the Newark Club's closing.
Frank Heizler, who had been working at the hotel on an interim basis during a search process, joined the banquet team effective May 30. He will work closely with Artie Wassif, the hotel’s director of sales, to update the catering menus and bring new offerings that reflect the diverse tastes of the area’s clientele.
The hotel is owned and managed by the Berger Organization, a diversified real estate company based in Newark with significant hospitality and office properties within its portfolio. The firm has recently completed extensive renovations to the century-old hotel.
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Prior to joining the Robert Treat Hotel, Heizler’s 20-year food-service career has included cooking, running kitchens and designing menus for high-end weddings and upscale social occasions at The Venetian in Garfield and Seasons in Washington Township, where he was executive chef, and Shadowbrook at Shrewsbury. He was the opening chef at the Pleasantdale Chateau in West Orange and worked at the iconic Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York City as well as its sister locations in Florida.
“My specialty is classical French cuisine, but today, everything about catering is eclectic,” said Heizler. “At the Robert Treat, we are veering away from typical hotel fare to offer new ideas such as a la carte banquet service, more akin to a restaurant, where everything is cooked to order fresh. This is quite different than what you usually find elsewhere.”
Heizler attended the French Culinary Institute in New York City as well as Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. and the Culinary Institute of Charleston at Trident Technical College in S.C. In order to keep up with culinary trends and refine his skills, he takes continuing education courses at the venerated Culinary Institute of America and Johnson & Wales.
Wassif noted that Heizler’s broad experience and attention to culinary trends aligns well with the changes being implemented in the Robert Treat Hotel’s banquet department.
“Here in downtown Newark, we cater to many varied ethnic backgrounds and foods, with a more urban flair," said Wassif, who had previously worked at the Newark Club, which closed in February. "Whether it’s a social occasion or a charity gala, business conference or political event, our clientele is seeking a venue that offers not only gracious banquet space but interesting, contemporary food. We’re proud to be able to offer all that under Frank’s guidance.”
Another change Heizler is bringing to the Robert Treat Hotel are farm-to-table menu options, using more local resources. “The hotel uses local vendors whenever possible, buying ‘Jersey fresh’ produce and other goods,” he said.Brilliant, elegant, functional, design. It doesn't get much better.
I got exposed to the AKG K271s when I was tracking my first album in 5 different studios. One of the studios, where I spent the bulk of my tracking time [200 hrs] had these. I was sold in the first session. These you could keep on for hours without major ear irritation and, for folks that wear glasses like me, they don't grind your glasses ear stems into your head or at least way less than other headphones. The K271s also have a great feature in that you can peel off one ear and the audio to that ear stops. That's great for tracking string players who typically want to track with only one ear in the phones; the same is true for choir members. These work wonderfully for those applications. I also keep a pair plugged into my Roland XV-88 keyboard when playing it. It almost goes without saying how great they sound. Frequency spectrum is hugely wide, bass is solid and fat, and highs are crisp and clean. I have 8 pairs of these in my little home studio for tracking small choir groups and I even keep a couple as safety spares but that is probably pointless since they aren't likely to go out anytime soon. If you are particular about the country of manufacture [some are some aren't], the K271s come in two issues: the original issue was simply called "K271 Studio" and they were Made in Austria, the subsequent issue are what we have now the "K271 MKII" which is actually Made in China. I, personally, have no issues with the people of China but I do have issues with their government. That being said, BOTH issues are outstanding in quality. Functionally, I also love that the pads are easily replaceable and they come in two textures: plastic/leatherette and felt. I have found the felt to be better for very long sessions as they don't retain as much heat. These phones are also light feeling and don't weigh down your head after long periods of usage. The headstrap is very comfortable and it allows for easy auto-adjustment when you put them on. You don't have to fidget with getting them just right on your ears and head. They do that for you. Brilliant, elegant, functional design. It doesn't get much better. I wish all pro audio equipment was as functional, affordable, and well-designed as these phones.Read full reviewA bold play to shake up the North American railroad industry ran out of track on April 11, when Canadian Pacific Railway withdrew its unsolicited $28 billion bid for rival Norfolk Southern Corp. Spearheaded by CP chief executive E. Hunter Harrison and activist investor William Ackman, the planned deal would have been the first merger of two Class 1 North American freight railroads since 2001.
But the management and board of the Norfolk, Virginiabased target had refused to talk. After three rebuffs and a proxy filing aimed at forcing merger negotiations by a shareholder vote, Calgary-headquartered CP saw no clear path to a friendly merger at this time, Harrison said in a statement.
CP investors were happy with the outcome: The companys stock closed at C$187.65 ($145) on April 15, up 6.2 percent for the year. Politicians, rail customers and trade unions opposed the deal, which would have reduced the number of Class 1 railroads from seven to six, fearing job losses and higher freight costs. For its part, CP has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate what it calls anticompetitive efforts by some of its peers to block the Norfolk Southern merger.
Harrison and CP board member Ackman, founder and CEO of hedge fund firm Pershing Square Capital Management, had big dreams for the tie-up: the continents third-largest railroad, stretching from Vancouver to Miami. To fulfill its East Coast ambitions, CP could yet swallow bigger competitor CSX Corp., but the Jacksonville, Floridabased company reportedly spurned a $20 billion offer, making that prospect unlikely.
With mergers unpopular in many quarters, the North American railroad industry finds itself at a crossing, searching for new growth engines. The commodities rout, in particular the steep decline of coal, has cut deeply into traffic volume. But railroad bosses and bullish investors, including billionaire Warren Buffett see light at the end of the tunnel.
For shareholders, who had been accustomed to steady growth before it ground to a halt in the first quarter of last year, the ride may continue to be bumpy. After 15 years of relative outperformance, what we see now is a return to cyclicality with volumes but not pricing or margin improvement, says Ken Hoexter, a New Yorkbased transportation analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The glory days are over, Hoexter warns. The new normal for railroads means earnings-per-share growth in low two digits to mid teens, versus peak returns north of 25 percent between 2003 and 2014, he says.
Until last year railroad revenue kept climbing, propelled by strong global appetite for commodities, favorable pricing and leaps in efficiency. Then growth hit a major snag. Coal shipments, which accounted for 39 percent of all U.S. carloads and 18 percent of U.S. railroad profits in 2014, according to the Washington-based Association of American Railroads (AAR), went into sharp decline.
Factors ranging from tougher environmental rules for power plants to cheap shale gas and weak Chinese demand have hammered the coal business. U.S. production will shrink to 752.5 million metric tons this year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts, a 31 percent drop from 2011. On April 13, St. Louisbased Peabody Energy Corp., the top American coal miner, filed for Chapter 11, joining fellow publicly traded giants such as Alpha Natural Resources and Arch Coal in bankruptcy protection.
Railroads have felt the pinch. In the first quarter, total carloads for U.S. carriers fell 13.8 percent year-over-year, the AAR reports. Coal shipments led the way, with a 32.5 percent decline; petroleum products and ores and metals were down 20.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively.
We think that fossil fuels are probably dead, Harrison, a straight-talking Tennessean, said in March at a J.P. Morgan transportation conference in New York. Its going to take a long time to transition.
Still, railroads are faring better than the commodities producers whose goods they haul. Last year CPs adjusted diluted earnings per share climbed to a record C$10.10, a 19 percent increase over C$8.50 in 2014. Revenue also set a record, edging up to C$6.71 billion from C$6.62 billion in 2014. On April 15, CSX stock closed at $25.93, flat for the year and up 18 percent since May 2011. By contrast, the Market Vectors Coal ETF finished the day at $8.18, down some 80 percent during the same period.
As freight trains head into unfamiliar territory, will new sources of revenue spur growth and hike returns? Not without a fundamental, quantum shift in railway operations, CP president and COO Keith Creel tells Institutional Investor, citing precision scheduling and single tracking, whereby trains going both ways share the same track.
Different cargo will travel by rail within five years, experts say. The revenue portfolio is going to look dramatically different, predicts Frank Lonegro, CFO of CSX. Railroads are pinning their hopes on the intermodal business, the integration of trucks and trains on routes that trucks alone now dominate. The plan is for faster trains that will replace coal and other slow-moving commodities with on-time delivery of consumer goods.
From Montreal to Fort Worth, Texas, railroad executives are keeping their eyes on head count. Labor is our largest cost, Lonegro says. In five to ten years, well move to less labor intensity, from two to one person in a cab, and maybe in my lifetime to zero. In Australia some trains already run by remote control, he notes.
Before Harrison took charge in 2012, after heading Canadian National Railway Co. for seven years, CP paid too much for too little, according to Creel: People would effectively come in six hours for 12 hours of pay. After punching out theyd go to second jobs. The upshot? We dont need as many people, Creel says. In 2015, en route to a Spartan operating ratio the railway industrys proxy for operating margin CP trimmed its workforce by 12 percent, shedding 1,800 employees. Known as a ruthless cost cutter, Harrison expects to slash another 1,000 jobs this year.
In a world distracted by Facebook and iPhones, the sheer scale and power of freight trains still inspires awe. A single diesel locomotive can weigh up to 200 tons. In North Baltimore, Ohio |
Happy Ending
The night was scheduled to end at Rhinegeist. However, we were running around 20 minutes behind schedule at the end, and to facilitate my driver getting my video guy back to his car easier, we decided to flip our last two stops and wrap up at Hofbrauhaus. We strolled up to the main doors at 1:40 (they close at 2am) only to find them locked. Thinking the restaurant must have closed a little earlier than the biergarten (we had seen plenty of people back there, drinking still on our way down the sidewalk) we ventured back to the biergarten entrance.
Strolling into the biergarten, we were met by an employee of Hofbrauhaus who told us we had missed last call by 11 minutes. Assuming that a quick explanation and reassurance that we just needed a small (tiny even) beer to check the last stop off, that we’d be able to snag one – we explained the purpose of our stop that evening, and our journey all day. For the first time that night, we were met with someone who didn’t care. No… Hofbrauhaus had no desire to be part of every Cincinnati Craft Brewery, or the Biggest Cincy Beer Tour Ever. I took a seat on the bench closest to me in disbelief. This was how it would end? A denial? The biergarten was full of drinkers still working their way through massive liters of beer, and here I was, a beaten Gnome, only needing 4 ounces of the lowest abv beer I could get my hands on. I lost. I had been beaten.
After a few moments… the frustration set in. I knew I had to update those of you who were still following the progress on social media, so I fired up Facebook live to tell you about our failure. Upon finish the video I had the sneaky idea – we struck up a conversation over the fence to a couple finishing up their beers. Would they be willing to share a small sip of one to help me finish my task? Of course… Hofbrau (rightfullly so) came over to tell us that we couldn’t do that either. In sadness of a sure failure, we continued to talk to this nice couple who to their credit wanted to help very much, but couldn’t. We were telling them about our journey, about the mission, about who I am and what I do. They were wonderful people, and I was actually enjoying the conversation very much… almost starting to feel better about how our evening had ended.
Then all hell broke loose.
The Part Where I Go To Jail
I respect the police. I respect what they do, and the difficulty of their job, but the two officers that were posted up in the Hofbrauhaus Biergarten that night to keep the drunks from getting out of hand left a horrible taste in my mouth for the way the Newport Police Department operates. The officers came up to us and told us that we couldn’t get other patrons to give us beer. Explaining that we understood, and that we were just talking to them now, we were told we couldn’t do that either, and that we needed to leave. I expressed my disbelief that I wasn’t allowed to carry on a conversation, as long as I wasn’t blocking the sidewalk, or breaking any other laws. The officer started to get angry with me, and his tone started changing. “You’re not from around here, are you?” – “Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse” these comments were what started our disagreement, but it was quickly ended when abruptly I was told to put my hands behind my back.
When I was put into hand cuffs, I asked what I was being detained for. “You’re not being detained, you’re being arrested”.
In shock and well knowing that I had not broken any laws, I spent the next 8 hours alternating between attempting to sleep on the concrete floor of the large white room I was placed in at the Jail, to trying to figure out what I had done wrong. In the end, I was charged with Public Intoxication (I found that out at around 4am after sitting in jail for a couple of hours). The law reads that meant I was:
manifestly Intoxicated, and a danger to myself or others.
This is where I get even angrier. Both my sober driver and my sober “video guy” were there explicitly to make sure I was not a danger to myself or others. Even if you want to say I was “manifestly intoxicated” which I also debate – its hard to say in good conscience that I was a danger because of it. On top of that, the dishonest account that was written on the police report is frightening… it states that we were kicked out of the restaurant (which we weren’t) upon which time we went in the back door and tried to “sneak in” and get patrons to “buy us beer” (which isn’t what happened). The officer states that my eyes were red and watery, and that I was unsteady on my feet…. so I was arrested.
It’s bogus, and I can’t afford to argue it in a court of law.
I will pay a $200 fine and plead guilty so something I am not guilty of, because I have no other option. This happens to people every single day, where they are falsely accused with misdemeanor crimes, and can’t afford to risk proving their innocence in a court of law. It’s frightening that the Newport Police Department can get away with this. It’s sad that Hofbrauhaus, a brewery that I used to consider part of the most loving community of like-minded people in any industry was willing to stand there and watch all this happen on their doorstep.
I’ll suck it up, and I’ll deal with it, but I won’t be quiet about it.
What I Learned
I think if I was going to take this to court, the judge would probably want to know that I learned something… and I did – but not really about preventing this in the future. Here’s what I learned from my adventure:
It’s possible. You can get to ever current “Cincinnati Brewery” in one day – which is 38 of them currently.
We are incredibly lucky to have a beer scene full of some fantastic people, who “Get It”.
When people ask me what my favorite beer or brewery is… I’m justified in telling them that I really have no idea.
The police can arrest you, even if you have done nothing wrong, if they want to… even if they have to stretch the truth to do it.
When in jail… toilet paper can make a great pillow (I didn’t learn that until much too late unfortunately.)
If arrested with Meth, swallowing your little baggie of it is an ok idea… but if you cough it up in the wrong spot, someone else might get your meth.
The whole phone call thing… it’s confusing, and people aren’t going to help you notify your loved ones where you are.
The Thanks
The day was a success. That’s important for me to remember about all of this. I went to every brewery in one day, and drank at almost all of them. It wouldn’t have been possible without the help from a LOT of people. My four drivers… The Old Man, My Wonderful Wife, Andy Reynolds and Finally The Old Lady – you guys did amazing keeping the schedule that admittedly was a little tight and tough to keep. Andy… I love you for coming through for me on a day that I’m sure was already busy enough for you… Your wife and kids…. I owe them for this. Chris Payne, for being the star videographer and editor that this project needed to show people what It’s all about – Thank you, sorry you had to tell my Mom that I got arrested. To (almost) every brewery for helping me achieve this goal – especially those that went out of their way to do it. For the couple of you who were almost closed when I walked in your doors… or almost open when I pressed my face against your door – THANK YOU. I exist to help places like every one of you be a part of something bigger. To all the people who encouraged me during the day, and before and after the event. Your memes and happy words were awesome. If I ran into you during the day I’m sorry I couldn’t stay and chat longer – I owe you, and Thank You for supporting such a harebrained scheme.
Finally… To the city of Newport… I don’t thank you. You have some very terrible people working for you… dishonest people don’t deserve to prosper. Hofbrauhaus… I’m ashamed that you stood there, knowing the situation and watched things go down the way that they did. It breaks my heart to see that you were ok with it. People ask me what Craft Beer is about, and I often tell them that it’s hard to describe. Do you see the list of thank you’s? That’s craft beer. What happened at Hofbrau – that’s not craft beer.
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commentsNews4's Jackie Bensen talked to a comedian attacked on her way home from a club, just days before she's set to perform at the DC Improv. (Published Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2015)
A group of men attacked a female comedian on a D.C. street just days before she's set to take the stage – and she says the show will go on.
Paris Sashay, 23, was brutally attacked by several men late last Saturday night after they called out to her and friends and she rejected their advances, she told News4.
The comic was walking from Eden, on I Street NW to a car parked on L Street NW when a group of men began harassing the group of women. Their behavior escalated and then became violent, Sashay said.
She was pushed to the ground, blacked out and woke up in a hospital with a broken nose and chipped teeth, her face covered in bruises.
"Guys make it where you don't have a right to say no anymore. But as a woman, you should be able to say no," Sashay said. "Just say no. You're just not interested."
Sashay said her first concern when she awoke was not the damage to her face but whether she would be able to perform on Thursday at the DC Improv comedy club. She decided that those who hurt her would not stop her.
"Tomorrow won't be nothing but excellent. No matter how much it takes, I'll just go out, perform and do whatever it takes to make the people laugh," she said. "I won't let the people down."
Stand-up comedy is a tough business, and after her performance Thursday, Sashay will have proved herself plenty tough. She's accepting donations online toward her recovery.The Real O'Neal's Christmas Kiss and 'Oh Holy Night/The Greatest' Mash-Up Is Groundbreaking
Last month the anti-LGBT Parents Television Council named the ABC sitcom The Real O’Neals the most “profane” show on television, and that’s in a television landscape that includes profound violence and violence against women on shows like Game of Thrones. So last night’s The Real O’Neals Christmas episode should really send the Parents Television Council members into a collective meltdown.
The series, which revolves around Kenny, a gay teen (Noah Galvin) navigating coming out while living under his very Catholic mother’s (the unparalleled Martha Plimpton) roof while also trying to survive Catholic school, featured Kenny and a classmate in the Christmas episode falling for each other before singing a mash-up of “O Holy Night” and the Kendrick Lamar verse from Sia’s “The Greatest” – church choir robes and cherub-esque faces and all! And the mash-up really worked!
If that weren’t enough, prior to their performance, Kenny confronted his possible love interest Brett (Sean Grandillo), demanding to know why Brett didn't like him. Before Kenny could get another word out, Brett kissed him right there in the church. But more than just a sweet love story with lots of laughs, the show continued to push boundaries of acceptance and understanding. Go Real O'Neals!
Watch the kiss below.GETTY Theresa May and the faces of individuals on the terror lis
Dozens of individuals who have had their financial assets and accounts frozen because of their links to extremism have been named and shamed in Government papers. This is to ensure the believed-to-be terrorists do not operate business or invest money in UK property in order to spread their terrorist agenda. The HM Treasury list, released this week, has renewed its sanctions against suspected architect of the 9/11 terror attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
PH Sheikh Khalid Mohammed is included on the individual list
Dozens of individuals who have had their financial assets and accounts frozen because of their links to extremism
The Kuwaiti national is currently being held by the US at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-related charges. The terror organisation Hamas, including Izz-al-din Al-Qassam, is again on the updated list of the financial sanction targets in the UK. Beleaguered Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, previously referred to the Palestinian group as “friends” despite it being declared as a terrorist group by the European Union and America. He has since expressed regret over the comments he made in Parliament in 2010, insisting he used the words “friends’ in the hope of encouraging the Middle East peace process.
PH Imad Khalil Al-Alami's finances have been frozen in the UK
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is fighting for autonomy for Kurds, is also named in the documents. The militants, this month, claimed responsibility for the car bomb attack which exploded in Izmir, Turkey, killing four people and injuring dozens. The UN Security Council adopted the Terrorist Asset-Freezing Act 2010 in the wake the 9/11 terror attacks in the US. It aimed to denounce terrorism and ordered member states to deny all forms of financial support for those who take part in terror acts and to share with other governments information about any group practicing or planning an attack. The 2010 Act provides HM Treasury with the powers to freeze funds and economic resources of those suspected or believed to be involved in terrorist activities. Individuals and organisations are restricted to funds, financial services and economic resources.
Here is list of the individuals and organisations named under the Terrorist Asset-Freezing Act 2010 Individuals 1. Hamed Abdollahi Both UK listing and EU listing. 2. Imad Khalil Al-Alami UK listing only. 3. Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-Nasser - Both UK listing and EU listing 4. Mohammed Ibrahim Salid Al-Yacoub Both UK and EU listing 5. Manssor Arbabsiar Both UK and EU listing 6. Mohammed Bouyer EU listing 7. Hassan Hassan El Hajj EU listing 8. Usama Hamdan UK listing 9. Hasan Izz-al-Din UK and EU listing 10. Fawaz Mohammed Khaled UK listing 11. Abu Musa Marzouk UK listing 12. Farah Meliad, EU listing 13. Khalid Mishaal UK listing 14. Sheikh Khalid Mohammed UK and EU listing 15. Daloky Sanli UK and EU listing 16. Abdul Reza Shahlai UK and EU listing 17. Gholam Ali Shakur UK and EU listing 18. Qasem Soleimani UK and EU listing
TERRORISM: What you need to know Wed, January 11, 2017 Terrorism: A devastating and growing issue worldwide. Play slideshow AFP/Getty Images 1 of 8 Terrorism can be described as the wrongful use of violence in order to intimidate civilians or politicians for ideological, religious, or political reasons with no regard for public safety.
PH Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-NasserImage copyright SPL Image caption Scans of the prostate can show if there is a cancerous growth
The biggest leap in diagnosing prostate cancer "in decades" has been made using new scanning equipment, say doctors and campaigners.
Using advanced MRI nearly doubles the number of aggressive tumours that are caught.
And the trial on 576 men, published in the Lancet, showed more than a quarter could be spared invasive biopsies, which can lead to severe side-effects.
The NHS is already reviewing whether the scans can be introduced widely.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in British men, and yet testing for it is far from perfect.
If men have high prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels in the blood, they go for a biopsy.
Twelve needles then take random samples from the whole of the prostate.
It can miss a cancer that is there, fail to spot whether it is aggressive, and cause side-effects including bleeding, serious infections and erectile dysfunction.
"Taking a random biopsy from the breast would not be accepted, but we accept that in prostate," said Dr Hashim Ahmed, a consultant and one of the researchers.
Around 100,000 to 120,000 men go through this every year in the UK.
Scanning
The trial, at 11 hospitals in the UK, used multi-parametric MRI on men with high PSA levels.
It showed 27% of the men did not need a biopsy at all.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Dr Hashim Ahmed describes on Radio 4's Today a new breakthrough in prostate cancer diagnosis
And 93% of aggressive cancers were detected by using the MRI scan to guide the biopsy compared with just 48% when the biopsy was done at random.
Dr Ahmed, who works at University College London Hospitals, told the BBC News website: "This is a significant step-change in the way we diagnose prostate cancer.
"We have to look at the long-term survival, but in my opinion by improving the detection of important cancers that are currently missed we could see a considerable impact.
"But that will need to be evaluated in future studies, and we may have to wait 10 to 15 years."
Chris, 70, from Hassocks, West Sussex
Chris first noticed the symptoms at the theatre a decade ago, when he needed to go to the toilet repeatedly.
Doctors found his prostate was enlarged.
In May last year, Chris needed to see his doctor again, as he was feeling tired a lot of the time.
Prostate cancer was suspected, and he was offered an MRI scan as part of the trial.
He says: "I'd heard from a friend that a prostate biopsy could be extremely painful and uncomfortable, so was pleased to know that I wouldn't be sent for one unless the doctors were confident I needed it."
In the end, he still needed a biopsy, and he was diagnosed with a cancer that had not spread out of the tumour.
He is now considering what to do about treatment.
Angela Culhane, the chief executive at Prostate Cancer UK, described the current system of testing as "notoriously imperfect".
She added: "This is the biggest leap forward in prostate cancer diagnosis in decades."
The study, led by the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit, is already being considered by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
It will decide whether the NHS can afford multi-parametric MRI for prostate cancer.
Each scan costs between £350 and £450 pounds per patient - so introducing them for all patients across the UK would have a bill around the £40m mark.
But each biopsy costs the NHS £450 so reducing the number would deliver savings. Catching aggressive cancers earlier could also deliver savings as could not treating patients with very low-risk cancers.
A full cost-effectiveness analysis is being carried out.
Prof Ros Eeles, from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said the study was "very important" and "provides ground breaking data".
The chairman of the British Society of Urogenital Radiology, Dr Philip Haslam, said: "Today's findings represent a huge leap forward in prostate cancer diagnosis."
However, he warned the biggest issue could be the number of scanners and training people to interpret the results.
Follow James on Twitter.Newcastle Falcons have added title-winning prowess and proven international class with the signing of French centre Maxime Mermoz.
The 30-year-old will join the club this summer following his short-term deal at Leicester Tigers, the 35-times-capped test star having performed at the top level for more than a decade.
Mermoz has won the French Top 14 title with three different clubs after successful spells with Toulouse, Perpignan and Toulon, also helping the latter to two European Champions Cups as well as starting for his country in the 2011 Rugby World Cup final.
Delighted to have brought the vastly-experienced performer to Kingston Park Stadium, director of rugby Dean Richards said: “Maxime’s signing is a major statement of intent for Newcastle Falcons.
“We have been working hard over a long period of time to make this move happen and we are delighted that a player of such proven calibre is keen to play a key role in the ambitious plans we have for the club.
“The fact that he will spend the back half of this season with Leicester Tigers is ideal in the sense that he will already be accustomed to Aviva Premiership rugby by the time he arrives with us in the summer, and we are excited by what he will bring to the group.”
In no doubt as to what Mermoz will add to his squad, Richards said: “He is a very intelligent centre who runs great lines, he has fantastic handling ability and his understanding of the game is first class.
“It is no coincidence he has won major trophies with every club he has been at, and the fact we have been able to attract a player of his standing in the game says a lot about the regard in which the Falcons are held at the moment.”
Bursting onto the scene as part of France’s Under-21s World Cup winning squad back in 2006, his first league title came with Toulouse in 2008 before moving to Perpignan the following season. Mermoz helped the Catalan club to the league title at the very first attempt, going on to spend five successful seasons at Toulon.
His time on the French Riviera brought a pair of Champions Cup medals in 2013 and 2014, and he started 19 times in Toulon’s victorious domestic league campaign 2014, scoring six tries.
Making a total of 167 appearances over 13 seasons in France’s top flight competition, Mermoz has made 12 league outings for Toulon this term, eight of which were starts.
Playing a further 40 European Champions Cup games over his glittering career, the 6 foot midfield man said: “I am really happy to join the Falcons and I have been attracted by the ambitious plans of this historic club, which was the starting point of my former team-mate and legend Jonny Wilkinson.
“I expect to share my experience and bring my contribution to achieve the ambitious goals of the team. But I also come to learn and experience something new, and to enjoy my passion in an environment and culture deeply different from what I have known in France.
“This is a big challenge, but really exciting and motivating. I love it, I feel grateful and want to pay back the trust shown in me by Newcastle Falcons.”
To get all the latest news from Premiership Rugby sign up to our NewsletterSam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) may be getting a huge help from the Lord Almighty soon in an upcoming episode of the hit series "Supernatural."
(Facebook/Supernatural) A powerful ally will come to help Sam and Dean in the upcoming episode of "Supernatural."
The Winchesters have so far been up to their elbows fighting Amara (guest star Emily Swallow) and her minions. God's not-so-little sister will not rest until she gets her revenge. She wants God to feel her wrath by hurting his beloved creations. Sam and Dean have been busy trying to thwart her plans, but Amara has demonstrated that it will take more than the fragile humans to stop her.
Ever since Amara appeared on Earth, Sam has been consistently asking God for help. This frustrates Dean, as he tells his brother that God is not listening to any of their pleas. In episode 20 of the current season, fans can expect that God will finally heed Sam's prayers. He will send forth a powerful ally that can pit against Amara. TV Line reports that God will command the powerful prophet Chuck (Rob Benedict) to aid the Winchesters in their fight against Amara.
Meanwhile, Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino) is still possessing Castiel's (Misha Collins) body. The angel agreed to the Prince of Darkness' request to use him as a meat suit if he could defeat the Darkness. So far, all Lucifer has done is use Castiel to torture Cowley (Mark Sheppard), who has taken his place as the king of the devils. Collins spoke about the predicament his character was in during the recently concluded Salute to Supernatural by Entertainment in Houston. He shared that it is entirely possible for Castiel to cast Lucifer out of his body, just like Sam did in the past season.
"He probably could. If he were properly convinced, he probably could expel him Lucifer. Sam did it. I think it's possibly. I don't think that is off the table. We've seen a precedent for that in the past," the actor said, as per the International Business Times.
"Supernatural" season 11 returns with new episodes on Wednesday, March 23, at 9 p.m. EST on The CW.An angry French mayor has called for all known suspected radicals on a terror watch list to be kicked out his town.
Guy Lefranc, mayor of Evreux in Normandy in northern France said he was 'furious' after he was denied a request to see the country's 'Fiche S' list of 'potentially dangerous individuals'.
He then demanded that any on the list who are living in his town be 'expelled' by the state.
Guy Lefranc, mayor of Evreux (pictured) in Normandy in northern France said he was 'furious' after he was denied a request to the country'd 'Fiche S' list of 'potentially dangerous individuals'
Normandy was at the centre of a terrorist outrage earlier this summer when two jihadists claiming allegiance to ISIS stormed into a church and butchered an elderly priest.
Lefrance had asked authorities to tell him if radicalised individuals on the terror list were living in the area claiming the information was needed for the safety of the town.
But after the request was refused, he said: 'Given that the state does not give us the means to protect the people of Evreux, I demand the state expels all those who are "Fiche S".
'I feel compelled to ask for this expulsion because I am not entitled to a perfectly legitimate request to know all those who are "Fiche S".
Normandy was at the centre of a terrorist outrage earlier this summer when two jihadists claiming allegiance to ISIS stormed into a church and butchered an elderly priest. Police are pictured at the scene in July
'I ask myself a question about some of my staff, who work with the public. I don't know if they are Fiche S, I don't know if they are dangerous.
'Given that we are in a state of emergency it is the responsibility of the Prime Minister to issue a decree… that would give local mayors access to the files,' he added, according to The Local.
France remains under a state of emergency after 86 people were killed in a Bastille Day truck attack in Nice and last November's ISIS atrocity in Paris that left 130 dead.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said this week that the threat to France is higher than ever.Color & Lift With Thickening Fibers - is currently on backorder. You may still purchase now though and we'll ship as soon as more become available.
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Toss Color & Lift in your purse or tote to refresh your look anytime, anywhere. Simply just dab and go! You can now instantly refill the brush with the included refill component. Never be without your Color & Lift!
Fun tip: Add streaks of temporary color to your hair by using an alternative color than your matching shade. Add red to blonde hair or medium brown to lowlight. This is a super fun way to test out a new hairstyle!An imam recorded on video making controversial remarks about homosexuality at a Edmonton Islamic school says his comments were taken out of context.
The video posted to YouTube shows Mustafa Khattab, former iman of the Al-Rashid Mosque, telling students at the Edmonton Islamic Academy that being gay is like having diabetes, cancer or AIDS.
In an email statement sent to CBC News Wednesday night, Khattab said he was talking to students last fall during a lunch break, not in a classroom.
He says he was responding to a student’s question about homosexuality and tried to use humour to make a point.
"I agree I might have been unlucky in my choice of words, but I believe the comment was taken out of context and misrepresented," Khattab wrote.
"Whoever reported the comment failed to mention what I said about gays and lesbians being our brothers and sisters in humanity and they shouldn't be discriminated against — even if we might disagree with what they do."
Khattab said that the views expressed were his alone and not representative of school policy.
"To characterize me or the Academy as homophobic and to call for the pulling of funding for private schools is really unfortunate," he added.
On Wednesday, the Alberta Liberals said the Edmonton Islamic Academy is promoting hate and intolerance and called on the province to pull $4 million in funding the school receives each year.
Education Minister Jeff Johnson said his department investigated the comments and was satisfied that the school does not endorse the comments made by Khattab on the video.
Since the video was recorded last fall, Khattab stepped down — for reasons unrelated to his comments — as iman at the Al-Rashid Mosque. He subsequently departed Canada for Egypt.By MassPrivateI
Police and the Border Patrol are using ‘general crime control checkpoints’ to harass and detain motorists across the country. Below, is a list of nine different checkpoints police use, to ticket and arrest citizens.
Last year, I warned everyone that multiple law enforcement partners, are conducting drug (heroin) checkpoints focused on vehicles and pedestrians!
Drug testing checkpoints are a lie…
“If they say drug check lane ahead, it’s false,” says Wichita attorney Dan Monnat. “Because the courts have ruled on this being a violation of the 4th amendment.” (for more info. read City of Indianapolis v Edmond)
And recently, I warned everyone that DHS is paying police departments to set up DUI checkpoints across the country.
To learn how police, will soon add a tenth checkpoint to the list, please read on.
Why are police using illegal checkpoints?
Sixteen years ago, the Supreme Court held that checkpoints established for general crime control purposes are unconstitutional. (City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 44 (2000).
So why are police and the Border Patrol stopping innocent motorists?
DHS admits DUI checkpoints are REALLY about checking a person’s immigration status.
Aliens convicted of a “significant misdemeanor,” which for these purposes is an offense of domestic violence; sexual abuse or exploitation; burglary; unlawful possession or use of a firearm; drug distribution or trafficking; or driving under the influence… (Source)
Also, there’s millions of dollars at stake. The University of Berkley which has close ties to DHS, made close to $14 million off of ‘No-Refusal’ checkpoints in 2013.
The California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) has awarded UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research & Education Center (SafeTREC) $13,930,555 to run its 2012-2013 Sobriety Checkpoint program. (Source)
FYI, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) lists over a hundred documents supporting checkpoints in the so-called “land of the free.”
Updated 9/27:
Bus checkpoints
Texas police found 8 kilos of cocaine during a random search of a Greyhound bus “created a checkpoint that trespassed on the Constitution” so the drugs cannot be used as evidence, a federal judge ruled.
Greyhound spokeswoman Lanesha Gipson said its policy is to let police search their buses.
“We fully cooperate with local authorities and allow them to board the bus to do a search if they ask to do so,” Gipson said in an email.
Judge Lynn Hughes rejected the idea that the search was legal because Greyhound’s driver consented to it, nor was he impressed by other arguments from the government.
Hughes said that Greyhound is “economically coerced to adopt policies of compliance” to police searches because if it refused, it would be “risking the ire of every excessively zealous or corrupt police force in the places through which its buses travel,” which could throw its buses off schedule. (Source)
Judge Hughes:
The officers’ abuse of their authority is bad; however, the federal government’s bad judgment in bringing this case is worse… it has reinforced the officers’ illegal evasions. It may need statistics to justify its funding to Congress, but this is a weak and mean way to cater to its bureaucratic imperative.
According to Courthouse News, The Conroe Police Department did not respond to a voice message asking if they still randomly searches Greyhound buses.
So far, this makes bus checkpoints the tenth different police checkpoint.
Police use checkpoints to threaten motorists and cite them for violations
Establishing a Checkpoint
1. Are motor vehicle checkpoints permitted?
Yes, in appropriate circumstances. As noted above, the United States Supreme Court has held that sobriety checkpoints do not violate the Fourth Amendment. The General Statutes go further and allow checkpoints to be used “to determine compliance with the provisions of Chapter 20.4″ In other words, the statute allows checkpoints to be used to detect violations of any motor vehicle law, not just the impaired driving laws. By contrast, checkpoints may not be used for general crime control.
But, that’s exactly what police are doing…
The Border Patrol’s (CBP) own records contain multiple accounts of Border Patrol agents stopping and searching motorists without justification; threatening residents with assault rifles, Tasers, and knives; destroying and confiscating personal property; interfering with efforts to video-record agents; and using dozens of false alerts by CBP dogs to search and detain innocent people. (click here to read all THIRTEEN CBP documents)
Police use checkpoints as a new ‘stop & frisk’ method
FOIA documents released to the ACLU, show that the Border Patrol’s extra-constitutional police practices amount to a de facto policy of “stop and frisk” for residents within 100 miles of the border.
Police setup drivers license checkpoints, despite using license plate readers
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Ask yourself what’s wrong with this picture, nearly eight years ago an Appeals court concluded that police can set up drivers license checkpoints, because cops don’t know everything about a driver.
That the primary programmatic purpose of the checkpoint was the enforcement of the State’s Motor Vehicle laws.
That the State has a “vital interest in ensuring that only those qualified to do so are permitted to operate motor vehicles, that these vehicles are fit for safe operation, and hence that licensing, registration, and vehicle inspection requirements are being observed.”
(Source)
This outdated ruling, ignores the fact that, law enforcement uses ‘automatic license plate readers‘ mounted on police vehicles, highways and traffic intersections to identify drivers. And also ignores the fact that police are using more than TWENTY-EIGHT automated risk assessments on anyone traveling inside the U.S.
Police also run drivers licenses through the National Precursor Log Exchange, to see if their names are on a police/pharmaceutical drug list.
One corporation, is responsible for America’s checkpoint television ads
The NHTSA pays, Traffic Safety Marketing (TSM) a private advertising company, to make national television commercials promoting checkpoints, like ‘Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over‘, ‘Click It Or Ticket‘, ‘Fans Don’t Let Fans Drive Drunk.‘ TSM, brags about providing States with TV PSAs, re-tagging them in support of State highway traffic safety marketing initiatives.
Coming this fall, Halloween checkpoints
TSM, has come up with a new way, to expand checkpoints…
Halloween is meant to be scary, but not when it comes to driving. When it comes to drunk driving, Halloween can turn the roads into a horror fest.
Get ready America, for new TV ads, telling a gullible public that kids everywhere are being killed by drunk drivers this Halloween. Their new slogan should be, ‘Tricked and Gullible.’ There’s NO epidemic of drunk driving in America period; in fact, it’s just the opposite.
Do drunk drivers really cause half of all traffic deaths? Not even close! GetMADD.com explains how the NHTSA includes passengers and pedestrians who had some alcohol but weren’t DRUNK. Click here to find out more about the DUI myth.
If you’ve been keeping track, that’s a total of TEN different types of police checkpoints!
Day or night police use checkpoints to ticket and arrest motorists
I know I covered ‘Click it or Ticket,’ by TSM, but I thought everyone should see the look of terror on this guys face, who’s about to be pulled over for a seat belt violation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I bet someone can come up with a thousand words that describe what he’s feeling.
Police are stopping motorists with kids in car seats
You read that correctly, police are stopping motorists with child car seats because according to them, 3 out of 4 kids are not properly restrained!Jeep Hunter was fired after three seasons with the Gamecocks.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier has fired the Gamecocks safeties coach. Spurrier said in a statement Friday that he told Jeep Hunter he would not be retained because the thought the team needed a more experienced coach for its defensive backs.
Hunter just finished his third season with South Carolina, but his first on the defensive side of the ball. Spurrier hired Hunter in 2009 to coach tight ends.
The Gamecocks now have lost four assistants from last year's team that set a school record with 11 wins. Assistant coach in charge of defense Ellis Johnson left to become head coach at Southern Miss, running backs and tight ends coach Jay Graham left for Tennessee and special teams coordinator John Butler is heading to Penn State.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Paul Danahar: "Whoever did this may have acted with mindless violence, but attempts |
patients. In the late 1960s, Medtronic Company designed nuclear-powered pacemakers. It implanted 250 pacemakers out of which about 90 are still serving. Because the world stopped producing plutonium-238, the manufacturing had to be discontinued. There’s hope for revival, assuming we have some extra plutonium-238 after NASA grabs its share for space missions.
Plutonium-238 is being used to power sensors at the ocean bottoms. Russia had put up about 1000 lighthouse beacons that use power plutonium-238 and most of them are now in ruins. The US had also placed remote navigational systems and monitoring centers in the arctic areas which are powered by plutonium-238 generators.
The Future
Plutonium-238 potential is enormous. Futurists are hinting their possible use in everyday gadgets to replace conventional batteries, and perhaps even in automobiles. But the technology and the production of plutonium-238 are still exceedingly expensive and legal conditions are still very stringent. Moreover, many people are still scared of radioactive contaminations that can occur with uncontrolled accidents. In the US, government entities are the only legal suppliers of the plutonium-238. What we need is investments, more funding and more firms to work for the increase in the supply of plutonium-238.Former Triple Eight stalwart Ludo Lacroix has broken his silence on his controversial move to DJR Team Penske ahead of the 2017 season.
News of the long-time Triple Eight technical director's impending shift to Penske stunned the Supercars paddock last November.
Among those blindsided was Triple Eight boss Roland Dane, who slammed Lacroix as ‘duplicitous’ for not disclosing earlier his decision to join Penske.
Immediately placed on ‘gardening leave’ for the remainder of the year, Lacroix took up his role as competition director with DJR Team Penske at the start of January.
In an exclusive two-part interview with Supercars.com editor Stefan Bartholomaeus, the Frenchman opens up about his big change, revealing a desire to join Penske's NASCAR operation.
Ludo, to date we’ve only heard one side of your move from Triple Eight to DJR Team Penske. Firstly, tell us the when and why of leaving Triple Eight from your perspective.
I had been there a long time and felt that I needed a change.
Triple Eight has been aware of my decision to leave in early September time.
I had a conversation with representatives of Penske America. They indicated that there could be a role for me there if I was interested.
I had a further chat with the Penske guys after Bathurst. They said that Team Penske would be interested in having me work with their Supercars team.
Roger Penske was in Australia at the time, so a meeting was arranged between Roger and I.
As you know Roger is a very successful man. Roger talked to me about his plans for the team. Roger basically talked me into joining DJR Team Penske.
I didn't inform Roland or Triple Eight of my discussions with Roger and Team Penske at the time as nothing was decided.
Also, I had given notice and was under no obligation to inform Triple Eight of my future moves.
At the time I was requesting that Triple Eight announce my departure. I'm not sure what the reluctance was, but I certainly found it strange.
Once I had made my mind up to join DJR Team Penske I informed Roland of my decision.
Roland was obviously a bit shocked but we agreed that I would finish the season with Craig (Lowndes).
Then you, Stefan, ran the story the following day about me leaving Triple Eight. Immediately after the story ran Triple Eight put me on gardening leave.
You say that Roland was disappointed, but his public words were a little stronger than that. What was your reaction to what was said to the media at Pukekohe?
People say all kinds of things in the heat of the moment. I'm not going to bad-mouth Roland. We had a successful working relationship for many years.
Have you spoken to Roland since? What is the relationship like now with him and the other guys at Triple Eight?
I haven't spoken to Roland directly. We have spoken through lawyers, but that seems to have stopped now. I'm not losing any sleep over what has happened.
Life is short. I don't hold any grudges against Roland or the Triple Eight team.
In all honesty, I haven't spent too much time thinking about Triple Eight. I'm a forward looking person. I'm 100 percent focused on my new role with DJR Team Penske.
The timing of your move is especially interesting considering where Triple Eight is with the 2018 Commodore project. You were expected to lead that, and then you left…
Like I said, I wasn't particularly comfortable with the direction Triple Eight was heading. I'm not one to stick around if I'm not 100 percent committed.
I could've stuck around, gone through the motions, but that's not how I operate.
The truth is that a new Commodore didn't excite that much, not enough to make we want to stay at Triple Eight.
Back to the lure of Penske. You said the first contact was you reaching out to Penske in the US.
Yes, I called Tim (Cindric, Team Penske president). We ended up having a few discussions about Team Penske in the US. As I said before, that eventually led to me being introduced to Roger.
Roger is an incredible man. He is extremely driven yet down to earth. Roger and I talked about motor racing a lot. Roger's knowledge of the industry in phenomenal.
It was refreshing to talk to someone with such incredible knowledge and ideas about racing.
I actually found speaking to Roger inspiring, which was pretty remarkable when I think about all the racing people I have met and known over the past 30 years.
At the time I thought that a move to the US was on the cards. Things have turned out slightly differently, but I couldn't be happier. You don't get the opportunity to work with one of the legends of motor racing every day.
Roger, Tim, Ryan (Story, DJR Team Penske managing director) and the team have been 100 percent supportive of me. Joining DJR Team Penske has been the best move for me.
So you’re saying it was the man, not the money that was the big lure?
The money had absolutely nothing to do with my decision. It's never been about the money for me.
I don’t disclose my salary, but I can tell you I’m not earning a penny more than I was earning last year. That’s the truth.
I hear people complaining that Penske is trying to poach people. Every team tries to pinch people.
I want this on the record - Penske didn't poach me... There was no set plan by the team to poach me. It was truly a case of 'right place, right time'.
Is there a period of time that you’re committed to the Supercars team for, either contractually or mentally?
We are on a beautiful ride and I’m enjoying working here. I'm not planning on going anywhere. Anyone that knows me or has looked at my record knows I like to succeed.
I'm not planning on leaving DJR Team Penske until we win a championship. And then I'll be chasing two or three!
Maybe one day I'll talk to Roger about NASCAR, which is on my bucket list.
Tomorrow in Part 2 of Supercars.com’s exclusive interview, Lacroix discusses what is needed to turn DJR Team Penske into Supercars race winners.This year for Manchester After Hours, MadLab’s Make Stuff and Fred Aldous are joining forces to host an evening of DIY digital innovation, art and craft.
Across the three floors of Fred Aldous, you will get the chance to explore the juncture between Art, Science and Technology through free hands-on workshops, activities and demonstrations. See if you can bring a bit of ‘Odd Coupling’ into your creative practice.
PatternCraft and PatternBeats
Taking inspiration from textile and computing heritage PatternCraft lets you experiment with physical coding. Using binary code and a DIY punchcard reader you will get to create a digital sculpture and make music.
Photobooths
A scientific innovation of the late 19th Century, wet chemistry photo booths had almost disappeared from the public realm until dedicated ‘boothers’ brought them back to popularity. Step in, strike four poses and capture your photo booth portrait using this 127-year-old technology.
VR: From Manchester to the Milky Way
Let Make Stuff transport you out of Fred Aldous and stand atop Mount Everest; take a look around at the breathtaking views. Then voyage to the Milky-Way and beyond. You are no longer on the outside looking in, get up walk around, peek around corners, interact with the world with your virtual hands.
Wearable Tech
What will fashion of the future look like? Explore futuristic materials and see how they can be applied to clothing. In this drop-in workshop, you will get to make your very own flashing LED tote bag and solder a light-up badge to take home.
3 Minute Portraits
The Fred Aldous "3 Minute Portraits" are back! Inspired by the length of time it takes a photobooth to develop a picture; sit down, relax and let one of the talented artists draw your portrait, to take home, in three minutes.
Collaborative Conductive Canvas
Painting with conductive paint, you will have to work collaboratively to make an electric current. Make your mark light up!
Arduino Traffic Lights
Arduino is an open source electronics platform which can be used to create interactive projects. Explore its creative potential by learning to make traffic lights using an Arduino circuit board and a little bit of code.
3D Portraits & 3D Printer Demo
Get a first-hand opportunity to see a 3D printer in action and get a scan of yourself in 3D!
Coding with Raspberry pi-topCEED
The Raspberry Pi is a tiny and affordable computer that can be used to learn to program. Using a Raspberry pi-topCEED and Minecraft Make Stuff will teach you basic programming commands so you can build, explore and create.
Fred Aldous and Cloudwater have kindly supplied drinks for the evening.I finally read "Lady Chatterly's Lover". I'd heard about it for many years, but what I heard made me think it was just a sex book, written back in the time when that kind of thing was utterly scandalous, which is what made it famous (or infamous, if you prefer), and that's why it has lasted as long as it has. I was wrong. There's a lot more to the book than just sex. There is sex, yes, but the vivid descriptions don't come until quite a ways into the book.
At first the book seems to be about depression. The characters have a rather depressing view of life, and of relationships, and the language of the book, the words on the page, the vibe of the book, is dry. You wonder that a whole book of it can have been written and somehow become a classic. As it goes on, you see it's not just about depression, but also the different classes; the working man and the aristocrats. A lot of time is taken on that aspect, all through the book.
Then Lady Chatterly finds herself beginning a relationship with someone other than her husband (who returned from the war paralyzed from the waist down) and the whole feel of the book changes. As she opens up, like a flower in the morning to the warmth and light of the sun, the vibe becomes less and less dry, less depressing. The outlook of the characters on relationships, on feelings between people, both physical and mental, change in big ways. Life becomes something to reach for.
It's not an easy read, as the language doesn't flow freely, but it's quite worth reading. This book deserves its classic status.
As far as the e-book version I read (Lady Chatterly's Lover - The Unexpurgated Edition), all throughout the book there were grammar errors, misspellings, and symbols placed amid letters so that you couldn't tell what some words were supposed to be. Such as "of four" instead of "off our". It made for a bit of a slower read, but looking past that, a worthy one.UPDATE 2015-01-28: Now taking into account recent changes to Juju 1.20+
If you’re frequently hacking on Juju source code or just creating and destroying local environments often, you may find the following snippet I came up with handy.
It’s supposed to be run as root, like sudo cleanup-juju (assuming it’s somewhere in your ‘$PATH’ and it’s executable). Just change LOCAL_ENV=localenv to whatever your local environment name is (from $HOME/.juju/environments.yaml – usually local ) and run it. Twice, if needed (when mongodb and/or jujud agents are busy), to clean up:
Any leftover gocheck or mgo test directories in /tmp (these tend to accumulate over time and waste space)
(these tend to accumulate over time and waste space) Juju run-time temporary directories (e.g. /tmp/juju-worker-deployer<random-number>/)
Mongo socket files created by mongod run from juju tests (port other than the default 27017)
Old-style upstart “auto start” configuration (in juju 1.17 and later we use user upstart jobs for that)
Any juju or juju-lxc logs
Any lxc containers created by juju for that local environment
The.jenv file of the environment itself
Kill any mongod or jujud processes related to the local environment (for this to work it’s important you pick a unique name for your environment, so that ps xa | grep <envname> does not return processes not belonging to the environment – i.e. “local” is a bit too generic, I use “localenv”)
cleanup-juju #!/bin/bash # Change this to match the name of your environment type:local in # ~/.juju/environments.yaml LOCAL_ENV=localenv [[ $UID!= 0 ]] && echo "$0 must be run as root" && exit -1 pkill -9 -f $LOCAL_ENV pkill -9 -u $USER mongod find /tmp -name'mongodb-*.sock' -not -name'mongodb-27017.sock' -delete cleanup=( "/tmp/gocheck-*" "/tmp/test-mgo*" "/tmp/juju-*" "$HOME/.juju/${LOCAL_ENV}" "/etc/lxc/auto/*" "/var/log/juju*" "/var/lib/juju*" "/var/lib/lxc/${SUDO_USER}*" "/var/lib/lxc/juju-*" "/var/log/lxc/${SUDO_USER}*" "/var/log/upstart/juju*" "/var/log/upstart/lxc-instance-*" "${HOME}/.juju/environments/${LOCAL_ENV}.jenv" ) for f in "{cleanup[@]}"; do rm -fr $f done 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 #!/bin/bash # Change this to match the name of your environment type:local in # ~/.juju/environments.yaml LOCAL_ENV = localenv [ [ $UID!= 0 ] ] && echo "$0 must be run as root" && exit - 1 pkill - 9 - f $LOCAL_ENV pkill - 9 - u $USER mongod find / tmp - name'mongodb-*.sock' - not - name'mongodb-27017.sock' - delete cleanup = ( "/tmp/gocheck-*" "/tmp/test-mgo*" "/tmp/juju-*" "$HOME/.juju/${LOCAL_ENV}" "/etc/lxc/auto/*" "/var/log/juju*" "/var/lib/juju*" "/var/lib/lxc/${SUDO_USER}*" "/var/lib/lxc/juju-*" "/var/log/lxc/${SUDO_USER}*" "/var/log/upstart/juju*" "/var/log/upstart/lxc-instance-*" "${HOME}/.juju/environments/${LOCAL_ENV}.jenv" ) for f in "{cleanup[@]}" ; do rm - fr $f doneStar parties are a great way to view celestial objects like stars, planets and the moon — and accomplish one of the requirements for the Astronomy merit badge. Here are some tips for hosting a stellar star party.
Pick the Best Spot
Regardless of where you live, you’ll want to find a spot for your party that offers as wide of a view of the sky as possible. That means a location that’s both free from tall buildings and light pollution (like bright lights from neighborhoods or downtown areas).
Crowd Control
If you’re expecting a big crowd, be sure to have some additional activities planned for when people are waiting for their turn at the telescope(s). Try making a scale model of the Solar System with beach balls, ping pong balls, basketballs and baseballs acting as the planets and sun.
Weather Warning
Star parties take place, well, under the stars. That means you need to be ready for the weather like rain, snow, cold temperatures or even cloudy conditions that could make your views less than ideal. So, be sure to check the forecast beforehand. And, plan a few indoor presentations will stimulate your interest and curiosity in case surprise weather ruins your plans.
Create a Theme
Give your party an extra bit of fun with an exciting theme. For example, a Winter Wonderland party could include building constellations out of snowballs. A Star Wars party could feature music from that galaxy far, far away, some Star Wars collectibles, or glow sticks and laser pointers to act out lightsaber battles. Make your party food-centric with astronomical treats like star-shaped pizza, chocolate meteorite cookies, moon-shaped cookies and more. The point is: get creative!
Limit the Light
Because it’ll be dark out there, your group will probably have flashlights on hand. But that white light makes seeing the stars even tougher than it already is. White light will shrink the pupils of your eyes, making it nearly impossible to see the stars. We recommend having some red plastic wrap or red plastic to hand out to your visitors. Why? Covering flashlights with a red filter will keep everyone’s eyes dark-adapted. Just use a rubber band or tape to fasten the red filters over the flashlight.
Start Simple
For most beginning stargazers, naked-eye astronomy is the best way to start our star party. That means simply looking up at the stars above with your own two eyes, and getting used to what you’re looking at. As it just starts getting dark, spend some time getting to know the brighter stars and constellations. Have some picked out beforehand, and have everyone in the group try to spot the stars by sight.
Be Prepared
If you want to have a successful party, you need to be sure to have all the right equipment. For constellations, we recommend using the naked eye or binoculars and a planisphere (a special star charting instrument). The National Geographic 10×40 Porro binoculars feature a wide field of view and a comfortable feel.
For Deep Sky Viewing: try the 114 EQ Reflector National Geographic Telescope. An EQ mount allows you to track celestial objects with slow motion controls that follow the parabolic curve of the horizon.
When viewing the planets, the moon and things a little closer: try the National Geographic 700AZ. It comes with an Alt/Az mount, it tracks object in a up/down or left/right motions with slow motion controls to zero in on a specific object you are looking at. Plus, it’s great for looking at the moon because the provided eyepieces allow you to get a little closer because of the increased focal length.
Another great tool is a smartphone or tablet. You can download cool apps like Night Sky, Star Chart, Stellarium or the official NASA App. All three show your relative position on Earth and what constellations/objects are up for viewing at the time.
Click here for more suggestions on telescopes, binoculars and other stargazing gear from Explore Scientific.Montreal's Homa Hoodfar says members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard psychologically tortured her during dozens of interrogations over the course of 112 brutal days in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.
They threatened "they would send my dead body back to Canada," the retired Concordia University professor told CBC News in her first interview since her release on Sept. 26.
"I was prepared I might face a few years in prison, or as they said 15 years, maybe I would never be released," she said in a lengthy interview in her second-floor apartment in Montreal.
Guards threatened to send Hoodfar's dead body to Canada 0:56
She says the interrogators tried to break her spirit. The worst part, she said, was when they played music from the funeral of her husband, who died in December 2014. They had found the music on Hoodfar's iPad.
"One of the techniques they have is to make you cry," she said. "I didn't, so they played the music that was played when my husband's body was removed from here (their Montreal apartment).
"That was the most difficult moment I had with them."
Deal at the UN
After 112 days in prison, Hoodfar, 65, was released last Monday and flown to Muscat, Oman. Canada had secured Oman's diplomatic help a week earlier, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. Hoodfar seen arriving in Montreal last Thursday. Her niece, Amanda Ghahremani, is seen in the background. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)
Iran's state prosecutor had accused the anthropologist of "dabbling in feminism," but she says that's not a crime so the authorities came up with charges that she collaborated with a hostile government against national security, without any evidence.
She believes she was taken as a pawn in the internal political struggle between the elected government led by President Hassan Rouhani and the country's more conservative, anti-West forces, including the judiciary and the Revolutionary Guard, whose agents first interrogated her.
The fact that I live in the West and taught at a Western university, for them, was enough. - Homa Hoodfar
"The fact that I live in the West and taught at a Western university, for them, was enough," she said.
"In some way, they arrested me because they wanted to embarrass and put pressure on the elected body [in Iran]."
Her ordeal began with a visit from Revolutionary Guard agents back in March. She was due to return home to Montreal two days later, but they barred her departure, seized her computer, phone and passport.
Twelve interrogations followed. She was free on bail until June, when they arrested her again and locked her up in a tiny cell. Over the next four months, she was interrogated 30 times.
Toothbrush notes
Dressed in pink prison garb, including pants, a long coat and a pink and white head scarf, she turned the prison experience into research.
She decided to take notes of her interrogations, but she had no pen or paper. So after each one, she'd lie on the floor of her cell and scribble barely legible notes on the cell walls with her toothbrush.
"The first week was hard, but after that I thought, 'You know what, I'm an anthropologist, I'm here in Evin prison... I had not planned to do field work in prison, but I'm here."
Evin is renowned for the many political prisoners and intellectuals who have been incarcerated there, including Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was arrested in 2003 while taking photos outside the prison and died in custody less than a month later.
Hoodfar recalls using her toothbrush to write on the walls of her cell 0:25
Hoodfar, an Iranian-Canadian with passports from both countries, had gone to Tehran in February to reconnect with family and friends. Born in Iran, she earned a bachelor of economics at Tehran University, followed by a master's degree in the U.K., before moving to Canada. She was a professor of anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, widely known for her work on gender and sexuality in Muslim culture. Hoodfar had recently retired but she was still writing and tutoring students.
After months in prison, she was suddenly told on a Sunday night to be ready for 8 a.m. the next day. She says four male and two female guards took her to her Tehran apartment to collect her things. They insisted she go to a salon to get her hair dyed and cut and told her to wear "a bright colour."
"They wanted me to look good when I was leaving Iran," she said.
And that's when she knew she really was going to be free. Hoodfar, centre, in her Montreal apartment with her niece, left, and sister Katayoon Hoodfar. (Susan Ormiston/CBC)
Although she believes her arrest was part of an internal struggle, she may also have been used as a bargaining chip to try to secure Canada's commitment to reopen formal diplomatic relations with Iran.
The day she was released, Iran announced talks were beginning to re-establish a Canadian Embassy in Tehran.
The same day, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said, "We have to be in Iran," but he denied there were any deals or trades in connection with Hoodfar's release.
'We have to be in Iran,' Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said on the day Hoodfar was released from prison. Iran announced talks have begun to re-establish a Canadian Embassy in Tehran. (Jacques Boissinot/Canadian Press)
"That's not the way it works," he said. "We negotiate for the sake of Canadians, not to please another country."
Hoodfar says she hopes she wasn't traded as part of an embassy deal.
"I know that has happened sometimes," she said. "But that's one of the concerns I have." Hoodfar describes the feeling of freedom once returning to Montreal 0:57
Another concern is the vulnerable people she leaves behind. Other dual nationals left in prison in Iran, and people she knows in Tehran. Investigators went through her archived emails and questioned her about dozens of names.
"I heard that a lot of people, including my handyman that would come once a year when I was there to fix the electricity and clean the windows and all that, have been interrogated."
She says the experience has left her sad that "all the researchers, social scientists like me, can be a pawn in these politics."
"I had hoped to go back and teach sometime, but told them I will never go back to Islamic Republic again, I'm too heartbroken."Sony has revealed its Xperia Z5 range during the IFA 2015 earlier this month and announced its schedule of release next month. However, the giant tech company has decided to launch the Xperia Z5 Compact earlier and to the rejoice of mini-flagship aficionados as the new phone will now be available in a few countries in Europe and available pre-orders for Hongkong and Singapore.
Caesarea Spa ordered from the United Kingdom, where people can now buy the new handset at Carphone Warehouse, which has listed the smartphone at £450 (about AU$980) SIM free and unlocked. The retailer is the only one offering the Coral and White colours. Meanwhile, MVNO GiffGaff sells one for £429 (approximately AU$935) or £18.50 (about AU$40) per month for two years. On October 5, Amazon UK will also start selling the new handset. Its pre-order price is set at £429 (about AU$935).
In Singapore and Hongkong, the new smartphone is now listed for pre-order. In Singapore, its price tag is S$998 (about AU$1,002), with the Z5 Compact at S$828 (about AU$831) while the Z5 Premium is priced at S$1,098 (about AU$1,102). For earlier orders starting today until the 11th of October, you will get extra Micro USB Charging dock and if you pay additional S$49 (about AU$49), you get another gadget, the MDR-NC750 Hi-res handset.
In Hongkong, the Xperia Z5 series are also available for pre-order with the Xperia and Xperia Z5 Dual having the same price tag at HK$5,698 (approximately AU$1,057) and the Xperia Z5 Compact at HK$4,798 (approximately AU$890). There is a free screen protector for orders until October 5.
Based on the hands-on experiences of those who attended the IFA 2015, the Z5 Compact has everything it takes to be a success and it is no surprise that everybody is happy that it is now available in the market.Dead Game: Reactions to 6.79 October 21st, 2013 19:25 GMT Text by Heyoka Graphics by shiroiusagi
Table of Contents
Players' Thoughts
Casters' Thoughts
See Full Patch Notes on
TeamLiquid
Focus Mode
Turn off Focus Mode [x] See Full Patch Notes on
Dead Game: Reactions To 6.79
SEATTLE (AG) -- In a discovery some are already hailing as "a Dead Sea Scrolls level revelation," an archaeological team this week uncovered a royal decree, or Patch Note, shedding new light on the 'Doto' civilization that flourished in the early 21st century.
"A Patch Note was the primary method of communication between the middle period Dota kingdom's ruler, Icefrog I, and his citizens," an anthropologist deeply involved in the excavations divulged. "We're talking about a figure who was held in semi-deific esteem. If he declared, as he does in this Note, that daytime and nighttime now lasted 4 minutes each, his followers would actually believe it, and act as if it were the case."
"For the normal population of Dota, or 'feeders,'" he added, "this was certainly no game."
Compared to previous Patch Notes discovered through prior research expeditions, the new finding, dubbed "6.79" by the World Organisation for Dota Original Theories & Assumptions, seems to have come at a time of great upheaval in Doto society. While many of the phenomena or people referred to in the Note are still unknown- cryptic references to "bloodseekers" and "neutral camps" abound- the ambitious scope of Icefrog I's vision for his society is undeniable.
Not all of the 6.79 Patch Note has been translated and decoded yet, and not all speaks well of this turbulent period of Dotoan history. Researchers also discovered hundreds of thousands of written references to "raising" something called "dongers," perhaps signs of civil unrest or a citizens' rebellion.
In our special feature on the Patch Note, we asked a number of prominent historians and analysts of Doto civilization to briefly review this remarkable document and give us their first opinions. As more information about this critical period of Doto history is uncovered, we hope these remarks will serve as a signpost of modern society's perspective on the lives & livelihoods of these historical peoples.
The Professionals: Players' Reactions
I think it's a new start for Dota.
You can't help heroes win their 1-on-1 lane. It's easier to get gold and experience for most heroes; every hero will get much faster levels now from the increased XP range as well as the change where ranged heroes get the same amount of experience from denies as melee heroes.
I think the whole metagame is going to change because all the fighting/push heroes got buffed while the splitpushing farmers got nerfed indirectly. The new 4 minute day/night rotation instead of 6 minute rotation is gonna ensure that Nightstalker will be seen a lot more, because his Ultimate also reduces the vision of the enemy by 25%. The fact that Pudge and Vengeful Spirit can use Blink Daggers now further hints towards this metagame shift. While splitpushing isn't impossible, it's gonna get a lot harder and riskier because of the new buyback change where you can't earn money from creep kills anymore when you buyback.
The only thing I really dislike is that Roshan respawns randomly between 8-11 minutes. It takes away the whole strategy aspect of Roshan because you have to guess when it's up; of course you can narrow it down to 3 minutes but that still isn't all that helpful.
All in all I think this is a very nice patch, with a lot of changes that have to be used to the team's advantage in order to make the most out of everything. I am excited to see how the East and the West adapt to this patch.
Black (LGD.int) I think it's a new start for Dota.You can't help heroes win their 1-on-1 lane. It's easier to get gold and experience for most heroes; every hero will get much faster levels now from the increased XP range as well as the change where ranged heroes get the same amount of experience from denies as melee heroes.I think the whole metagame is going to change because all the fighting/push heroes got buffed while the splitpushing farmers got nerfed indirectly. The new 4 minute day/night rotation instead of 6 minute rotation is gonna ensure that Nightstalker will be seen a lot more, because his Ultimate also reduces the vision of the enemy by 25%. The fact that Pudge and Vengeful Spirit can use Blink Daggers now further hints towards this metagame shift. While splitpushing isn't impossible, it's gonna get a lot harder and riskier because of the new buyback change where you can't earn money from creep kills anymore when you buyback.The only thing I really dislike is that Roshan respawns randomly between 8-11 minutes. It takes away the whole strategy aspect of Roshan because you have to guess when it's up; of course you can narrow it down to 3 minutes but that still isn't all that helpful.All in all I think this is a very nice patch, with a lot of changes that have to be used to the team's advantage in order to make the most out of everything. I am excited to see how the East and the West adapt to this patch.
My thoughts on this patch are kind of muddled mainly because I think we won't know whats strong or not till maybe a month or two into practice. The Night/day cycle is probably the biggest change along with creeps spawning farther away from their respective towers on both Radiant and Dire safe lanes. I think that mid is going to have to play passive as hell as soon as first night time hits mainly because supports would rather get XP and gold off Kills than the pulls. I do think that radiant pulls are going to continue to be very strong however if you are able to pull them off because you can pull to all three camps.
Dire pull is kind of screwed even more now. Radiant mid is going to continue to be very strong for heroes like Shadow Fiend and Storm because their small camp is easier to kill at later levels and catch up or farm insanely fast. Radiant mid is also harder to gank when night time hits because the hill is smaller and supports can camp their hero mid while also pulling camps. I feel Dire advantage with Roshan is somewhat mitigated because you can't just snipe it as soon as it spawns anymore. So overall, Radiant got buffed quite hard in my mind mainly because Dire got nerfed due to pulls and Roshan.
Offlaning heroes like Clock and Dark seer and Timbersaw are going to continue to be really strong and probably be top picks(remain i guess) because of how annoying they are to deal with as offlaners that get experience. A level 3 clock can solo most trilanes to be honest with boots and so can dark seer. Even though timbersaw's Chakram got nerfed, he is really hard to deal with (Funn1k) in lane and he is a hero that can catch up quite well.
The change I dislike the most is that range heroes get the same denied XP as melee heroes. I dont see the reason why they did this because it took away from lane matchups mid. Crushing someone mid in levels is a lot harder now and denies will mainly be used to stop people from csing and keeping it on your hill over building a level advantage. I guess this change was to buff trilane vs trilane experience for ranged support heroes or offlaning ranged heroes that can soak exp like Windrunner.
As for the current imbalanced heroes like Bat, ET and Wisp, i think ET got the least nerfs and is going to continue being a first ban first pick. hero. The way I like to play him mid got nerfed quite heavily though because my Astral Spirit will not 1 shot the ranged creep anymore but I still think you can manage. The aura is what is broken about the hero, not the Spirit damage. The hero is actually as strong as he currently is late game.
I do think its a misconception that supports are getting heavily buffed. We have to wait and see but Supports are going to have a lot harder time getting XP off regular trilanes and maybe dual lanes will happen. But the late-game is going to come faster and carries and semi-carries will probably be even more important because of the gold increase. This may make people want to pick better late-game supports but how will they actually level up fast enough to make an impact early on? Anyways this is just my hypothesis off playing literally zero games and just reading patch notes. However, Dire can check Roshan easier so it is still easier for them to know what time it is. Let's wait and see.
Bulba (Liquid) My thoughts on this patch are kind of muddled mainly because I think we won't know whats strong or not till maybe a month or two into practice. The Night/day cycle is probably the biggest change along with creeps spawning farther away from their respective towers on both Radiant and Dire safe lanes. I think that mid is going to have to play passive as hell as soon as first night time hits mainly because supports would rather get XP and gold off Kills than the pulls. I do think that radiant pulls are going to continue to be very strong however if you are able to pull them off because you can pull to all three camps.Dire pull is kind of screwed even more now. Radiant mid is going to continue to be very strong for heroes like Shadow Fiend and Storm because their small camp is easier to kill at later levels and catch up or farm insanely fast. Radiant mid is also harder to gank when night time hits because the hill is smaller and supports can camp their hero mid while also pulling camps. I feel Dire advantage with Roshan is somewhat mitigated because you can't just snipe it as soon as it spawns anymore. So overall, Radiant got buffed quite hard in my mind mainly because Dire got nerfed due to pulls and |
Go, those records and then he was like do you wanna do a session. We were like "yeah" and then he went "you'll have to come down to Maida Vale" and we were like "whoah, we can't make that kind of music with the BBC staff. We'll have to make it in our studio." John Peel was like "oh, I'll have to see about that, I think we can do it, I'll try and get a special dispensation. I'm sure it'll be okay". So we just booked the studio and started recording and then he rang up and said that it had got to be unionised and by that time we'd started about three tracks, one of them was Pacific but it was pretty basic at that point, pads, a bit of drum programming, not a lot really and it was kind of left on the shelf that one. Then we returned to it at a session when nobody had turned up I pulled a sax out because my mate had left his sax at the studio and I can play a bit. I thought the tune needed a bit of melody so I got the sax out and played over it and it sort of came together." Graham Massey Voodoo Ray – A Guy Called Gerald "Voodoo Ray was totally designed for the Hacienda. That's was the sounding ground for everything we were doing, even when I was working with 808 State, we always had the Hacienda in mind. It was kind of the place where you thought if we can play it in there that'd be really cool. I actually always wanted to bring the studio into the Hacienda, that was one of my ambitions but it was definitely a place where you'd look towards trying to make one of your tunes work there." A Guy Called Gerald "The first time we heard A Guy Called Gerald "Voodoo Ray" that haunting melody and the sparseness of it all. All these records nowadays are fodder for Now That's What I Call House Music compilations but people forget that at the time they were unbelievable, hairs on the back of your neck, never heard anything like it records." Graeme Park "Playing and hearing Voodoo Ray for the first time, that was a moment. Manchester got its first real record of its own." Jon Dasilva "Voodoo Ray, that was one of the records I absolutely pestered Eastern Bloc into submission until they finally found me a copy. It was that record at The Hacienda for so long because no-one else had it. It was the record at the Hacienda, it was one of those defining records. It was that, Ce Ce Rogers "Someday", there were a few records that really defined that 88 to 90 period and they were really hard to get hold of and I remember just craving those records so much that when I finally got hold of them, I wore them out." Sasha Hardcore Uproar - Together "I had the idea for "Hardcore Uproar" when I met my partner, Jonathan Donaghy, who did actually come from Blackburn. I had a bit of an idea for a track and he pretty much put the finishing touches to it. We were pretty much raving in Blackburn but if I had to make a choice between Blackburn and The Hacienda it would have been the Hacienda hands down. It had become our dream to hear a tune that we'd done in that club, that became our aim after a while. We thought that if we did that we would just be happy forever and I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't that we thought that we were doing something cool or innovative with music. "We didn't realise it at the time but because we were ravers, we were probably on a much more commercial edge of house music. I'm trying to avoid the word cheesy but with our air horns, crowd samples and I don't think my voice made things particularly underground which wasn't deliberate. Looking back on it, we made a pop record. We thought we'd made a really underground piece of music which the Dj's loved and got played in the right places but really it was very radio friendly and had catchy elements. It was aimed at the underground which was those bleeps but it did give it a commercial edge as well." Suddi Raval
The Special Events That Defined The Manc Acid House Scene Well having got this far you deserve something a little juicy….. The infamous New Order post Technique Party at Real World Studios, Bath "Events would be definitely the trip down to bath to Peter Gabriel's studio and the party we had for New Order at the end of August 88. That was pretty mad. You were playing a gig with a river running beneath the glass floor in a studio. I lost my mind." Jon Dasilva "I remember right at the beginning of it New Order, there was a very infamous party they had, well it was one of my best parties really. They'd been recording at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios and when they finished recording, they were like "We're having a party". We got two double decker coaches down from the Hacienda, this was right at the beginning so there were probably about a hundred heads and we were absolutely twatted before we even left. It was amazing. As we were getting near the place, people were getting off in these little villages and like Geoff The Chef getting off asking the way with a whistle and one of those little muslim hats on. In the end someone saw the lights and people were running across the field to get to it, they were just that desperate." Mike Pickering "I remember it all. God knows why? We decided to have a party to celebrate the end of Technique so Rob decided to bring everyone down from Manchester. Why did he do that? Two coach loads and [name removed] ordered 1000 E's and he said to [name removed] "You sell em?" So [name removed] got em and I think he got em for eight grand and [name removed's] idea was the two grand would pay for the booze. Once everyone was twatted, he was giving them away anyway. I think he woke up with a fiver and a sore arse. "A lot of people did lose their minds at that. The one I remember is [name removed], he had a girl, holding her round the neck like that walking round the party with an axe. He wasn't there, he'd gone, there was nobody there. A fire axe and her in a headlock and she was screaming blue murder and nobody knew who she was and nobody could hear her because of the music. Someone came and got me cos I was in the cottage so I went up and went "[name removed], what are you doing?" Took the axe off him and told him "let go of the girl, c'mon let go, let go." So he ultimately let go and the girl ran off screaming, I put the axe away somewhere good and then he went off shagging [name removed] in the lake. You could see the two of them in the lake like that with their heads bobbing." Peter Hook "Yeah, (laughs), yeah, I was there. The whole thing was quite bizarre because everyone was in such a haze about what we were going to do and being invited was pretty cool, and then two coaches going down there got fucked before they arrived so by the time everyone got there, they'd taken everything they'd brought with them. My main memory of it is being in the studio there, the one with the glass floor and it was quite a surreal party. One of the things I never remember about that do is that I have no idea how long it went on for?" Gary McLarnan "We got in there and there were silver trays full of E's going round. It was brilliant. It went on for about three days. I remember me and Graeme were Djing and Graeme was like "Mike, Mike, Can I go on now?" And I was like "I've only just gone on" and I'd been on six and a half hours. I didn't have a clue. I was like "Ah shit, sorry, there you go." It went on for about two, three days, it was one of the classic early parties." Mike Pickering "Rob came up with a great idea for storing all the booze away and he had these two girls giving the drinks out so everyone was allowed two cans of beer or a bottle of wine and then they all came in off the coaches, pushed the girls out of the way and ransacked the bar. There were people walking around with twenty bottles of champagne cupped in their arms. It was an annual pig fest. Everyone went fucking beserk. There was shagging everywhere, it was just outrageous. I went and locked meself in my bedroom." Peter Hook "Peter Gabriel never knew about it." Mike Pickering "There was hardly any damage. They repainted the walls. That was it." Peter Hook The United States Of Hacienda Tour "I'd say actually going to New York with the Hacienda. That was an amazing gig. We kind of did this tour and it was a package really. We'd all just gone over there and like going over there on your own is like one thing but going over with a load of people who you know from where you're from it was such a mad buzz, it was amazing. I'll never forget that." A Guy Called Gerald "The United States Of Hacienda, I didn't go on that but I got the T-Shirt. It's one of my most treasured T-shirts. The thing is, I was 18, 19 years old then, just, and I was getting fifteen quid a gig and the idea of touring America was just….so far out there. That's why when it started to kick off for me, it was just such an amazing change." Sasha "The United States Of Hacienda was brilliant cos that was tied up with a New Order tour of America and I remember having to DJ on the same bill as The Sugarcubes featuring Bjork, Public Image Limited, then me, then New Order. I was DJing on the tour and then the club coincided with that with Jon Dasilva, Gerald and a few others. It was great. I was playing American House music in a club in Manchester and then I was over in the Stares playing it back to them. I suppose we re-exported house music back to them." Graeme Park "Yeah, the United States Of Hacienda, we paid for them and we lost a lot of money on that. They just acted like primadonnas and we got treated like shit. I remember one night I offered a load of them out, Dasilva and Graeme Park. We were at a club in Detroit and they were taking the piss. I went in and told em "Outside now ‘cos I'm gonna leather the pair of yer, I'm fucking sick of yer, yer both a bunch of cunts". "What's up with you?" "Fucking outside now" and they were dragging me off them. "It just got really uppity. They just disappeared up their own arse. It was a good time but I didn't see much of them after that, I just went "Fuck em" and left them to it. They were arriving to clubs in limos, "Ah Hooky, how's it going. Hey hold that for a stone man." What a way to disappear up your own arse……" Peter Hook
The Role Call Of Contributors A Guy Called Gerald Gerald Simpson, architect of the archetypal Manchester tune, Voodoo Ray who then went to follow this with the immense, ground breaking album "Black Secret Technology." Nowadays living in Berlin, playing live throughout the world and still releasing innovative and exceptional EP's and albums. Kelvin Andrews, Sure Is Pure A Stoke born DJ who became a Hacienda regular in the late 80's and early 90's before setting up Gem Records, becoming resident at balearic club Golden and one half of highly esteemed remix outfit Sure Is Pure who scored a UK number one with their still astounding remix of the Doobie Brothers "Long Train Running." Now recoring as part of Soul Mekanik. Jon Dasilva, Hacienda Resident From his heady days as the resident at The Hacienda's Hot to djing throughout the 90's all over the globe, Dasilva's production work has included remixing the likes of the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, A Certain Ratio as more. Currently releasing highly acclaimed gear as TVMR, The Virgo Mechanically Replayed. Peter Hook, New Order & Hacienda Co-owner Joy Division, New Order, Revenge, Monaco, Freebass and Fac 51 The Hacienda. How lucky can one bassist be? Graham Massey, 808 State One of the finest studio engineers in the country if not the world, Graham's responsible for creating and developing 808 State's sound throughout the 90's, including being the first to recruit indie type vocalists to sing over techno (Bjork and Bernard Sumner on Ex.el). Still cutting edge sonically speaking as his recent Toolshed excursions and remixes have demonstrated. Check out his recent re-rub of The Whip's "Blackout" which is as ever superb. Mike Pickering, Hacienda Resident & Bookings Manager from 1982 Rob Gretton's best mate who came to shape the music policy of The Hacienda and in the process re-shaped the values of club culture world wide. One of the partners of Deconstruction Records, the "M" behind M-People and now head of A&R for Colombia Records where he has recently overseen the considerable success of The Ting Tings. Gary McLarnan, Sparkle Street A photographer for Mixmag, Boys Own and other such ground-breaking publications back in the day, Gary went on to manage Sasha in his early days before moving into music management full time where he now runs Sparkle Street in Manchester and is responsible for shaping the career of Mr Scruff since when he first hit the scene in the mid Nineties. Graeme Park, Hacienda Resident One of the finest US garage Dj's on the planet, Graeme became a resident at Mike Pickering's Nude Night at The Hacienda in the Summer of 1988 and has never looked back since. Still in demand around the world for his technically excellent DJ'ing as one of the mainstays of the Hacienda Tour and as a well respected radio presenter. Darren Partington, 808 State The energetic, bundle of fun frontman of 808 State. An Eastern Bloc regular from the mid 80's and one half of the infamous 808 State radio show, Darren still plays with 808 State and dj's throughout the world as one half of the Spinmasters, the offical 808 State DJ team. Suddi Raval, Together Hacienda regular, man about town and the legendarily double jointed vocal cords behind Together's "Hardcore Uproar" which is set for a re-release over the next few months featuring both the original and new remixes. Tom Rowlands, The Chemical Brothers One half of the Chemical Brothers who back then came to Manchester as history students and left as The Dust Brothers whose first release "Song To The Siren" set them on their way to international acclaim and some 15 years as one of the top dance acts across the world. Rowetta, Happy Mondays X Factor and Happy Mondays survivor, Rowetta boasts one of the most fearsome, diva styled vocal ranges in modern music. From Step On to Black Grape to current dance records, she remains one of the few girls to be considered totally well in on the Factory Records / Hacienda scene and remains so today. Sasha, DJ Sasha Came to Manchester one Alexander Coe from Wrexham back in 1988, left in 1992 as the internationally renowned DJ Sasha. At the top of his game since then with residencies at The Hacienda, Renaissance, Twilo and more, he presently records and releases his own gear vis his imprint Emfire records and the follow up to his mega selling "Involver" artist / remix compilation, "Invol2ver" is set to drop early September 08. Ed Simons, The Chemical Brothers The other half of the Chemical Brothers who back then came to Manchester as history students and left as The Dust Brothers whose first release "Song To The Siren" set them on their way to international acclaim and some 15 years as one of the top dance acts across the world. Danny Spencer, Sure Is Pure The other half of Sure Is Pure and more the production head to Kelvin's DJ nous, Danny was practically resident at Manchester's Spirit Studios in the late 80's and one of the early adopter of Acid House and it's associated technologies. Then onto the classic "Ride The Rhythm", Gem Records and as the other half of possibly the finest balearic remixers, Sure Is Pure. Like Kelvin, nowadays part of Soul Mekanik.While engaged in trade discussions with the Cincinnati Bengals, some within the Cleveland Browns organization considered that head coach Hue Jackson could end up back in Cincinnati according to CBS Sports' Jason La Canfora.
The Bengals were trying to pull second and third round picks from Cleveland. A similar situation occurred when Jackson was the head coach of the Oakland Raiders. He acquired quarterback Carson Palmer from the Bengals in exchange for two first-round picks then he left for Cincinnati.
(Sign up for our FREE email newsletter and do not miss any Browns breaking news as they prepare for a showdown with the Lions!)
Jackson has a long-standing relationship with Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis. A reunion in Cincinnati would not be surprising if Cleveland did ultimately part ways with the coach. The conflicting scenario is that Lewis, himself, might be on the hot seat. Over the past two seasons, his team has gone 9-14-1. In 15 seasons, Lewis has not led the Bengals to a post-season victory.
Lewis and Jackson coached together with the Washington Redskins in 2002. Jackson then joined Lewis' Bengals for four seasons from 2012-2015.Joe Bullock rejects United Voice union's call to relinquish WA Senate position over 'inexcusable' speech
Updated
Joe Bullock, the controversial Labor Senate candidate at the centre of a row about his political future, has defied calls to stand aside and says it is not his current intention to go anywhere.
The union which helped parachute Mr Bullock into Labor's number one spot on the West Australian Senate ticket is now calling on the controversial union leader to quit, saying he is unfit to represent the party.
United Voice says it regrets helping to get Mr Bullock onto the ballot, after details emerged of a speech he gave in November last year.
Mr Bullock has since apologised for the address, in which he praised Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott, criticised some Labor members as "mad", and took aim at some of the party’s more progressive policies.
The speech was made public on the Friday before the re-run election, the same day he emailed members to say sorry for commenting on his running mate Senator Louise Pratt’s sexuality and her advocacy of same sex-marriage.
"If we had had the information we have now, if we'd known the comments and his views on party members, if we'd known the sort of comments he'd made about Louise Pratt, we would not have supported him," the union's Carolyn Smith said.
"I don't want people to believe that just because United Voice endorsed Joe Bullock in the Senate election that we endorse the comments he made, I think they are inexcusable.
"What Joe Bullock does is his decision, we just want to make it clear that we no longer support him and we think he should resign."
Bullock says he's not going anywhere
Mr Bullock is likely to be the only Senator elected for Labor out of Saturday's re-run election, and has told the ABC he plans to "continue serving the working people of Western Australia".
"It's not my current intention to go anywhere," Mr Bullock told ABC News Online.
"I have been and will continue to be a good representative for the working people of Western Australia, it's my intention to continue doing that in another venue."
Mr Bullock says he is still hopeful that Senator Pratt will also be elected when the final votes and preferences are counted and allocated.
Joe Bullock's apology email to Labor:
I am writing to apologise for the offensive remarks I made last year which have been widely reported in the media today.
My comments were ill-considered, and I apologise unreservedly. I have the utmost respect for Labor members and our supporters and share your concern for the interests of working people in this state and this country.
I have enormous respect for Louise, she has served the Party and this state magnificently for over a decade and I'm confident that with the support of us all she'll be returned to the Senate tomorrow.
Both Louise and I need your support on booths tomorrow and I know we can count on you.
Thank you
Joe Bullock
"I do hope Louise gets over the line," he said.
He says that would leave the party in a better position than it would have been if the original Senate vote were upheld, in which the Greens and Palmer United Party beat Labor to a second Senate spot.
A spokesperson for Opposition Leader Bill Shorten backed Mr Bullock.
"Joe Bullock was pre-selected by the WA branch and was voted into the Senate by Western Australians on 5 April," the spokesperson said in a statement.
"Joe Bullock has spent the last 30 years of his life standing up for low paid workers and he’ll stand up for them and Western Australian as a Senator."
Union didn't think factional deal would hurt Pratt's Senate chances
Labor's primary vote collapsed to less than 22 per cent in last Saturday's Senate election re-run in WA.
That was bad news for Labor's number two candidate Senator Pratt, who is fighting for her political life against Liberal Linda Reynolds.
Senator Pratt was consigned to Labor's second spot due to a factional deal brokered by United Voice and the right.
Sources say the deal was one of many, stretching back more than five years, which involved the selection of candidates for state seats and the Senate vacancy caused by the departure of former minister Chris Evans in 2013.
That position was filled by United Voice's candidate Sue Lines, but the union's secretary denies the move helped deliver Mr Bullock the number one on the senate ticket, saying it related to getting a left candidate installed in the state seat of Fremantle instead.
Ms Smith says the union never imagined the deal could cost Senator Pratt her job.
"I don't think anyone in West Australia thought that for the first time ever we would lose two positions in the Senate," she said.
"So we certainly didn't envisage Louise Pratt being number two as her losing a Senate position."
ABC election analyst Antony Green says while the union can call on Mr Bullock to stand down, they cannot force him to leave.
"Nobody can force him to resign, nobody can resign on his behalf, the seat is his," he said.
Manufacturing union says issue a 'train wreck'
The WA secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, Steve McCartney, says he agrees with the sentiments of United Voice.
But the AMWU has stopped short of calling on Mr Bullock to stand down.
"I'll let that train wreck get dealt with by the state executive and the national executive," Mr McCartney said.
"We've got processes in the party to eliminate people that bring the party into disrepute, that will be a decision they'll make."
He says the current pre-selection system has seen people become disenchanted with the Labor Party, and members should have more say in the process.
"We should open the doors for more of that discussion so that people in the branches that belong to the party can have more say in the pre-selection process," he said.
"We've lost those people's hearts and minds, we have to build the culture back in the party so it's a party they want to belong to."
Topics: government-and-politics, federal---state-issues, federal-government, elections, political-parties, alp, wa, australia
First postedA Winnipeg soccer referee was seriously injured after he was allegedly attacked by a player at a game Thursday evening.
Winnipeg police said they were called to the Vince Leah Recreation Centre on Salter St. around 9 p.m. about a possible assault.
Const. Jason Michalyshen said two adult male soccer teams had been playing.
A man in his 50s who was refereeing a soccer game at the Vince Leah Recreation Centre on Thursday night was seriously injured in an assault. Winnipeg police said Saturday a 29-year-old man who was a player in the game, is facing an assault charge. (Tamara Pimental/CBC) When officers arrived they found the referee, a man in his 50s, with serious injuries.
He said paramedics attended to the man and he was taken to hospital. He has since been upgraded to stable.
Xxavier Barra, who witnessed the altercation unfold, said his team Galatasaray United was playing Winnipeg Croatia on Thursday when, in the final five minutes of play, a player on the Croatia team was given a yellow card.
He said the player then went on to taunt the ref and asked to be given another yellow card.
When the ref went to do that the player punched him and he fell to the ground unconscious, Barra said.
Barra alleged that the player then kicked the ref twice.
Xxavier Barra was present for the altercation Thursday and said he witnessed another player punch and kick the ref. (Kiran Dhillon/CBC) Michalyshen said an off-duty officer who happened to be on the scene held the suspect, a 29-year-old male soccer player, until police arrived.
The man is facing a charge of assault causing bodily harm. He's been released on a promise to appear.
He is not allowed to play in another match until a hearing is held.
In a statement released Monday, the Manitoba Soccer Association (MSA) says its discipline committee will hold a hearing "as soon as possible" into the alleged attack.
"The MSA does want to ensure due process is followed for all parties involved but we are clear that we don’t tolerate violence on the playing field," association executive director Héctor Vergara said in the statement.
The Manitoba Major Soccer League says it expects the MSA to hold a hearing soon and "appropriate disciplinary action will be taken against the accused party."
Read the full statement from the Manitoba Soccer Association below:WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate on Wednesday approved legislation to avert a government shutdown next week, freeing Democrats and Republicans to spend the next few months arguing over deeply divided strategies to shrink longer-term budget deficits.
A general view of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington February 28, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed
The bill, which would keep government agencies and programs funded through the end of the fiscal year on September 30, must go back to the House of Representative for final approval on Thursday.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers said he was pleased with the bill and believes it can pass the Republican-controlled House.
“It’s a great success,” Rogers told reporters. He called the effort a “healthy start” toward returning to a normal, bipartisan budgeting process.
The measure, approved by a 73-26 vote, keeps in place $85 billion in automatic spending cuts, but it offers the military and some domestic agencies more flexibility to shift funds within these reduced budgets to higher-priority programs.
Without new government spending legislation enacted by March 27, federal agencies and discretionary programs ranging from the Department of Transportation to national parks would have faced a shutdown.
Both parties opted against risking such a shutdown as they wrangle over longer-term tax and spending policy. If approved by the House as expected, the measure pushes the next critical fiscal deadline to late July or early August, when the next increase in the federal borrowing limit will be needed.
Until then, Democrats and Republicans are likely to argue over their vastly different budget resolutions that are expected to pass each chamber before a two-week recess starts at the end of the week.
The Senate immediately opened debate on its first budget in nearly four years, a Democratic-focused plan that calls for raising nearly a $1 trillion in new tax revenues, spending $100 billion more on infrastructure and offering up some modest spending cuts.
The Senate budget stands in stark contrast to the Republican proposal being debated in the House, which calls for deep cuts to social programs to reach a small surplus by 2023.
Some analysts question whether the House and Senate will be able to reconcile their diametrically opposed budgets and say a broader fiscal agreement would require direct negotiations this summer between President Barack Obama and House Republicans.
That scenario could be eerily reminiscent of the high-pressure 2011 budget standoff, in which a deal was cobbled together before a potential August debt default.
The budget blueprints do not carry the force of law, but set a guideline for an overall spending limit for discretionary budgets determined by the appropriations committees.
PET PROJECTS
The Senate vote was not without drama. Dozens of senators tried to attach provisions to shield pet programs and regional interests from the pain of automatic spending cuts ranging from air traffic controllers to inspectors at meat processing plants.
On Tuesday, Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas tried to block Senate consideration of the spending bill for the rest of this fiscal year unless he was promised a vote on his proposal to shield air traffic controllers at small, rural airports from the spending cuts.
Moran’s sparsely populated state depends heavily on small airports and is home to several civil aircraft manufacturers. He said staff reductions or shutdowns of rural control towers would remove a critical safety layer in the air traffic control system.
Related Coverage Senate acts to avoid meat inspector furloughs
“Once there is an accident, and somebody dies and a plane crashes, the question will always be ‘what if there had been an air traffic control tower there? What if we had left the program in place?’” Moran told the Senate.
Moran’s amendment was not considered, but the Senate approved a proposal to shift about $55 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture funds to prevent temporary layoffs of meat inspectors.
A plan to shift some national park-related funding to keep White House tours open in the face of cuts was defeated.Over the next week or so, you are going to see your share of mock 2017 NHL Entry Drafts. We thought we’d do something a little different with ours and have a little fun. Here is the 2017 Blogger’s Tribune Mock Draft complete with trades and commentary.
1-New Jersey Devils – Nolan Patrick – C – Brandon Wheat Kings
The closer we get to the Entry Draft, the more and more we see Nico Hischier being placed at the top of lists as the #1 prospect in the draft. There is no reason for this aside from the fact that Nolan Patrick barely played this season – and when he did he had to struggle through injuries.
Patrick is the best player in the draft – that will be proven over time. Ray Shero know this and selects the ultra-talented two-way center to continue the rebuild in New Jersey. Seeing Patrick fall from the top spot is very reminiscent of the 2012 draft when Alex Galchenyuk was selected 3rd simply because he missed most of the season due to injury.
2-Philadelphia Flyers – Nico Hischier – C – Halifax Mooseheads
When the Devils picked Patrick 1st overall, a frenzy was set off at the Philadelphia draft table. Calls from Vegas, Arizona, and Detroit looking to move up and draft the player many think might be the most dynamic in the draft. At the end of the day, no one came close to the asking price. The Flyers select the Halifax center with an eye towards slotting him in behind Giroux and Couturier down the middle next season.
3- Vancouver Canucks (from Dallas Stars) – Casey Mittelstadt – C – Green Bay Gamblers
(Trade: #3 Overall + Val Nichushkin for Chris Tanev + #33 Overall)
We know Jim Benning isn’t afraid to tell people what he wants to do – in this case, he steps up and pulls the trigger on a move that (finally) signals he is in full re-build mode. The Canucks want Casey Mittlestadt refuse to take the risk that he falls to them at #5. Mittlestadt is a skilled two-way center who skates really well and that some believe has top-line potential. The Canucks are very high on him and hope that year in the NCAA will prove that his skills can transition to more than just beating up on high school kids. Third overall will seem like a reach for some, but Jim Benning knows the guy he wants and isn’t going to sit around and wait for him.
It’s no secret that Vancouver is looking to trade Chris Tanev – for some reason – and Benning finally finds a taker in the Dallas Stars, a team that would benefit a lot more from an impact veteran than they would from selecting a prospect at the top of the draft. Despite a bad season, the Stars are not a team in the middle of a re-build. Tanev solves a lot of problems for a team that has the potential to make a big jump up the standings next season.
4-Colorado Avalanche – Cody Glass – C – Portland Winterhawks
With their eyes set on Mittlestadt, the Avalanche once again got caught with their pants down only to miss out on the player they were excited to draft. As a result, the Avs move on to their next option – Cody Glass.
A very different player from last year’s first round pick Tyson Jost, Glass is a big, strong center that brings a 200-foot game and will likely end up as a second liner in the NHL. He is a high IQ player that has had his offensive production numbers inflated by the system he plays in with the Winterhawks. He’ll have to prove that his skating is strong enough to be a true top-6 option in the NHL.
5-Vancouver Canucks – Cale Makar – D – Brooks Bandits
Continuing his now annual tradition of over-drafting defensemen with the 5th overall pick, Jim Benning selects the prospect that has more hype behind his name than anyone else. Cale Makar is an exceptional skater that has tremendous skill, but is he the best defenseman in the draft? Some think Makar is the real deal, while other believe the hype train is running out of control. The undersized, puck-moving defender is going to give us a glimpse of which one is true next year in the NCAA.
Adding Makar to Juolevi give the Canucks and their fans a future blueline to get excited about and regardless of how the rest of the draft turns out, Jim Benning is going to leave a happy man – even if the rest of us believe he spent two top-5 picks reaching on questionable picks.
6-Vegas Golden Knights – Gabe Vilardi – F – Windsor Spitfires
When George McPhee sat down at the draft table Friday night, he almost certainly didn’t expect Vilardi to fall into his lap at #6. The tall, rangy forward fought through injuries to become one of the best draft eligible players in the last few months of the OHL season.
Vilardi spent a lot of the season in Windsor playing the wing, but whichever NHL drafts him will likely do so with the intention of keeping him at center full-time. He’s a decent skater that has the potential to get a lot better if a development team can get a few hitches out of his stride. He’s very good with the puck on his stick and spent the year giving many OHL fans flashbacks to Eric Staal’s time in the league.
In a draft that lacks the star power of the past few, Vilardi is a very good piece to build around and Vegas could do a lot worse with their first pick in franchise history.
7-Minnesota Wild (from Arizona Coyotes) – Owen Tippett – RW – Mississauga Steelheads
Pre-expansion trade: Matt Dumba for #7 Overall
The Coyotes already own Minnesota’s first-round pick thanks to a deadline deal for Martin Hanzal. Now the teams link up again to send Arizona’s 7th overall to the Wild in exchange for a player that fills a huge hole for the Yotes. In Dumba, Arizona gets the top-4 RD they desperately need. The team is loaded with high-end young talent and this is the time they move long-term future assets in exchange for immediate help.
The Wild are not going to be able to protect all the players they would like in the expansion draft – as a result, they move the young RD for a significant asset as opposed to losing him to Vegas for nothing.
In Tippett, the Wild get the bet pure scorer in the draft and a guy that isn’t going to be your star player but will make a very fine top-6 compliment.
8-Tampa Bay Lightning (from Buffalo Sabres) – Miro Heiskanen – D – HIFK
Draft day trade: #8 Overall for #14 + #45 + #76
When Miro Heiskanen started to fall out of the top-5, Steve Yzerman started to make calls. The young Finn was outstanding in the U-18 tournament and is going to be the best defenseman to come out of this draft class. He’s smart and confident with the puck and having already played a season of professional hockey in Finland, he’s likely ready to come over and start his North American hockey journey.
The Sabres need a defenseman themselves, but new General Manager Jason Botterill won’t be able to turn down the value he recieves to move down a half dozen picks. The assets he recieves will provide more resources as he begins to remake the Sabres in his image.
“We Have A Trade To Announce”
The Montreal Canadiens have traded Alex Galchenyuk to the New York Rangers for Derek Stepan. In another one of Marc Bergevin’s hilariously nearsighted moves, he gives up on Alex Galchenyuk way too early in exchange for a player that is older, slower and much more expensive. At this point, the Habs have to go all in and this is a move that Bergevin feels would help his win-now philosophy. A year after the Brassard for Zibanejad trade, the Rangers once again identify a GM willing to give up on talent that doesn’t “fit” with his team.
9-Detroit Red Wings – Timothy Liljegren – D – Rogle BK
Knowing they have a long rebuild ahead of them, the Red Wings take Liljegren with the intention of bringing him along slowly and hoping that his rough draft year was an anomaly caused by injuries. The right-handed puck-mover came into this year as the consensus #2 in the draft. He is immensely talented and is a guy that will be very interesting to watch develop in Sweden next season.
10-Florida Panthers – Lias Andersson – F – HV71
Andersson is an interesting prospect that has been getting some love from scouts in Bob McKenzie’s polls. He is a 200-foot player that has spent the past few years playing against competition above his age. He is a late 1998 birth-date that spent most of the season playing in the SHL. He ‘s looked very good for Sweden in international competition and is |
old: U.S. military equipment, training, and support will build strategic relationships with partner nations and then empower them to fight terrorists on our behalf.
This thinking has led to explosive growth of military aid since 2001. According to the Security Assistance Monitor, the United States is poised to spend almost $20 billion on foreign military assistance in 2016 alone, through programs scattered between the State Department and the Pentagon.
In practice, this logic is severely flawed. Rather than creating cooperative partners, research shows that military aid produces reverse leverage: The more aid given to a recipient country, the less likely it is to do what we want. For example, Pakistan receives $1.6 billion in U.S. military aid every year, but the Pakistani government still supports extremist groups in Afghanistan and has deep ties to the Haqqani terrorist network.
The reason lies with the incentives that U.S. military aid creates.
Limitless and beyond the view of the public, U.S. military aid is a tap foreign governments don’t want to turn off. The longer they’re “fighting terrorists,” the more “security assistance” they get. There’s no reason for them to actually defeat terrorists, because if they did, the cash would go away. Instead, foreign security partners are incentivized to maintain a form everlasting instability, wherein nobody wins and everybody loses.
Unfortunately, the U.S. taxpayer isn’t the only victim. The crimes committed by U.S.-funded security forces are too many to list, but they include bombing weddings in Yemen, sexually abusing children in Afghanistan, and blowing up tourists in Egypt. Western support of these outrages is seldom lost on the local victims.
The perverse irony is that this type of behavior — underwritten and enabled by the United States — is perpetuating terrorism. Research has shown that nothing recruits terrorists like corrupt security forces committing human rights abuses with impunity.
Kenya illustrates this dynamic well. After the horrific attack at the Westgate Mall in 2013, Kenya responded with aggressive policing tactics, arresting and mistreating thousands of Kenyan Somalis and Muslims. That brutal response, however, helped al-Shabaab by inciting anger across the country.
After last month’s attack in Paris, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for a more aggressive strategy to counter terrorism. Days later, the State Department finalized a $1.29 billion sale of targeted bombs to Saudi Arabia. It’s hard not to note the irony: How exactly would extending the coercive arm of oppressive states like Saudi Arabia improve counterterrorism efforts?
After 15 years of letting the military take the lead in fighting terrorism, policymakers need to accept that political problems demand political and diplomatic solutions, which are seldom found on the path of least resistance. But the tools needed — robust diplomacy, accountability mechanisms, democracy support — are starved of funding.
As U.S. military assistance grows every year, support for democracy shrinks. During Obama’s tenure in office, democracy assistance funding has declined by almost 30 percent. And while the Pentagon is slated to receive over $600 billion in funding, the State Department and foreign aid account will be lucky to get $50 billion.
By relying on military aid, the United States is fostering a world of endless war and insecurity. For the United States’ so-called security partners, that’s good for business.Griffith's Aboriginal Research Fellow Dale Kerwin said the task was a difficult one, and until questions were asked of the Commonwealth Department of Veterans' Affairs and the Australian War Memorial by brisbanetimes.com.au this week, there had been little interest in tracking the trackers. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," Dr Kerwin said. "I've written to the Prime Minister and the premier of this state asking for some financial assistance and nothing is coming. "They've wished me all the best and I've applied for grants all over the place but no one is interested in this story." Fought between the British and colonial forces and the Dutch- descended free settlers - or Boers - the Boer war saw extensive use of guerrilla tactics by the settlers and brutal use of force by the British.
The British tried any method to reduce the advantages the Boers had in using guerrilla warfare including officially condoned murder of Boer prisoners by Australian Lieutenant Henry `The Breaker' Morant. In 1902, the head of colonial forces, Lord Kitchener, asked Australia's first Prime Minister Edmund Barton to send indigenous bushmen with knowledge of hunting and tracking to act as scouts to locate Boer fighters. When Australian forces withdrew later that year, the four trackers are thought to have been left behind, forced to live out their days on foreign soil. We were seen as less than human in those days. We were less than the flora and the fauna at the time and government was just waiting for us to die out. Dr Kerwin believes the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 - known as the White Australia Policy and which prevented non-white landing - was to blame. It meant the men would have had to have applied to return home and funded their own passage.
"No one cared," Dr Kerwin said. "We were seen as less than human in those days. We were less than the flora and the fauna at the time and [the Australian Government] were just waiting for us to die out." Dr Kerwin has enlisted the help of a UK researcher to help with the project, scouring war archives across two continents. Indigenous historian and author David Huggonson has also provided some assistance on the valuable role the trackers played in the war effort. In his book The Black Trackers of Bloefontein, Huggonson recounts the story of an Aboriginal man known only as Billy who tracked five British officers across the South African veldt (or open plain) proving the abilities of the trackers by finding all the men and bringing back evidence of their presence.
"The tracker, first stating that the men had chosen their various routes...described how one had got off his horse and had then proceeded to light his pipe, producing the half burnt match to prove it," Huggonson wrote. "One man whom the boy describes as a `silly fellow' because he had gone in his socks, had cut his foot at one point, and gone lame for the rest of the journey; a piece of fluff from a sock was brought back as one proof." So impressive were the bushmen's skills, Australian officers in South Africa at the time had wagered on their abilities to win a bet with the British. Dr Kerwin believes the trackers came from North Queensland and may have been drawn from the Queensland mounted police force due to their required skills in weaponry, horsemanship and military discipline. After being contacted by brisbanetimes.com.au on Friday, Gary Oakley, curator at the Australian War Memorial and head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and Services Association of Australia, said the memorial was keen to investigate the plight of the lost men.
"The project we are working on at the moment is to try and document all indigenous Australians who ever served in the defence force or worked for the defence force in a capacity such as trackers or auxillaries," he said. "We would be very interested in their story. These people were employed by defence for a specific purpose and basically the Australian Government let them down." Dr Kerwin said he wanted to raise the profile of the contribution of Aboriginal Australians in some of the nation's most historic events. "At school when we do history and presentations to our peers its all about the dominant cultural history and it doesn't give [indigenous Australians] any self esteem from the contribution we've made," he said. "We've made a lot of contributions: these men who went to the Boer War and the capture of Ned Kelly just to name a couple."Recently Four Winds Brewery in Delta, BC created a special beer specifically for a local Farmhouse Beer Festival. People were so excited for this beer, they apparently lined up for over 60 minutes during the six hour festival just try a 4 oz sample of it. Well, finally they decided to release their other barrel’s worth of the limited beer named Edna in a one day sale exclusively at the brewery. This release was limited to a maximum of 500 bottles and was advertised via a simple Facebook post and Tweet, which in turn became a viral calling for all of the local beer geeks in the area who clearly made plans to stop by the brewery that day in hopes of getting some. Bottle limits were set a two per person, so only the first 250 people would be able to grab it, a decision I respect and applaud as it allows avid fans a true chance at getting it. This was truly a great example of viral marketing, something I don’t even think the brewery intended to do, but inevitably happened anyway. Oh yeah, did I mention this was all for a Cranberry Crabapple Sour Farmhouse Ale, not exactly your run-of-the-mill high demand product, but definitely a unique offering.
I arrived an hour before they opened and was thankfully the eleventh person in line. Shortly after I got there small waves of people started to line up behind me and as the line grew, people were frantically messaging their best beer pals and telling them to get there quickly if they wanted a chance to buy this release. Meanwhile the brewery staff, who were seeing the line grow rapidly, smartly decided to organize their cases into pre-arranged bags of two 500mL bottles priced at $26 per pair to smooth out the purchasing process. If you didn’t get there by about 12:30 (thirty minutes after they opened the brewery) then you likely missed out and were stuck enviously gawking at all the social media check-ins and Instagram posts that followed, having to live this one vicariously through your online beer buddies instead of trying it yourself. An hour later, about five minutes after opening time I had my two bottles in front of me at the bar while I enjoyed a different beer with a friend and watched the organized chaos of a fairly large lineup of people trying to get their hands on this limited gem of a beer.
On the way home from the release, I started to reflect on this experience and how certain happenings in the craft beer industry have lead up to the point where people will wait an hour or longer for a mere litre of unique beer on a chance that they might end up liking it. In fact the crazy revelation in my head was that, most likely anyway, all of us who waited and got the beer felt that this was a very valuable way to spend a few hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon. After pondering this epiphany, I have personally concluded that the driving forces behind this feeling are centered around three things: the fear of missing out (FOMO), the awesome feeling of being a part of something even remotely special, and finally the fact that pretty much anyone in that line was more than willing to spend an hour or two talking about craft beer!
Now FOMO is a real thing in life and is a huge driver of purchasing habits in the craft beer community. When your favourite brewery puts the words “limited” or “small batch” on a bottle, us beer geeks flip out and do almost everything we can to get a hold of at least one bottle before it inevitably sells out. Whether it be the enticing desire of another unique check-in (typically with a good “toast” ratio) or the general “gotta catch em all” attitude of almost any craft beer enthusiast out there these days, the fear of missing out on something special causes us to do pretty unusual things in life for a unique beer. Some people pay enormous prices online for hard to find beers just to be able to say they tried them, others wait 12 hours in line to get first Pliny The Younger at Russian River Brewery in California. Honestly it’s like any other hobby where the desire to complete the collection is rather compelling and if you’re not on top of your game you’ll probably miss something seemingly important. Craft beer FOMO is built up over scarcity, reputation of the brewer, quality of their limited releases and quite frankly what others say about the beer in advance – when your friends brag about something, you tend to want to get in on it too.
There’s also something fun about lining up at one of your favourite breweries with a bunch of like minded people who are also waiting for same special release and frankly it’s kind of awesome to be a part of something like this. Very, very few people will ever get a change to try this beer and let’s face it, there’s an exclusivity factor that goes along with being one of those few people who got one. Comments of “lucky you” and “full of envy” on social media certainly help assert these feelings and like any other limited item, there is a cool factor associated with it because so few others got one too. For us beer geeks, it is the equivalent to seeing a movie on opening night at midnight, owning a rare piece or art, or getting front row seats for your favourite band at their next concert. As an enthusiastic fan this stuff just simply seems to matter.
Talking about beer with a couple hundred other folks who have a pretty solid beer knowledge base is always a fun thing to do. Each of us in line all had something in common, our prolific love for beer, so it was easy to get a conversation going while waiting in line and time went by pretty quickly in doing so. I had a blast comparing notes on recent releases with the guy in front of me and had some fun chatting with a couple behind me who were moving back to Vermont soon (bless their souls). We even came up with some fun ideas for the next limited release line, like brewing a batch of beer in the parking lot while waiting in line or maybe next time bringing some coffee or breakfast stout and making a little tailgate party out of it (with a designated driver of course). I almost felt like I was waiting in line at Disneyland, anticipating the cool thing at the end that would be totally worth the wait. The whole concept may sound a little odd, but waiting in line for a special beer is kind of a fun time or at least a lot more pleasant that it initially sounds like it might be. When in a crowd of people who doing the same thing that you are for similar reasons, it’s always an interesting experience that makes you feel connected in some way.
In conclusion, I felt that my experience exemplifies what craft beer is all about, chasing down those unique and interesting experiences with other like minded folks and having a great time doing so in almost any situation. Sometimes these experiences happen in a glass at home on your own, sometimes they happen with friends at the bar and sometimes they happen before you even open up that special bottle of beer. As I am writing this, I still haven’t tried the beer, but it is calling me from my refrigerator every day so that exciting moment will happen soon enough. Limited, small batch releases are for the super fans in the craft beer world and so far I’ve been pretty excited to be a part of that experience from time to time, making the most of it when it happens. Don’t worry if you feel like you missed out though, there’s always another awesome release just around the corner and a new beer or brewery just waiting to be discovered.
I’m curious, have you ever waited in line for a special release? How did it feel to you? Was it fun? Was it worth it? Please leave a comment or two below as I’d love to hear your thoughts.
RelatedMontana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials will hold five public hearings in August to find out if there’s a place for bison on the Montana landscape. The first two hearings are scheduled next week in Bozeman and Billings. Bison are managed both as a wildlife species, and for disease control because of brucellosis.
MontanaFWP spokesman Ron Aasheim says the focus of these public hearings is the draft Environmental Impact Statement on bison conservation and management.
That document offers four alternatives and includes the possibility of restoration of a publicly-managed bison herd on private and/or public lands of willing landowners; on tribal lands; or on a large landscape with minimal conflicts with livestock. The last alternative is "no action".
"Bison are an intriguing, controversial, contentious species to talk about, and what this is, one of the final steps in determining whether there’s the possibility of bison restoration somewhere in Montana where they can be managed as a native species," Aasheim says. No predetermined outcomes. We’re just going to ask the public what they think and we’re going to get an earful."
Aasheim says these will be formal public hearings. FWP officials will briefly introduce the topic, but the main purpose is to listen to the public.
He says the draft EIS does not identify any specific site or sites, nor bison herd. He says if it is the wish of the public to move forward with bison conservation and management there will be further analysis and a site-specific environmental assessment.
The first hearing is Tuesday in Bozeman, followed by another Wednesday in Billings. All hearings begin at 6:00 p.m. Other hearings will be held later in August in Great Falls, Malta, and Miles City.
FWP is accepting comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement on bison conservation and management on their website.For those attending the 10th annual Battered Mothers Custody Conference last year, it was a rare moment of recognition by a U.S. government official that courts were forcing children into abusive relationships.
Two months earlier, President Obama had signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Rosenthal explained that a portion of that legislation was written with the family court system in mind. “The success of the Violence Against Women Act is to fund initiatives, evaluate them and then replicate them around the country,” Rosenthal said. “We want to do that in the family court system.”
Another speaker at the conference was not convinced any amount of training could fix the U.S. family court system. Just 20 months earlier at age 16, Damon told the remarkable story of how he ran away to Las Vegas and convinced a random woman on the street to marry him so that he could be legally emancipated, freeing him from a California judge’s decision that forced him to live with his father. A local Fox reporter filmed the wedding. “The family court judge had issued a final order. I was going to be under his complete control until I was 18, despite me constantly saying that he sexually abused me, that I wasn’t safe with him and that I didn’t want to live with him,” said Damon, who had posted videos on Youtube pleading for help.
The number of court officials who had chosen not to protect him reveals a system that has developed a culture of ignoring children’s cries for help. “I had 30 professionals fail me, six judges wouldn’t protect me,” he said. “I told my story to over a dozen social workers, policemen and psychologists. Family court covered up evidence, destroyed my mother and put me in danger. Two judges said on the record that it didn’t matter if I was abused... this isn’t rare — not only is it not rare it is common. It’s an epidemic.
“One in five children are sexually abused and many of those are endangered by the family court system.”
About 58,000 children a year are ordered to have unsupervised contact with an abusive parent in the United States -- over twice the yearly rate of new childhood cancer, according to the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, a non-profit organization that promotes the ethical application of psychology.
When parents are getting a divorce, it can spur a child to reveal abuse for the first time. Unfortunately, divorce is also the time children are least likely to be believed by officials, according to a Leadership Council study funded by the Department of Justice. “Violence in families usually remains invisible to those outside the family because family members are reluctant to jeopardize the integrity of the family by reporting it,” according to the study, which was presented at a Congressional briefing. “When the family unit is split up during divorce, there is less incentive for victims of family violence to keep their abuse secret.”
Family courts have embraced discredited psychiatric theories such as parental alienation syndrome, where one parent is blamed for a child’s strong negative feelings about the other parent to the point that abuse claims are not taken seriously, the study observed. DeAnn Salcido, a former family court judge in California, told SF Weekly in 2011, “I was basically told to be suspect of anyone claiming abuse. I had senior judges telling me, ‘Be suspect. The dad probably has a new girlfriend, and the mom’s upset.’”
Salcido said that privately among court officials, the concept of parental alienation arose “all the time.”
In her speech at the mothers’ conference, Rosenthal offered a broader explanation for why family courts often dismiss a woman’s claim that she or her child is being abused. “The root of this is a view that women lie,” Rosenthal said. “It’s a deeply entrenched view in our culture that there is something about women that makes us not truthful, manipulative and scheming to get a leg up.”
Acknowledging that the steps the federal government has taken to stop child custody abuse have been “woefully inadequate,” Rosenthal told the more than 100 parents in the room — many who have not seen their children for years and fear daily for their safety — that change is going to take time.
She ended her speech with a quote from an equal rights activist in the 1970s. “We are in for a very long haul. I am asking for everything you have to give. You will lose your youth, your sleep, your patience, your sense of humor and, occasionally, the understanding and support of the people you love very much. In return I have nothing to offer but your pride in being a woman and all the dreams you ever had for daughters and nieces and granddaughters, your future and a certain knowledge that at the end of your days, you will be able to look back and say that once in your life you gave everything you had for justice.”
This is the fourth in a series of articles for Daily Kos about the treatment of abused children in the U.S. family court system. M.C. Moewe is a former criminal justice and investigative reporter for several newspapers with a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Texas. Email m AT moewe.com or use this link.In a monumentous decision, a federal judge has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove longstanding age and point of sale restrictions that prevent women from easy access to emergency contraception. The FDA has 30 days to comply. It's about damn time.
As it stands, emergency contraceptives are only available to women 17 and older without a prescription; younger teenagers need a prescription from a doctor. But even older women can have a hard time getting their hands on the morning after pill, since it's only for sale at health clinics and pharmacies — and because some pharmacists take it upon themselves to (very illegally) play moral police.
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Multiple studies have shown that all kinds of women — old and young, married and single, from all ethnicities and education levels — depend on emergency contraception to prevent unintended pregnancy. Even pediatricians think teens should have unrestricted access to Plan B. Near the end of 2011, it looked like things might change for the better when Teva Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of Plan B One-Step, filed a supplemental new drug application with the FDA to ensure that the drug would be available OTC for women of all ages.
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But U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebilius blocked the FDA commissioner's approval of the application, even though it included additional data that confirmed its safety for all-ages use. The next day, President Obama publicly supported Sebelius's decision, "as a father of two daughters." Blergh.
Thankfully, the Center for Reproductive Rights' renewed its lawsuit against the agency seeking to expand over-the counter access to all brands of the morning-after pill, such as Plan B One-Step and Next Choice, to women of all ages, and now they've won! In his decision today, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Korman called the actions by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebilius "politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent." He continued: "The decisions of the Secretary with respect to Plan B One-Step and that of the FDA with respect to the Citizen Petition, which it had no choice but to deny, were arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable."
"Today science has finally prevailed over politics," Nancy Northup, president and CEO for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. "This landmark court decision has struck a huge blow to the deep-seated discrimination that has for too long denied women access to a full range of safe and effective birth control methods.
"Women all over the country will no longer face arbitrary delays and barriers just to get emergency contraception. It's a true victory for all women, especially young women, women without government-issued identification, and those who live in areas with limited pharmacy hours."
There are still some crucial unanswered questions — how affordable will it be, for one — and the government hasn't yet said whether it'll file an appeal, but the decision is still cause for instant celebration. It's ridiculous that it's taken this long for the government to OK a totally safe medication, but it's great timing, considering the growing number of companies that are fighting Obamacare's contraceptive mandate in court. Women of all ages need access to emergency contraception — and, in just 30 days, they should be able to purchase it as easily as aspirin.“ He's fast and he's brutal. Killed about a dozen of my men with a goddamn driver iron. Hence his name. ” Major Dhatri
Driver Nephi is a leading member of the Fiends, serving under Motor-Runner. He lives in the southwest corner of the Fiend compound around the South Vegas ruins east entrance in 2281.
Contents show]
Background Edit
Driver Nephi can be found alongside six other Fiends in a burned-out building north of the Samson rock crushing plant, and south of the South Vegas Ruins East Entrance. He is nicknamed for the unique golf club he carries with him into battle: Nephi's golf driver.
Nephi is on Major Dhatri's hit list for the quest Three-Card Bounty. Dhatri states that 1st Recon had previously been sent to kill Nephi, but proved unsuccessful after multiple attempts, as Nephi tends to use his own men as meat-shields to protect himself, and is also tough enough to have managed to survive despite 1st Recon snipers having managed to land at least a couple confirmed shots on him.
Major Dhatri also warns that Nephi is exceptionally fast, having earned his nickname by managing to kill a dozen armed NCR troopers in melee combat before they even knew what hit them. In fact, he moves 25% faster than a normal human non-player character. Bert Gunnarsson will comment on Driver Nephi's passing after his death, but will not elaborate further on any prior relationship he had to Nephi or the Followers of the Apocalypse.
Fallout: New Vegas cut content and has not been confirmed by The following is based onand has not been confirmed by canon sources.
Cut dialogue suggests that they are both former Mormons from New Canaan.
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Interactions with the player character Edit
Interactions overview Edit
General Services Quests Essential: Companion: Plays Caravan: Merchant: Repairman: Doctor: Rents bed/room: Starts quests: Involved in quests: Three-Card Bounty
Quests Edit
Three-Card Bounty: Driver Nephi is one of the Fiend leaders that Dhatri tasks the player with killing.
Inventory Edit
Notes Edit
Fallout: New Vegas cut content and has not been confirmed by The following is based onand has not been confirmed by canon sources.
Driver Nephi has an unused unique dialogue tree in the GECK, in which the player can ask him basic questions about himself, his golf club, Violet, and Cook-Cook. This dialogue also reveals that Nephi is from Utah, and was once a friend of Bert Gunnarsson and a member of the Mormon Church before he fell under the influence of the Fiends and became Driver Nephi. It was also possible to inform Nephi that the Courier wanted to check on him on the behalf of Bert, in which Nephi stated he would never go back to the church.
Fallout: New Vegas cut content. End of information based on
Driver Nephi's headless corpse will not disappear as a regular fiend's corpse will.
He is one of the few named characters that are affected by the Sneering Imperialist perk.
Notable quotes Edit
Fallout: New Vegas cut content and has not been confirmed by The following is based onand has not been confirmed by canon sources.
" Fuckin' A right it is. This baby's my life, my love, my strong right arm. Killed a lot of fuckers with this hunk of iron, yessir. "
" " Huh? Oh, lots. More than any other Fiend - hundreds, maybe. Wham, bam, "oh god, my brains, you hit me in my brains." Easy as that. "
" "Get fucked."
Fallout: New Vegas cut content. End of information based on
Appearances Edit
Driver Nephi appears only in Fallout: New Vegas.
Behind the scenes Edit
Driver Nephi's name may be a reference to Nephi (pronounced /ˈniːfaɪ/) which is the name of four prominent individuals in the Book of Mormon, the religious text read by the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints, and also the name of a city in Juab County, Utah. Driver Nephi may have received his name because of his affiliation with the Mormons at New Canaan prior to becoming a Fiend (mentioned in the cut dialogue found in the GECK).
In dialogue with Major Dhatri he says "let him get close and he'll take your head off" this is in reference to the Book of Mormon story where Nephi beheads Laban, an evil steward, although, in the Book of Mormon, Nephi does not wish to kill him.
Bugs Edit
Xbox 360 Driver Nephi is not marked as a respawning non-player character in the GECK, but scripting issues may rarely cause him to respawn some time after killing him. [verified]This week, a New York Times op-ed declared that there's been a "seismic shift" in America's habits. Namely, people seem to be demanding healthier food and turning away from processed fare and "artificial" ingredients.
As evidence, authors Hans Taparia and Pamela Koch cited several promising trends. Soda consumption is down, for example. More consumers are rejecting McDonald's and opting instead for "fast casual" options like Sweetgreen. They also noted that food companies have been revamping their products in response to consumer demand: "General Mills will drop all artificial colors and flavors from its cereals. Perdue, Tyson and Foster Farm have begun to limit the use of antibiotics in their chicken." And so on.
But does this really add up to healthier eating? It doesn't seem so — at least not yet.
When you dig into the data, at a macro level, Americans are still eating very poorly, even consuming fewer fresh fruits and vegetables compared with six years ago. The newest figures show the obesity rate is actually on the rise. So McDonald's may be seeing a slump in sales, but it will take a lot more than a few salad chains to improve America's diet.
It's true that Americans are drinking less soda
As the above graphic shows, soda production is down, which is the best indicator that consumption is also on the decline.
The consumption of sugary breakfast cereals has also dropped over time as more wholesome options like yogurt have become more popular. And a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs found that Americans are also eating less trans fat (which increases the risk of heart disease and death) and more fiber — indicators of improvements in overall nutrition.
But we're still not eating nearly enough fruits and vegetables
But here's the flip side: A few positive trends aren't making much of a dent in eating patterns that remain, overall, pretty terrible.
For example, Americans still aren't eating nearly enough fruits and vegetables. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013 fewer than 10 percent of American adults ate the recommended helping of vegetables; fewer than 15 percent consumed the recommended amount of fruit.
And those numbers have actually been getting worse over time. As you can see in the chart above, America's per capita consumption of fruit and vegetables has declined since 2009.
Even these figures may understate the problem. Potatoes — which aren't the healthiest choice, particularly when fried — are still far and away the most popular vegetable in the US.
Consumption of fruits and vegetables is a crucial health indicator. As the CDC put it, "Eating more fruits and vegetables adds nutrients to diets, reduces the risk for heart disease, stroke, and some cancers, and helps manage body weight when consumed in place of more energy-dense foods."
The overall obesity rate is climbing
And here's perhaps the best evidence that healthier eating hasn't caught hold just yet: About 38 percent of adults in America were obese in 2013-'14 — up from 32 percent in 2003-'04. Among youth, the obesity rate has stayed flat since 2003–'04 despite the major push to address childhood obesity.
When it comes to obesity, there's huge variation among demographic groups, with black and Hispanic Americans having the highest rates. The data shows that nearly half of black American adults and 42 percent of Hispanic Americans were obese in the period from 2011 to 2014. And it's quite plausible that income plays a role here.
The groups with the highest rates of obesity are also the poorest
As it happens, black and Hispanic Americans are also the racial and ethnic groups with especially high percentages of individuals living below the poverty line. This suggests that whatever positive trends in nutrition might currently be unfolding — a decline soda consumption, the broader availability of healthy fast food — they aren't being shared across the income spectrum.
Bottom line: America's overall eating habits remain pretty terrible, and the rise of Sweetgreen hasn't really made a dent, at least not yet.TRENTON, NJ - JANUARY 21: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie listens to a speaker after being sworn in for his second term on January 21, 2014 at the War Memorial in Trenton, New Jersey. Christie begins his second term amid controversy surrounding George Washington Bridge traffic and Hurricane Sandy relief distribution. (Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)
The players may change from cycle to cycle but the game and its essential elements do not. There is only one question to be answered as to 2016 in the consideration of any candidate.
Can he win?
No, not can he win the Republican nomination but can he win the general election? Anything less is an exercise in futility akin to celebrating the joys of kissing your sister. To put it another way, here in Los Angeles, Lakers fans don't celebrate winning the Pacific Division. The goal is the championship ring. We don't concern ourselves with the question of whether the team can win the division or even the conference.
The GOP should take a page from the Lakers' fanbook. In the consideration of candidates to vie for the White House in 2016, there should be only one question to consider.
"Can he win?" Simply winning the Republican nomination would be a short-sighted and wrong-headed strategy to employ.
No, I didn't say "she" and yes, I consciously omitted any such consideration. It would be harder for a woman to win the Republican nomination than to win the Oval Office. Let's not romanticize the issue and such a reality should give the party great concern.
Thank Sarah Palin in part for that. The anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment expressed by the party doesn't help either. Yes, I know... it's all Benghazi-related (wink, wink). That whole Senate report and embarrassing CBS sham of an exposé never happened (wink, wink). Aside from that, there will not be two women vying for the presidency at the same time. If Sec. Clinton runs, that further negates the possibility of a female Republican candidate at the top of the ticket.
But I digress...
The answer to the question of "can he win" is answered with respect to whether a candidate can carry or seriously compete for a demographic other than white men. If Mitt Romney's candidacy said anything about the future of American politics, it's that ethnic and gender coalition building are essential and inarguable. As President Clinton said, "it's mathematics."
And speaking of math...
In round numbers there are approximately 169 million registered voters, roughly 86 million are Democrat, 55 million are Republican. When put into these numerical terms, losing the fight for the emerging Latino vote could be the death knell for the GOP in a generational sense. Presently, 51 percent of registered Latinos are Democrat, 18 percent are Republican. Quoting HispanicsinAmerica2012.com, "Every month for the next two decades, 50,000 Hispanics will turn 18." The white male base of the Republican party is shrinking. The future Latino vote, be it in the form of amnesty or the children of immigrants coming of voting age, will have increasing impact in an exponential sense.
This is where the immigration reform debate is key. If President Obama is unable to pass immigration reform before leaving office, the Democrats will be unable to tout it in the run up to 2016. Conversely, Republicans will remind America that President Obama promised immigration reform in his bid for both election and reelection... yet didn't deliver in a bid to sway Latinos. The GOP wants immigration reform, believe you me; but needs to make sure it both gets the credit if completed during this administration or perceived as dedicated to making it happen in the next one if elected. Otherwise the statistical trend of Latinos voting primarily Democrat will worsen.
The math in this equation also then requires a candidate who at the minimum can pull from centrist Democrats, with all due respect of course to the Electoral College system. The math highlights the "reasons" behind the various Republican-spearheaded voter ID laws. The math doesn't lie.
Now, for the Gov. Chris Christie conundrum...
For many in the GOP, Christie and his broad bipartisan support are unattractive. Imagine that. Christie is supposedly too moderate, too friendly with the Democrats or a RINO (Republican In Name Only) altogether. For many in the party, the only acceptable way to win the Oval Office is without compromise and with strict adherence to the most stringent party ideals. Yes, you want a Republican isn't attractive to Democrats, the dominant party in terms of numbers. Great strategy. That should work out well for you in the long run.
Back to my basketball analogy. You can maybe win a division title (i.e. Republican nomination, or congressional seats) without your best player. But you can't win a championship without him. I get it, Christie isn't Republican-sexy enough. But he's your best player. We've been over the math |
middle of road hit, killed by car
PORTLAND, Ore. (KPTV) — A naked man doing push-ups in the middle of a North Portland street was struck and killed by a car early Sunday morning.
North Precinct officers first responded to the report of a naked man running in traffic near North Columbia Boulevard and Portsmouth Avenue at 4:04 a.m.
While they were en route, police received a second report that the naked man was doing push-ups in the road. Then, they received a third report: he had been struck by a car.
Officers and medical personnel arrived and found the man dead.
The driver who struck the man remained at the scene and was cooperative. The driver was not impaired by alcohol or drugs.
The major crash team responded and investigators learned the driver struck the pedestrian in the roadway while traveling westbound on Columbia Boulevard.
The roadway was closed for several hours during the investigation, but reopened later Sunday.
The Oregon State Medical Examiner will conduct an autopsy, including toxicology, to determine the pedestrian’s cause of death.
The name of the naked man has not been released.Florida Gov. Rick Scott outlines his education budget recommendations Monday, Jan. 27, 2014 during a stop in Delray Beach, Fla. He wants more money for public schools in the coming year, but he's not asking for as big of an increase as he did last year. The Republican governor wants state legislators to boost spending on public schools by $542 million.The Scott administration says that the budget request would result in a record level of nearly $19 billion for schools. (AP Photo/J Pat Carter)
Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling and staunch Republican resistance, Marc Alphonse, an unemployed 40-year-old Marine veteran who is essentially homeless, cannot get health insurance under Obamacare.
Three years ago, Alphonse learned he has a kidney disorder that will deteriorate into kidney failure, and possibly prove fatal, if left untreated. As it stands now, he suffers from bouts of nausea caused by his dysfunctional kidneys, and he's dogged by an old knee injury that limits his job prospects. He gets by on $400 a month in unemployment benefits, and his family can no longer afford housing in their home city of Miami. Alphonse's 28-year-old wife, Danielle, and three young children are staying with relatives while Alphonse couch surfs.
"I live from family to family until I'm able to get myself situated," he told The Huffington Post.
Alphonse is one of nearly 5 million uninsured Americans caught in a cruel gap that renders some Americans "too poor for Obamacare."
Broken Promise
Obamacare was supposed to make health coverage affordable, or even free, for low-income Americans. The law's official name is the Affordable Care Act. However, the Supreme Court tossed a huge obstacle in the path of that goal in 2012, ruling that the states could opt out of one of Obamacare's crucial provisions: The expansion of Medicaid coverage to anyone making less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $15,300 a year for a single person. Since the court's ruling, 24 states, including Florida, chose not to expand the program.
Under the pre-Obamacare rules, eligibility for the program typically was limited to low-income children, pregnant women, parents caring for children at home, and adults with disabilities. Without the law's expansion, an adult without a disability who isn't living with their children -- like Alphonse -- doesn't qualify for Medicaid, no matter how poor he or she is.
For those who don't qualify for Medicaid coverage, Obamacare offers tax credits for private health plans sold through the law's health insurance exchange marketplaces. But those subsidies are available only to those making between the poverty level, or about $11,500 for an individual, and four times that amount. In states not expanding Medicaid, people who earn less than poverty wages get nothing.
In Alphonse's case, his family is trying to survive on his unemployment insurance. It amounts to $4,800 a year -- far below the poverty level, which is $27,570 for a family of five. Even the unemployment benefits will run out in March.
'People Break Down In Tears'
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) launched his political career in 2009 as a health care reform antagonist. Originally, he opposed the Medicaid expansion, but he then changed his mind. Last year, Scott and the majority-Republican state Senate backed a plan to accept federal dollars to expand the program. The GOP-led state House of Representatives refused to go along.
Now, 764,000 low-income adults in Florida will remain without insurance because of the coverage gap, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. And they're beginning to understand the tragic consequences of that public battle. At Miami's Borinquen Medical Centers for low-income and uninsured patients, Jason Connor sees hopes crushed as people who thought Obamacare could help them at long last learn otherwise.
"We've had people break down in tears at our desk," said Connor, who is under contract with the community health centers to do Affordable Care Act outreach and enrollment activities through his company, Choice Returns.
Seventy-eight percent of the 50,000 patients that Borinquen Medical Centers treat every year are uninsured, Connor said. About 20 percent of those who visit their facilities looking to apply for benefits fall into the coverage gap, he added.
"Folks are frustrated and they're angry, and they'll curse at you even though you have nothing to do with it," he said.
GOP Revolts
When the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion, Florida, Texas and nearly the entire South turned away billions in federal dollars offered for broadening the program, citing budgetary concerns and resistance to Obamacare itself. The federal government will pay the full cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016, after which its share will be no less than 90 percent.
These decisions by governors and legislators essentially consigned a huge swath of the very poor to a life of extreme insecurity.
"It's very frustrating," said Alphonse, who last worked as a security guard until being laid off 10 months ago. "It's kind of odd where an individual that has an opportunity to help millions of people in their own state, and they just totally refuse to do it."
Florida's legislature is poised to take up the Medicaid expansion again during this year's session, but the political dynamics don't appear to have changed much since last year. Meanwhile, one-quarter of Florida's population (under the age of 65) is without health insurance -- the second-highest of all the states behind Texas. In Miami-Dade County, where Alphonse lives, the uninsured rate was an astonishing 34 percent in 2011, the most recent year county-level data were available.
Where Are The Uninsured?
This map shows the percent of uninsured in each U.S. county in 2011. The data includes all incomes, races, and both sexes for people under age 65. Source: U.S. Census Bureau
'I Just Try To Live Every Day'
Unable to afford medical care or insurance, Alphonse hasn't followed up on the warning he received about his kidneys from a doctor treating a knee injury he suffered in 2011 while working as a security guard. Alphonse was told he needed to see a kidney specialist and start getting treatments, or he'd risk the condition worsening to the point he'd need dialysis or a transplant.
"It's extremely scary, but I try not to think about it. I just try to live every day because it's what you have to do to survive," Alphonse said.
A few years ago, Alphonse broke his hand and faced a $1,000 emergency room bill that destroyed his credit. He's afraid to rack up medical bills now. Even copayments as low as $20 at community health centers, which charge low-income patients on a sliding scale, are unaffordable, he said. He's applying for health benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs, but he may not meet the program's eligibility rules.
While hospitals can't turn away patients in need of emergency treatments, they aren't required to provide the kind of comprehensive care needed for someone with a serious medical condition.
"If you're really sick, you can fall through the cracks of the safety net system," said Lise Federman, a health policy specialist at Florida Legal Services in Miami. "People who have chronic conditions who need specialist services do suffer." (Florida Legal Services referred HuffPost to Alphonse.)
Taxpayers Still Foot The Bill
Keeping people like Alphonse off the Medicaid rolls doesn't shield American or Floridian taxpayers from the cost of whatever treatments he eventually may receive, like at a hospital emergency room or a government-funded community health center. Unpaid medical bills totaled $57.4 billion in 2008 -- and taxpayers picked up about three-quarters of the tab, according to a study published in the journal Health Affairs. Expanding health coverage via Obamacare was supposed to reduce that burden, but the patchwork Medicaid expansion limits the law's reach.
And if Alphonse's condition deteriorates into what's known as end-stage renal disease, or permanent kidney failure, he automatically would qualify for Medicare coverage paid for by the federal government. Although Medicare mainly is for people over 65 or those with disabilities, people who need dialysis or a kidney transplant are eligible under a special rule enacted in 1972.
For those too poor for Obamacare in Miami, watching neighbors who make more money receive subsidized health insurance makes the experience even more painful, said Mayte Canino, a field and volunteer coordinator for Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast. Uninsured people are skeptical of Obamacare and unaware of many provisions, and only 49 percent know that states have the option to expand Medicaid, according to a poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation this month.
"That even affects them more, when they see that other people are getting help and they're not," said Canino, who helps people sign up for insurance. "Many of them are very unhappy. They blame the law, some of them, for it. They just walk away from it, and they think that's it. They're defeated."The Patriots will start up training camp this week, hoping to capture their 5th Super Bowl victory since 2001. The Patriots had a relatively modest offseason in terms of spending, with their biggest contract being under $10M in total but made a couple interesting trades. The top players on the team nursed injuries and their top QB on the shelf for the first game of the season due to petty jealousy from a good chunk of owners. These 10 players have a lot riding for their NFL future, whether that's establishing themselves on the team or setting themselves up for a future pay day. Most of them are returning from the 2015 season, although some of them are acquisitions that haven't completely worked out in their previous destination and are looking to play themselves into another contract.
QB Jimmy Garoppolo: The Patriots backup QB will get the opportunity of a lifetime, a 4-game trial period where he gets to prove his worth once the season starts. The Patriots drafted a QB in the 3rd round this year in anticipation of Garoppolo getting traded or walking when his contract expires. Those 4 games will determine his future of being either a starter like with Matt Cassel from 2009-2012 in Kansas City or being a career backup like Brian Hoyer, although Hoyer didn't get any starts in New England like Cassel did and Garoppolo will. Depending on the health of the receiving corps, which Pro Football Focus ranks as the best unit, just ahead of the Patriots Week 1 opponent, the Arizona Cardinals, Garoppolo could wind up earning his job elsewhere. OT Marcus Cannon: Cannon was once a solid backup and decent starter as the team's right tackle in the 2nd half of the 2013 season, but struggled mightily the last two years with Deguglielmo coaching the offensive line. The Patriots have gone back to their OL coach from 2013 in Dante Scarnecchia, so there is hope that Cannon can rebound. Cannon is in a contract year along with Sebastian Vollmer, so the team is going to have to make a decision at the right tackle position the next offseason. The Patriots brought back La'Adrian Waddle on a 2-year deal for backup money, so consider Cannon on notice. CB Darryl Roberts: The Patriots' top 3 CBs are Malcolm Butler, Logan Ryan, and Justin Coleman. In addition, they've also added two talented CBs from the SEC in Cyrus and Jonathan Jones (not related) via the draft and rookie free agency. There is only a finite number of roster spots at the position, which I'm arbitrarily counting as 5 right now. Roberts impressed in camp prior to a season-ending wrist injury in the first preseason game last year. The players listed in the top 3 plus Cyrus Jones are locks to make the 2016 roster, so Roberts is going to have to fight hard for the last roster spot. TE Martellus Bennett: Bennett is a lock to make the team, but his performance in camp will determine how much the Patriots will use him for the season. Bennett was once considered to be in the tier just below Rob Gronkowski in his hey day in Chicago, but has fallen off a bit in a system that's less TE friendly than what the Patriots run. If Bennett can show he still has it and can adapt to the system in camp, he may turn into the #3/4 target. With Gronkowski's injury history since 2012, the Patriots need to have a 2nd capable TE that can take pressure off of Gronk to perform when healthy and not completely handicap the offense when he isn't. G Jonathan Cooper: Cooper was a Top 10 pick that just never worked out in Arizona due to a long list of injuries. The Cardinals shipped him off to the Patriots as part of the Chandler Jones trade and a draft pick that turned into Joe Thuney and Malcolm Mitchell. The Patriots will likely give him a chance to prove himself on the field before turning to other players. I have Cooper projected as the team's starting left guard, but that's not set in stone. RB Tyler Gaffney: The Patriots liked Gaffney to the point of claiming him on waivers when the Panthers waived him two seasons ago. However, he has spent both seasons in New England on the Injured Reserve list. The Patriots are in a clear need to determine who could be their early-down back with LeGarrette Blount being the default option. His main competition is Gaffney, who needs to prove he can stay healthy this camp. One more injury may result in the end of his NFL career. G Tre Jackson: The Patriots drafted Jackson as a plug and play guy, but mightily struggled with injuries and ineffectiveness to the point where the Patriots spent a 3rd round pick on an interior lineman in Joe Thuney. At times Jackson looked timid and slow, which was the opposite of his tape at Florida State. Fortunately, having Scarnecchia back might be able to help him teach the proper technique blocking in the offense. At a tightly competitive IOL shuffle, he's going to have to stand out to make the team over the veterans. C David Andrews: Andrews got the start at center when Bryan Stork missed the first half of the season due to a concussion, but was pulled in favor of Stork in the 2nd half. Andrews is a superior pass blocker to Stork, but gets pushed around easier in the run game. The Patriots play against some of the toughest DTs in the league just in their division alone and the play strength issue affects Andrews. Another area he can improve on is the ability to back up at guard in addition to playing center. Stork has the inside track at the starting center job and is a safer roster bet due to his ability to play guard and pinch in at tackle. Andrews has to outright win the center job to justify his roster spot. ED Trey Flowers: The Patriots spent a 4th round pick on Trey Flowers, who I considered a steal at the time because his game was more developed than most defensive ends. Flowers is a power end that collapses the pocket from the outside-in and uses his violent hands to rock back OL and walk them back into the QB. Flowers flashed in the 2015 preseason, using his combination of length and explosiveness to harass QBs while also shutting down the run game from the edge. With Chandler Jones now in Arizona, Flowers has an opportunity to be a large part of the team's pass rush in 2016 as he'll compete with Chris Long for the #3 DE spot behind Jabaal Sheard and Rob Ninkovich. CB Justin Coleman: Coleman played primarily the nickel role for the Patriots when they opted to go with 3 CBs as opposed to 3 safeties and put Patrick Chung in at nickel. Coleman was a workout warrior CB with untapped skill coming into the 2015 season, but had his moments altogether. Coleman is the Patriots 2nd most athletic CB behind Darryl Roberts in terms of timed measurables, but may have as big a ceiling as Malcolm Butler, who is a low-end #1/top-end #2 CB. Coleman isn't going to get the opportunity to play on the boundary in 2016 barring an injury, but you want to see if he improves going into Year 2 because the team controls him through 2017 before he becomes a restricted free agent in 2018.After some initial uncertainty as to how they would try and dismantle the Affordable Care Act, Republican leaders in Congress seem to be settling on a strategy: Vote to repeal the health reform law as soon as possible but delay implementing the repeal for several years while they figure out what should replace it.
This sort of political logic is fantastically risky and has failed in the recent past, but Republicans are impelled to go down this path because they made political promises that they have to keep, even if it means putting health coverage for millions of Americans at risk.
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But House Speaker Paul Ryan is confident that not only will this incredibly risky repeal plan work, it will go off without so much as a single person seeing any disruption in his or her health insurance coverage status during the transition period between Obamacare’s repeal and its replacement.
“Clearly there will be a transition and a bridge so that no one is left out in the cold, so that no one is worse off,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “The purpose here is to bring relief to people who are suffering from Obamacare so that they can get something better.”
There is little reason to believe this is true.
Obamacare “repeal” can come in many different forms, but the most likely (and quickest) way for Republicans to go about it will be through budget reconciliation, which will enable them to obviate a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Reconciliation will allow them to repeal the parts of Obamacare they hate the most: the mandates, the premium subsidies, the Medicaid expansion and the taxes on rich people that fund the legislation.
But, as Ryan said, there will be a “transition” period during which some of those provisions — likely the subsidies and Medicaid payments to the states — will continue, probably until safely after the 2018 midterm elections.
This probably won’t make all that much of a difference for next year, given that health insurers have already signed agreements to participate in the state exchanges for 2017. For 2018, however, it poses a big problem, given that insurers will likely decide that there’s no point in renewing their commitment to the exchanges.
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“Many insurers are already losing money on their marketplace offerings,” NPR reported earlier this fall. “If they know that the health insurance marketplaces are being eliminated and replaced by something else in 2019, why would they stick with a sinking ship?”
If those insurers bail, then consumers will lose their ability to buy federally subsidized health plans, which would leave them, to use Ryan’s words, “worse off” and “left out in the cold.”
There is a way around this. Republicans could move to subsidize the insurers and help cover whatever losses they might incur from participating in the exchanges during the “transition.” In fact, congressional Republicans are, according to The Hill already “in talks with insurers about policies they could implement to help improve their financial situation in that interim period and prevent a breakdown in the market.”
The Affordable Care Act already has mechanisms in place to incentivize insurers to participate in the exchanges and protect them against excessive losses. So Republicans are essentially trying to blow a hole in Obamacare and also temporarily patch that hole with more Obamacare.
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But that’s easier said than done. Those provisions of the ACA that protect insurers from market losses were viciously (and falsely) attacked by Republicans in Congress as insurance company “bailouts.” Ryan himself as sounded the alarm about “massive insurance company bailouts in the near future with Obamacare.”
Republican senators introduced legislation just last month to block the administration from using taxpayer money to “shore up the finances of Obamacare insurers.” There is a high level of political animosity among Republicans toward using taxpayer dollars to assist insurers participating in Obamacare exchanges.
So what’s going to happen? Well, no one knows. And that’s largely because Republicans like Ryan keep refusing to actually grapple with the realities of repealing and replacing Obamacare. All they know is that they want to get rid of it and replace it with... something.
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Eliminating a piece of legislation as far-reaching and consequential as the Affordable Care Act will obviously have negative consequences. But the speaker has nonetheless set a baseline to judge his party’s actions against: Zero people will be negatively impacted by Congress' voting to repeal Obamacare. We’ll see how well that promise holds up in the real world.It started as a normal date night: Shawn, a bearded graduate student who favors lumberjack plaid, went to Williamsburg for dinner and drinks with his girlfriend. But instead of taking the L train from their Chelsea apartment, they decided to ride Citi Bikes there and back.
A couple of cocktails at the Wythe Hotel led to beers at Mable’s Smokehouse and a nightcap at Post Office, a dive-like whiskey bar. After four or five drinks, they undocked a pair of blue bikes and rode home over the Williamsburg Bridge.
As usual, Shawn sped ahead, and as they ascended over the East River, he turned around to see where his girlfriend was. That’s when he lost his balance, kicked his foot into a bridge railing and broke his toe.
“I really wasn’t that drunk,” said Shawn, 30, who uses the bike-share program about 20 times a week. (Shawn, like many of the people interviewed, asked that his full name not be used; drinking and cycling is not really something to toot your bike horn about.) “I’ve never blackout Citi Biked.”Declared a national historic monument in 1997, the Palacio Barolo was once South America’s tallest building. Whilst this is no longer the case, the building still towers above neighbouring structures and offers one of the best spots to capture panoramic views of the capital and largest city of Argentina. The building constitutes one of the largest monuments to the work of Dante Alighieri, the major Italian poet of the Middle Ages, anywhere in the world, and is a unique example of an attempt to marry literature and architecture.
Entrepreneur and Italian immigrant Luis Barolo commissioned the Italian architect Mario Palanti to design The Palacio Barolo in 1890. Believing that Europe had begun drifting towards a collapse, Luis Barolo intended the building to house the ashes of his hero Dante, away from the disintegrating doom he found in Italy. His partnership with Mario Palanti (also a Dante aficionado) resulted in a safe haven for the soul of Dante in Barolo’s adopted hometown of Buenos Aires.
Luis Barolo and Mario Palanti’s admiration for Dante can be seen throughout the entire structure of the building. The height of one hundred metres corresponds to the one hundred cantos of Dante’s work. The nine access points within the building represent the nine circles and the nine hierarchies of Hell. The still working lighthouse represents the nine angelic choirs. Over the lighthouse is the Southern Cross constellation, aligned with the actual constellation on July 9th, Argentine Independence Day. The care in the detail and reference to the Italian poet is characterised throughout the building right down to the inscriptions in Latin. The overall design structure was also based on the number most prevalent in the Divine Comedy: twenty two. The building’s twenty two floors reflect the number of stanzas in the epic poem, and the building like the work, illustrates the visitors journey through hell, purgatory and paradise as they climb their way to the top. The complex neo-classical façade and tower evoke the expressionist architecture of Spain’s Gaudí whilst also bringing to mind the best examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Paris.
English and Spanish tours are offered Monday and Thursday every hour on the hour from 4 to 7pm, and Saturdays at 5pm (with reservation). Evening tours commence at 8pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, with Thursdays at 8:30pm, which includes a visit to the lighthouse and wine. Daytime tours cost $65 and the night-time tours $130. Towards the end of the tour you are taken to the dizzying heights of ‘paradise’ where you can take photographs from several balconies around the top tower. It is also possible to enjoy the views from inside of the tower without having to step outside for those uneasy with heights.
More Information: Palacio Barolo Avenida de Mayo 1370 Buenos Aires Capital Federal To book a place on the Palacio Barolo tour, click here.NEW DELHI: Two days after fresh cracks were noticed in two piers on the Noida line, the independent consultant appointed to inspect Delhi Metro structures after the Zamrudpur collapse has reported 16 more cracks on the Noida, Badarpur and Gurgaon lines.Even as Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) maintained that the new cracks "seem minor", this has caused panic in the city. People now fear even walking below the under-construction lines.The fresh cracks, which are reportedly hairline ones, are all going to be re-examined in detail. At Aya Nagar, cracks were seen on four piers ��� P-192, P-193, P-203, P-204. Locals say that since Friday evening, the area has been abuzz with inspections and checks.Residents fear that since these pillars are situated on both sides of MG Road, any collapse can lead to serious casualties. "The road is our lifeline," said a worried Shakir Khan, a resident of the area.Sources at the site revealed that several hairline cracks were detected on top of pier caps."It was nothing alarming, but we decided not to take a chance. After we tried chemically treating the cracks, we have now decided to reconstruct a portion of the pillars which has been damaged beyond repair," said an engineer.Investigators are asking for the public's help in getting more information about how a 13-year-old girl from Riverview ended up dead.
Janessa Shannon, 13, was reported missing by her father on July 3. Investigators say she initially disappeared on July 1. On Friday, July 14, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children issued an alert asking for the public's help to find the missing child.
Shannon had gone missing in the past, said Colonel Donna Lusczynski of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.
A body was found on Wednesday, July 12 in the Triple Creek Nature Preserve at 13305 Balm Riverview Road and was badly decomposed. Officials said that they were unable to confirm that it was her and needed a medical examiner to assist them.
HSCO investigators said. With the help of the medical examiner, they determined the remains were the body of Janessa Shannon.
Janessa's family and friends say they're devastated.
"I don't get to say anything to her ever again," said Michelle Mosley, Janessa's mother at a vigil in Palmetto on Sunday. "I can't even have an open casket for my daughter."
Investigators searched the teen's father's home after obtaining a search warrant. That is the last place she was seen, deputies said.
HSCO was tightlipped as to whether Janessa's father is a person of interest.
"We are not focusing on any one person at this time," Lusczynski said at a press conference Monday morning. "We want to make sure we are talking to everybody who could possibly be involved."
Investigators are now going through all of the teen's social media accounts to try and determine where she was and anyone she may have spoken with in the days leading up to her death.
The community and family friends are stepping up to help Janessa's mother lay her daughter to rest.
"We want to let them know they're not alone," said Wayne Washington, a family friend.
But Janessa's family is still consumed with grief.
"This is what I have left: pictures," her mother said. "Memories. And that's all I have left."I was working as a freelance web developer. I signed a contract with a client for an hourly rate because he changed the project requirements often and I saw big red flags each time the client discussed his requirements with me.
Client: Please sign the new contract I sent. It’s identical to the last contract we signed, but I had to change it to show my new company name. I need you to start working this afternoon; I’ve already missed critical deadlines!
I sign it on rightsignature. It’s the seventh new contract, due to the client’s constantly changing company name, project requirements, and schedule.
A few hours later, I notice a discrepancy in the contract.
Me: I signed contract on rightsignature, but after reading it word for word, I cannot agree to work under the terms of your newest contract. You changed the payment terms to be “per project.” I can only agree to hourly payment terms due to the shifting project requirements.
Client: Oops, sorry! I sent you the contract I have with another developer. Ignore it and we will work with the last contract we signed.
I worked for a few months and often convinced the client to stop changes because of the costs for my hourly rates. I was paid on time and as agreed for the first few months.
Some time later, I noticed my payment was not deposited and the client was giving me a new excuse each time I reminded him his payment was overdue. I was in the final phase of the project and working very long hours – it was going to be completed any day. However, the client was taking up a lot of my time talking about how all his other developers left him for no reason and other odd personal drama stories.
With the project being so close to completion, I knew I could be done with all of this drama if I stood my ground and insist I was paid what I was owed. The client’s excuses for not paying me started to get stranger and more comedic, e.g. the bank made a mistake, the client was sick, the client forgot, the client would pay tomorrow, etc.
I stopped all work and the client actually started crying on the phone with me as he begged me to just finish the work that night so that he could pay me the next day. I refused. The client owed me for more than five weeks of pay at this time.
I finally hired a paralegal to help me mediate with the client and to help get the money I was owed for my work.
The client suddenly changed his story and told the courts that he expected me to pay him $50k because I did not complete the project according to that contract that he previously told me he was going to delete off of rightsignature. The client screamed "you are a liar” in the court room, put on a very dramatic show and told stories about how he was very generous when he did pay me for my work.
He’s now suing me for $50k, with his brother-in-law as his lawyer. Please, learn from my mistake.BEIJING (Reuters) - China has removed 27 restrictions in its newly issued negative list for foreign investment in its free-trade zones, its cabinet said on Friday in a notice.
Chinese leaders have pledged to open the world’s second-largest economy wider to foreign investors but a negative list specifying the areas off limits to foreign capital is in place for its eleven free trade zones, which enjoy looser trade and financial regulations on a trial basis.
Among the beneficiaries of the new negative list across more than 20 industries are foreign makers of rail transport equipment and civilian satellites, who will no longer be obliged to enter a joint venture with Chinese partners or let the Chinese side take the majority share.
Previously restricted sectors such as precious metals and lithium mining, as well as internet access services, credit rating services, and large-scale theme park construction are now open to foreign capital.
Rules on banking services, which in the past forbade foreign banks from underwriting Chinese government bonds, have also been eased.
China opened its first free-trade zone in Shanghai in 2013. Since then, ten major provinces and cities such as Zhejiang and Chongqing have been approved to establish such zones.
The State Council, or cabinet, this year announced an easing of curbs on foreign investment, in sectors such as banking, credit ratings and accounting. But it gave no details or timeframe for the relaxation.
Foreign business groups have criticized China’s slow pace of market reforms, saying national security regulations and industrial policies are at odds with its reform goals.The term “global warming” has fallen out of favor, with the all-encompassing “climate change” taking its place. But the planet is getting hotter–just this month, flights were grounded in the Southwestern United States because it was too hot to take off. Now, a graphic from the New York Times shows just how hot the planet might get over the course of the century.
The animated map shows a planet that will be slowly but surely scorched. Created with new data from the Climate Impact Lab, it estimates the number of days that will have temperatures of 95 degrees or higher if countries take moderate action on climate change.
Historical data from 1986 to 2005 shows parts of Saharan Africa being some of the few places on the planet experiencing more than 200 days of 95+ degree heat per year. But the map illustrates how that kind of heat will spread in the years between 2020 to 2059. As the graphic slowly moves from 1986 to the projections for 2099, the swelling magenta color threatens to turn every day into the worst day of summer–without the fun of going to the beach. By the end of the century, a large amount of South America, Australia, North America, Southeast Asia, and southern Europe as well as Africa may also be suffering from upwards of 200 days of this extreme heat every year.
What could such extreme temperatures mean? Electricity use for air conditioning and cooling would likely shoot through the roof, creating more demand for energy–necessary in order to stop heat-related deaths. Even today, thousands of people die in heat waves in places where air conditioning is less common, and it’s frightening to imagine how many lives this projected extreme heat could claim globally. According to one study, extreme heat could cause crop yields to drop dramatically. It could cause widespread famine, disrupt global air travel and the economy, among many other possible outcomes.
Hopefully this scenario won’t come to pass, though it is based on predictions that take into account the Paris Agreement, in which most of the world’s countries (now excepting the U.S. along with Syria and Nicaragua) have pledged to reduce carbon emissions in an effort to keep temperatures rising at a lower rate. It’s another reminder of just what’s at stake in the fight against climate change.An impostor posing as “Gangnam Style” sensation Psy became the toast of Cannes as he partied with stars, scooped up swag, danced on a French TV show and even signed a deal to be honored at a gala in Monaco, before being called out yesterday by the real rapper.
For two days the dead-ringer was showered with champagne and posed for pics with celebrities, including Adrien Brody and Bond girl Naomie Harris, who enthusiastically tweeted a shot with the Psy look-alike at a Chopard party.
Faux Psy (we’ll call him Psych!) was so convincing, photos on Getty Images and other services still ID him as the real McCoy, and there were numerous “Psy sightings” at the Carlton Hotel, VIP Room and Martinez Beach. One jewelry brand even tweeted a photo of the phony wearing its baubles as a plug, and a rep for one bash he crashed Monday insisted to us, “I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure what you mean. It was the real Psy.”
Besides the Chopard party, Psych! attended millionaire oil magnate and fashion designer Goga Ashkenazi and Le Baron’s “secret party” at the Château de Garibondy on Monday. Photos show Faux Psy in sunglasses grabbing a mike behind a DJ booth, cigarette in hand, as duped Ashkenazi and guests go wild. Karolina Kurkova, Jessica Hart and Rosario Dawson attended.
The next day, Psych! was interviewed by France’s Radio Prestige (and even taught a clueless host how to do the “Gangnam” dance) and then headed to hot Torch Beach Club. “He was playing it up full scale,” said a spy. “He had three security guards with him at all times, in suits and earpieces. He was scamming free drinks and bottle service... three bottles of Cristal Rosé with lunch.” Psych! also had a French “manager” with him who negotiated an upcoming appearance at the starry Better World Awards in Monaco.
But an organizer finally e-mailed at 2 a.m. yesterday, “We’ve been duped. I had a conversation with his label... it [wasn’t] him, just a look-alike.” Real Psy tweeted from Singapore, “Seems like there’s another ME at cannes... say Hi to him.”
Harris has updated her Twitter account to say, “It looks as if we’ve been fooled, that wasn’t the real [PSY]! Could anyone else tell from the picture? Or am I just going crazy!? Haha!”
[View the story “PSY calls out fake PSY in Cannes” on Storify]White Evangelicals Believe in Nothing
These people are nihilists. Chip Somodevilla / Getty
Nice bit of eye-popping, soul-crushing, but ultimately predictable data journalism in The New York Times from Thomas B. Edsall this morning. According to a recent poll, during Obama's second term an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals thought immoral politicians couldn't do their jobs, but now an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals think immoral politicians can do their jobs.
Here's a nice little graph to illustrate that claim, which would serve perhaps just as well to illustrate the capriciousness of the Republican moral conscience:
When Obama was in office, only 30% of white evangelicals would forgive a president's immoral behavior. Now it's 72%. https://t.co/c6Fl |
eventually became the GTS would be a complex exercise in cult fragmentation, but suffice to say they trace their initial spark to Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club itself, and believe themselves to be the true heirs of Aleister Crowley’s legacy. They recruit and groom within the old pillars of power in our civilization: politicians, deans, captains of industry, old money. They are in every sense a secret society: united by their shared sense of superiority and thirst for forbidden knowledge, unafraid of morals yet respectful of tradition, they live and die by the golden motto of Thelema: “Do as you will”.
You can’t just join GTS unless you are already at the top of your game in the ‘unlit’ world (to use their terminology). Their very exclusive membership allows them to wield disproportionate economic, political and cultural power: picture a dozen black Cadillacs all arriving at midnight at some venerable hilltop mansion in the historical heart of Boston. Usually that is all anyone can picture, for what happens behind closed doors is a closely guarded secret. There are rumors of devil worshiping, of bacchanalia and orgies, of human sacrifices and pentagrams drawn in blood over expensive hardwood flooring, chants in Latin and hooded men wielding ceremonial knives, etc. Their relic collection is second only to the Vatican’s.
But modern society, being what it is, is changing too fast. GTS has been accused of being too slow to adapt, too stuck in their neo-victorian mindset of class warfare and conspiracy. GTS wants a New World Order where the Deserving have total control over the Undeserving -in the meanwhile knowledge, thrills, and the personal satisfaction of conquering domains beyond the mortal coil makes do. There are wheels within wheels and meanings within meanings. They have a reputation for manipulating world events behind the scenes; it is rumored that during the last Endgame in WWII it was a young GTS which lead Malleus astray towards its ill-fated alliance with the Thule Society, and that they had a hand in situating the original Fujin deity in the path of the A-bomb as a means of destroying the ancient Cult of Fujin utterly. It is said they manipulated Thule into exterminating the Brotherhood of Pharos after pillaging their vast knowledge, and then scavenged both corpses. Many things are said, but one is known: the Society wants to rule the world, and has a real shot at it too.
It started as a simple matter of efficiency. Scientific tests performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conclusively demonstrated the existence of a “psychic layer”, theorizing it as the true source of human sentience. Nobel-worthy findings indeed, if only they hadn’t been so quickly hushed up by a shady conclave of international corporate interests.
Indeed, the Psychic Tempore (what the scientists called the Shadowside) was seen by their payroll masters as too good an opportunity to pass up, a Columbus-sized discovery that would go to waste if disclosed to the public too soon, or too openly. And so it was quickly decided that this new frontier should not be exploited through traditional governmental channels: there were too many wildly diverging budgets, political ideologies and national interests to be accountable to, and truly, Men-In-Black are almost as expensive as congressional hearings are painful. Discretion was the order of the day.
And so the stage was set for the rise of Accelletrix; headquartered in Moscow but truly international, able to aggressively recruit the best operatives of every three-letter agency, and discreetly centralizing all research and development under a single umbrella. Revenue comes via third-party channels which commercialize proprietary R&D (mostly pharmaceuticals and military technology) and "security services" -an euphemism for their small private army.
Whether providing armament and field expertise in the Middle East, or developing bold new cures using human trials out of sight from regulators in the heart of China, Accelletrix delivers. They maneuver outside of the public eye; the last thing they need is to be slowed down by politics, laws, or ethics.
Getting hired by Accelletrix is a one-way-street. Once “in” you will be provided with the best hardware, military-grade training, and the most competitive pay in either the private or public sectors. You will be garrisoned in modern, self-sufficient complexes at strategic locations around the world, and every day the Blue Ascent logo will remind you of Mankind's glorious future as we merge Science and Spirit. You will be a Gear in the proverbial Machine.
Which also means you will grind until obsolescence at which point you’ll retire and be replaced. Everything has a price tag -all great human achievements are built upon thousands of small sacrifices like this.
Nevertheless, despite their reviled focus on short-term gains Accelletrix still keeps the long view. They realize that while paranormal organizations have always existed, content with merely prodding around in the dark in pointless internecine wars, Accelletrix is the only group dissecting the Shadowside with the shining scalpel of capital-S Science, turning the paranormal into normal, and taking the human species as a whole into the brave, brave future.
The word “#!SCaV3NG3R” was the "tripcode" originally used by the movement’s founding figure in some backwater internet image board known only as "/x/". People who followed him in retracing the steps of “creepypastas” eventually took to calling themselves “scavengers” (or “scavs” for short) and started contributing their own findings online. The “legit” ones would be endlessly re-posted, resulting in that many more thrill-seekers joining the fad and, in turn, creating many new “creepypastas”. While /x/ itself would eventually fall into grave disrepair, other specialized forums and blogs started popping up everywhere, manuals were written, comics were drawn, infographics were charted and just like that in the space of a few years a whole new subculture had been born.
It was all fun and games at first. For many it still is. But many “oldfriends” have been trying to organize into something more coherent. Scavengers are in the unique position to know exactly what each and every other organization represents for the Shadowside; they don’t gel with the medieval dogma of Malleus, the gang zealotry of Fujin’s Blood, or the brutality of Somosa. They don’t buy into Thelema’s claims of a New World Order, and see right through the fascist P.R. bullshit of Accelletrix. As for Big Sis, they consider their ideals noble at best, but so naïve. They know the Shadowside (a term they coined) holds the key to more than just freedom in this life or salvation in the next.
But no one listens.
It would be a mistake to underestimate SCaV3NG3R simply because they lack the money of Thelema, the hardware of Accelletrix, the numbers of Big Sis, the relics of Malleus or a vendetta to run them ragged like Somosa or Fujin’s. SCaV3NG3R is an internet consciousness lead by all but ruled by none, powered from a million connected points of light and impervious to corruption. They are the bane of Accelletrix -and of any other group who gets too big for its britches. They are the smartasses, the irreverent, unpredictable hivemind, the infinite-headed hydra of the Information Age, living Chaos Theory and humanity's youth bravely facing its final days in a much harsher, darker world.
They are also a bunch of nerds.
Expect “newfriends”. Expect no better headquarters than cybercafés or comic book shops and basements. Expect people “doing it for the lulz”. Expect offers to flood the enemies with pizzas, or “dox” them. Expect brotherhood. Expect loyalty and lifelong friendships, and a cause greater than any you could find in a cubicle. They are the ultimate Joker card; the last representatives of an honest humanity in all of its raw beauty, ugliness, confidence and uncertainty.
It's all good yarn to spin stories, but sometimes having to roll too many dice or having to remember too many rules can get in the way of even the best of stories: this is why Enter the Shadowside uses DESTINY.
DESTINY is a completely math-less system which uses regular poker cards instead of dice. As a player you hold in your hand certain cards which will result in success and certain cards which will result in failure. While you can't choose to simply succeed forever, you can choose when to fail -and as far as DESTINY is concerned both successes and failures are equally useful to build really good stories.
Here's an example; imagine this is your character: Byron Bacchus, a sensitive soul with a rebel heart who is haunted by the ghost of his own father.
Character creation is dead simple: there are only four Traits: Combat, Magic, Influence and Everything Else. Strong Traits draw three cards, Weak ones draw one card, and the rest (Average) draw two. Byron is kinda' into the occult, so you pick Magic for his Strength, but he's also an introvert so you pick Influence for his Weakness. After you draw your cards from each suit, Byron’s starting hand looks like this:
The other three players draw their cards for their characters too, and like you they keep them secret. A single standard 52-card deck can serve up to 4 players, but the StoryHost had two decks ready just for extra variety, and already broken up into the four suits.
The story begins and after some minor introductions you find yourself inside this dream-like reality -the Shadowside- with a creepy little ghost girl in a ballet tutu acting as your guide.
She wants to teach you how to fly! It's one of the Skills in the game, called "Wind's Hand" -a sort of air-themed telekinesis which is versatile enough to let you move yourself around as if you were flying.
Let's do it: this will be your first opportunity to use your cards. The StoryHost tells you that flying to a nearby rooftop will be Easy in this dream-like dimension, and that it will be considered a Magic task. Then he breaks out the big bad chart of CARD MEANINGS, but you don’t really need to reference it at all since somebody already took the time to write each meanings right on the cards themselves, with a sharpie.
When he asks you at the end of his description "Can you do it?" you're supposed to answer with a card. You quickly check to see if any of the three Magic cards you've got is any flavor of "Yes" for Easy.
Bingo -one of your three Magic cards is a 7 of Hearts, which means “Yes, And” for Easy. Good thing you chose that Trait for your Strength!
You lay the card on the table -it is “spent”, but it was worth it as the StoryHost elaborates the “And” portion to mean that not only do you take off in the air, but you actually go faster than the ghost girl for a while! Turns out you're a natural!
Awesome as the present moment is, you notice some of your cards read “No”, and you ask the StoryHost for more info on this mechanic. He tells you that basically it’s always like you just played it: depending on the task at hand the StoryHost calls out a Difficulty (Easy, Not-So-Easy or Hard) for any Action (Combat, Magic, Influence or Everything Else) and then the player responds with a card (Hard cards can answer for any Difficulty, and Not-So-Easy cards can answer for Easy too). Whatever the card says (“Yes, And”, or “No, But”, etc) gets translated into narrative -no numbers, no math.
"Flying to the nearest rooftop is Easy. Can you do it?" "Yes, And". That's it.
Since you don’t get any new cards until you spend all the ones you already have for any given Trait (no partial Refills), that means you have to turn in your “No”s sooner or later and fail, but at least you can choose when to fail. Its almost like being able to see one minute into the future, instead of just rolling blind.
There are some variations of course: having a relevant Skill or Item (or both) lowers the Difficulty (something that is Not-So-Easy for you and me is probably just Easy for a skilled professional, or for someone who has the right tool for the job), and by using Aces (a kind of award token the StoryHost gives you) players can replace any of their cards without actually spending it -thus altering their Destiny before it comes to pass.
Damage is tracked by card refills -for instance you start out with 3 Combat cards, then get in a fight, lose and end up with a broken leg -now you have to carry on with only 2 cards being Refilled until you heal that leg. Amusingly enough, you can Damage Influence too, for example by getting badly humiliated at a party -say the girl pours her drink on your head. It won’t kill you of course, but you have one less Influence card because, well, you're all wet and reek of cheap wine. You don't heal this with a first-aid kit either: you need to find a way to save face, or gain some respect again; it's all very narrative. Damage on any Trait doesn't always mean you're hurt, it just means you're less capable than you normally would be.
Since Trait levels are so close to one another, characters become different and unique basically through which Organization they belong to (there are seven, from Asian mafia to super-religious knights to what is basically a paranormal version of Anonymous), which spirit they are in Hierogamy with ("Hierogamy" means a ghost partner is riding inside your head -Byron ended up hitched to the creepy little girl, if you're wondering), and by learning tons of different Skills (there are 42 paranormal ones, and you can make up your own normal ones).
Basically, DESTINY is like making all your rolls ahead of time and then wisely spending them as the story moves along.
Here it is. A labor of love which summarizes many years of running sessions and caring -truly caring- about that certain magic that only happens when you step back in your role as Creator, and simply allow the stories and characters to just happen, hands off. I believe that's as close to real magic as we can get in this world.
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Pictures and Pages of the Print-Proof Core Book PREMIUM Edition and DESTINY deck:
REACHED: At $2,000: A free novel in PDF format: The Red Wolf, by Shawn L. Koch. This novel is based on the actual campaign we ran together while testing Enter the Shadowside, and the Setting Module of the same name already included in the core book.
At $2,000: A free novel in PDF format:, by Shawn L. Koch. This novel is based on the actual campaign we ran together while testing, and the of the same name already included in the core book. REACHED: At $3,000: A new Setting Module in PDF: The Chaos Engine, which takes place during World War II. Before Scavenger and Accelletrix : see the birth of the Greater Thelema Society, the death of the Brotherhood of Pharos, and the transformation of the Cult of Fujin.
At $3,000: A new in PDF:, which takes place during World War II. Before and : see the birth of the, the death of the, and the transformation of the. At $4,000: A new Setting Module in PDF: The Light at the End of the World, which takes place during the dark ages. See the Brotherhood of Pharos carry its noble mission, and see Malleus Diaboli hunt the precursors of the Sisterhood, and perhaps delay Judgement Day for the first time.
in PDF:, which takes place during the dark ages. See the carry its noble mission, and see hunt the precursors of the Sisterhood, and perhaps delay Judgement Day for the first time. At $5,000: A new Setting Module in PDF: A Machine Against the Dark, which takes place in the year 2,222. See a possible future where technology and magic mix to terrible and wondrous ends.
Kickstarter Video Music Music NikleusAfter months of speculation and rumor, yesterday Braintree announced that it will begin accepting bitcoin payments through a partnership with Coinbase. The PayPal-owned mobile payments platform works with companies like Uber, AirBnB, TaskRabbit, and HotelTonight, meaning consumers could soon transact on these platforms using bitcoin. And thanks to Braintree’s recently launched “future proof” V.Zero SDK, which includes PayPal integration, this new functionality is effectively aimed at PayPal’s millions of global merchants as well.
But beyond this high level announcement, there are a number of questions that remain unanswered. For example, why did Braintree elect to partner with an outside platform in Coinbase, rather than build out its own proprietary bitcoin experience? And, given the low-fee nature of bitcoin transactions, what will this decision mean for Braintree’s (and PayPal’s) bottom line? – a particularly important question as bitcoin transaction volume increases and discussions continue about spinning PayPal out of eBay as a standalone public company. And, lastly, after a lengthy period of non-commitment from management, why did Braintree decide to finally pull the trigger on this now?
I caught up with Braintree CEO (and the internal favorite to take over as PayPal CEO) Bill Ready yesterday following the announcement. Below is a Q&A from that conversation, lightly edited for clarity:
Pando: Tell me a bit about the strategy behind this announcement. Why did you decide to go the partnership route and why was now the time to roll this out?
Ready: The thing we’re most interested in is being the platform to give developers and merchants access to the most sophisticated payment tools available. That doesn’t mean just enabling payment experiences internationally and through our own wallet, but also through third parties where appropriate. I have been following bitcoin for quite a long time. It’s still very early, but it seems like over the last six months a lot of the regulatory and compliance issues have started to be sorted out.
Coinbase has a lot of philosophical alignment with Braintree and PayPal. They are the only player offering a great payment experience on both the consumer and the merchant sides of things. They’ve handled all the complex compliance issues well. We just felt that this partnership would allow us to deliver the kind of buying experience that we believe is important. Also, there are other good companies in the space but Coinbase seems to have the most traction of anyone.
Pando: Was there ever a conversation about building out a bitcoin product internally?
Ready: Braintree is an open platform. We care less about building it ourselves, than we do just about giving people access to the best payment experiences. For example, we don’t really care if merchants accept Visa or Mastercard or AMEX. We’re happy to enable them all. We think of bitcoin like another payment network and the best way for us to offer our merchants access was to work with a partner like Coinbase. Thanks to the V.Zero SDK, merchants and their developers only need to do one integration, which involves just a few lines of code, and they can opt to accept bitcoin. [Editor’s note: Merchants also need to sign up for a Coinbase wallet account (as do consumers) but don’t need to do any additional technical integration beyond configuring Braintree’s V.Zero SDK.]
Pando: What is the financial impact of your decision to partner rather than build? I assume you’ll be sharing fees in some fashion with Coinbase, but bitcoin fees are already much smaller than credit card processing fees. Is that accurate?
Ready: First of all, from a merchant perspective, pricing here won't change from what Coinbase has offered previous, which is a fee of 1 percent of the value of each transaction. We made it so that the merchant sees one price, and only needs to do one integration.
On the back end, we worked with Coinbase and figured out how to deal with sharing these fees, and sharing the fraud protection and compliance expenses. I can't disclose any more than that.
Pando: Will Braintree or PayPal earn any more or less on bitcoin transactions than it does on traditional credit card transactions? And by that token, if bitcoin transaction volume explodes in the future, what impact will that have on PayPal’s business?
Ready: Our public pricing has always been 2.7 percent plus $0.30, but most of that goes out to interchange and legacy payment platforms. [Editor’s note: There can be upwards of ten such participants in each transaction, making margins on payment processing surprisingly thin.] We looked at this market closely and we think, yes, bitcoin's in its early days, but there's a viable business model around this as well.
It’s still very early. We’ve been on the record as saying that we believe mobile will be the dominant platform for commerce in the next few years. I don’t think bitcoin is moving that fast. In ten years? Sure, maybe. But like I said, we think there’s a viable business here.
Pando: There seemed to be some mixed messages coming out of eBay, PayPal, and Braintree over the last year plus about whether bitcoin would eventually be adopted. In particular, eBay CEO John Donahoe and former PayPal CEO David Marcus often seemed to contradict one another. How much of a fight was this internally and how long has it been clear that this project would move forward?
Ready: I spent a ton of time with John before the deal to sell Braintree to PayPal, and during that time, we talked a lot about what the next decade of commerce would look. There was a lot of alignment there. I think you’re seeing things move fast now externally, because we talked about this stuff a year ago before the deal happened. We’ve always had a very good line on this. I think bitcoin falls within the Braintree bailiwick of giving merchants and developers access to the most sophisticated payment tools. John has been on the record in the past expressing the same belief.
Like we said when we announced our new V.Zero SDK this summer, we view this as future-proof. I think today’s announcement, like One Touch a few weeks ago, are the first tangible examples of that. You’ll see a lot more from us in this regard as we continue to focus on delivering the best payment experience possible.
***
Braintree’s decision to adopt bitcoin could be a major inflection point for the crypto-currency and for the payments world at large. The company follows prominent merchants in Expedia, Overstock, Tiger Direct, and Dell in accepting bitcoin through Coinbase. But save for Coinbase itself, Braintree together with PayPal could quickly become the world’s largest enabler of bitcoin commerce. Braintree competitor Stripe is currently beta testing its own bitcoin support.
Surprisingly, the announcement had little effect on bitcoin prices, which are mired in a mini-slump, having fallen from a period of stability between $600 and $650 in June to sub-$500 levels for much of the last month. The Coinbase Bitcoin Price Index was at $472 when Ready announced the Braintree integration yesterday around 1pm PST, and subsequently dipped as low as $464 overnight before rallying to current levels of $469 as of this writing.
With every merchant that begins accepting bitcoin, a bit more selling pressure is added to the marketplace, as most choose to instantly convert any bitcoin received to fiat currency. The only thing that will reverse this trend and stabilize or even increase the bitcoin price will be a commensurate increase in buying and trading activity. The visibility and credibility added by Braintree’s involvement, along with the potential adoption of bitcoin by Uber and its other clients, should go a long way toward driving this activity.
eBay shares, on the other hand, seem to be responding positively to the news. After closing trading yesterday up nearly 1 percent at $54.24, the stock gapped up in early morning trading today and currently sits up 0.68 percent on the day at $54.60.
As Ready said above, it’s still early days for bitcoin, and likewise we’re in the early stages of this Braintree integration. It will likely be several months before any Braintree merchants roll out their bitcoin adoption publicly. Until then, the impact of this announcement will be largely rooted in perception.
Braintree, and by extension PayPal, come out of today looking hip and progressive, something that is crucial in the highly-competitive and increasingly developer-driven world of payments. Bitcoin, on the other hand, looks slightly less risky and anti-establishment than it did coming into the day, which will be a welcome outcome for everyone hoping that this virtual currency experiment will soon go mainstream.
Bitcoin has long been hailed as a simple and inexpensive alternative to traditional payment options. If Braintree views itself as the enabler of the future of payments, something Ready has expressed throughout the life of his company, then it makes sense that bitcoin would be a part of that solution. And if we’re to take him at his word that the business case for this adoption makes sense, this could be the kind of win-win that is rarely seen when new disruptive technologies bump up against established players.The US-China summit
20 January 2011
Behind the pomp and diplomatic niceties, what dominates the state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington is the growth of tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.
Contrary to the general presentation in the US media, which echoes the Obama administration in portraying Beijing as the aggressor, the primary responsibility for the escalation of tensions in East Asia lies with the United States. Since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared 18 months ago that the US was “back in East Asia,” Washington has worked relentlessly to isolate China and contain its growing influence in Asia and internationally.
This has involved a three-pronged attack—economic, diplomatic and military. Only a month ago the world was holding its breath in fear of the outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. South Korea, with US support and participation, was holding a live-fire military exercise in the same disputed waters where a similar exercise the previous month had provoked North Korea to fire on a South Korean-held island, killing two South Korean Marines and two civilian inhabitants.
Under Chinese pressure, North Korea pulled back from its threat to retaliate militarily in the face of such a provocation. This, however, has not altered the US policy of stoking up tensions in Asia in order to maintain US dominance at the expense of China.
The standoff between North and South Korea was the most recent in a series of crises in East Asia involving murky naval incidents which were utilized, at the direction of the United States, to demonize North Korea and its main ally, China.
Last July, Secretary of State Clinton intervened into longstanding disputes between China and its neighbors over islands in the South China Sea, lining up against China and declaring “freedom of navigation” in the South China to be a vital US interest. This is a direct threat to Chinese control over sea lanes that are critical to its trade and security.
Only last week, the US held a joint naval exercise with South Korea in the Yellow Sea, deploying the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.
Notwithstanding such provocations, Obama insisted at the joint press conference with President Hu on Wednesday that the United States welcomed China’s rise. At the same time, he reiterated US demands that China sharply raise the exchange rate of its currency and remove subsidies to its industries in order to provide a “level playing field” for American firms. He also criticized China’s human rights record.
The carefully scripted news conference allowed only two questions each from American and Chinese reporters. Obama left it to the US reporters to express overt hostility toward Hu and China.
Ben Feller of the Associated Press asked how Obama could justify an alliance with a country “known for treating its people so poorly, for using censorship and force to repress its people.”
The question reflected the selective and hypocritical outrage of the American media over anti-democratic practices. No such questions are ever put to Obama, who has absolutely no standing to lecture China, notwithstanding that regime’s repressive hand, or anyone else on human rights.
Obama has, after all, kept the gulag at Guantanamo open; ordered the assassination of alleged terrorists, including an American citizen; upheld the “right” of the president to imprison people for life without a trial; continued the practice of “rendering” people to countries that practice torture; rejected the prosecution of Bush-era torturers; expanded domestic spying; and is currently seeking to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for exposing the lies and crimes of US imperialism.
The second US reporter, Hans Nichols from Bloomberg, asked how Obama would allay the fears of congressmen who see China as “an economic threat,” and followed up by asking how badly China’s “depressing its currency” harmed the White House’s efforts to create jobs and lower unemployment in the US.
The US has kept up a steady drumbeat that China is manipulating and undervaluing its currency in order to lower the price of its exports and gain an unfair trade advantage. In fact, the biggest currency manipulator by far is the United States. By keeping interest rates near zero and electronically printing hundreds of billions of dollars, the US is massively devaluing the dollar, cheapening its exports relative to rivals such as China, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Brazil.
It is also flooding the world with hot money, forcing up the exchange rates of a host of countries, stoking inflation and creating asset bubbles. China has, as a result, been hit with rising inflation, forcing it to raise its interest rates twice within the past several months.
In a speech last week in advance of the summit, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner expanded Washington’s economic demands, suggesting that China could gain wider access to the US market and technology only if, in addition to sharply raising its exchange rate, it reduced the role of the state in its economy, ended policies that “discriminate against US companies,” and removed preferences for domestic firms.
In other words, China should open its economy to the unfettered exploitation of American capitalism and accept the status of an economic colony.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking in Japan on Friday, called on Tokyo to expand its military and step up its military cooperation with the US, praising in particular Japan’s decision to shift the focus of its forces to its southwest islands—i.e., facing onto the Chinese mainland. He also invoked the US-Japan security treaty of 1960, which obliges the US to militarily defend Japan in the event of an armed conflict between it and China.
Open anti-China hysteria on the occasion of Hu’s state visit was left to congressmen and senators from both parties. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Hu a “dictator” and refused to attend the White House state dinner in his honor Wednesday night. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner also boycotted the event.
Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York) introduced a bill targeting China that would impose punitive tariffs on “currency manipulators” and bar firms from such countries from receiving US government contracts. “This legislation sends a message to China that says we are fed up with your government’s intransigence over currency manipulation,” he declared, adding, “If you refuse to play by the rules, we will force you to do so.”
The New York Times editorialized: “For Mr. Obama, the top items include: China’s currency manipulation; its enabling of North Korea and Iran; its abuse of human rights; and its recent challenge to American naval supremacy in the western Pacific… Mr. Obama has made clear that he won’t stand by while China tries to bully its neighbors.”
The Wall Street Journal in its editorial raised the prospect of war with China and World War III, writing: “But China’s new truculence is once again raising concern that Beijing is intent on dominating its region and destabilizing the world order, much as the Kaiser’s Germany did a century ago.”
In fact, as leaked WikiLeaks cables have shown, Secretary of State Clinton and the then-prime minister of Australia and current foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, discussed the need to prepare for the eventuality of war with China.
This year’s US Joint Forces Command’s Joint Operating Environment report—a strategic guide to perceived threats and future US military engagements—includes the following chilling warning: “The course that China takes will determine much about the character and nature of the 21st Century—whether it will be ‘another bloody century’ or one of peaceful cooperation.”
The mounting danger of war between the US and China, which would almost certainly escalate into a global conflagration, is rooted in deep-going shifts in the world economy and the global balance of forces: China’s rise to become the world’s second largest economy and the decline in the global economic position of the United States.
American imperialism has turned ever more violently to the use of military force to offset its economic decline, and it has no intention of peacefully ceding to China the dominance of Asia or any other region.
The only answer to the growth of militarism in general and the incendiary role of US imperialism in particular is the struggle to unite the working class internationally in the fight for socialism.
Barry Grey
Barry GreyCustomer Service Software and Customer Service Management - Helprace
Due to mass business migration online, help desk software and other help desk solutions have become very popular. How else can a business improve customer service other than a well-crafted customer service software platform?
The act of supporting a customer, also known as customer service is defined as keeping a customer satisfied throughout the use of a product or service. The web has changed companies’ needs for help desk software and other customer service software. Modern companies demand solutions far beyond a simple FAQ system or service desk system. To be successful, help desk software must tap into online social platforms and assist with community management in order to provide support, build trust and seek out potential customers.
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As your help desk and community grows, your support team may fall behind your customer service software. We adapt Helprace help desk software to shifting customer service needs of our clients. Our customer support solution is presented in scalable customer service software with a system of IT processes that allow for unlimited ticketing system support. Ultimately, Helprace offers an innovative approach to customer service issues by offering a holistic view of customer interaction, providing one customer support software to categorize, manage and analyze customer data to improve business processes.
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You’ve probably wondered how Helprace can improve your customer service issues. Whether you use helpdesk software, customer support software or just a singular knowledge base, Helprace ensures you stay on top of customer feedback and grow your business.
Many customers prefer to be able to go into the help desk software and learn what they need to know. It’s fast, easy, convenient, and it helps to keep the customer focused on problem solving. The idea of using help desk software and the ability to extract new information using the same help desk software makes the software twice as valuable. Overall, the Helprace online customer service software solution is not only useful as a support ticket help desk, but as an engaging platform for directing company improvements. The functionality of Helprace help desk software makes it an ideal software to unleash the customer support potential of any business.When a star dies in a violent, fiery death, it spews its innards out across the sky, creating an expanding wave of gas and dust known as a supernova nebula. Arguably, the most famous of these supernova remnants is M1, also called the Crab Nebula, a blob-like patch visible in low-powered binoculars.
The nebula stretches 10 light-years across, though it continues to expand. It lies approximately 6,300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Taurus. M1 can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky, but only barely. A pair of binoculars will turn up a dim patch, while more of the identifying features of the nebula become visible with a low-magnification telescope. A higher-grade, 16-inch telescope will begin to refine more of the nebula. 1968, astronomers in Puerto Rico discovered a pulsing radio source. Determined to be a pulsar, the object is a rapidly-rotating, town-sized star that flashes about 30 times a second. Known as NP0532, or the Crab Pulsar (a remnant of the supernova SN 1054), the neutron star is 100,000 times more energetic than the sun. Though only a few tens of miles across, it shines about as brightly as our nearest sun.
✯ ✯ ✯
More…Chinese astronomers watching the sky on July 4, 1054, noted the appearance of a new or “guest” star just above the southern |
Islam, oral sex between a husband and wife is considered "Makruh Tahrimi"[99] or highly undesirable by some Islamic jurists when the act is defined as mouth and tongue coming in contact with the genitals.[100][101] The reason behind considering this act as not recommended is manifold, the foremost being the issue of modesty, purification (Taharat) and cleanliness.[102]
The most common argument states[101] that the mouth and tongue are used for recitation of the Qur'an and for the remembrance of Allah (Dhikr).[103]. Firstly, scholars considers touching genital by mouth as discouraged mentioning reason the that, touching genital by right hand other than left hand has been prohibited by Muhammad; as in their opinion, mouth is comparatively more honorable than the right hand, for that touching genital with mouth is more abhorrent and vacatably exluded. Secondly, the status of genital secretions is debated among the four Sunni schools, some scholars viewing it as impure and others not.
Purification and hygiene [ edit ]
Sexual hygiene in Islam is a prominent topic in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) due to its everyday nature. Ibn Abidin, a 13th century Hanafi Islamic scholar explains:[104]
When there is discharge of thick, cloudy white fluid (wady) (that exits before or after urinating) or unlustful discharge of thin, sticky, white fluid (madhy) caused by play or kissing, it requires ghusl. And wudu.
Regarding things that necessitates ghusl:
sperm or female ejaculate that leaves its place of origin with desire [f: whether actual or effective], even if it exits the body without desire, even if without sexual intercourse; the head of the penis entering either private part of a living human being who is fit for sexual intercourse, even without any release of sexual fluids…” [al-Hadiyya al-`Ala’iyya (Gifts of Guidance, unpublished translation)][105]
After partaking in sexual activity where penetration or ejaculation occurs, both men and women are required to complete a full-body ritual ablution known as ghusl in order to re-establish ritual purity before prayer.[106] Ghusl requires clean, odorless water that has not been used for a previous ritual and begins with the declaration of the intention of purity and worship.[107] A Muslim performing complete ablution then washes every part of his or her body.[107]There are reports in the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad which indicate that the pubic hairs should be removed, he had set a time limit of 40 days, and the hair should not be left any longer than that and he set a time limit of no more than forty days for trimming the moustache, clipping the nails, plucking the armpit hairs and shaving the pubic hair.[108]
Fasting and Ramadan [ edit ]
It is made lawful to you to go into your wives on the night of the fast; they are an apparel for you and you are an apparel for them; Allah knew that you acted unfaithfully to yourselves, so He has turned to you (mercifully) and removed from you (this burden); so now be in contact with them and seek what Allah has ordained for you, and eat and drink until the whiteness of the day becomes distinct from the blackness of the night at dawn, then complete the fast till night, and have not contact with them while you keep to the mosques; these are the limits of Allah, so do not go near them. Thus does Allah make clear His communications for men that they may guard (against evil). Quran 2:187 (Translated by Shakir)
According to Qura'nic verse 2:187, one may have sex during the month of Ramadan but not during the time of fasting. As such, sex during Ramadan is only permitted at night.[109] Although this passage is explicitly addressed to men, the regulations on sex in regard to fasting are universally taken to apply equally to both male and female Muslims.[110]
Menstruation [ edit ]
And they ask you about menstruation. Say: It is an illness; therefore keep aloof from the women during the menstrual discharge and do not go near them until they have become clean; then when they have cleansed themselves, go in to them as Allah has commanded you; surely Allah loves those who turn much (to Him), and He loves those who purify themselves. Quran 2:222 (Translated by Shakir)
Verse 2:222 in the Qur'an implies that sexual relations during menstruation are prohibited. However, unlike Jewish tradition, Islam does not forbid men from interacting with menstruating women entirely.[111] Ibn Kathīr, a muhaddith, narrated a hadith that describes Muhammad's habits with his menstruating wives. This hadith demonstrates that Muhammad gave license to all forms of spousal intimacy during the period of menstruation with the exception of vaginal intercourse. Women are required to perform ritual cleansing (ghusl) before resuming religious duties or sexual relations upon completion of her menstruation.[112]
Nocturnal emission [ edit ]
Nocturnal emission is not a sin in Islam. Moreover, whereas a person fasting (in Ramadan or otherwise) would normally be considered to have broken their fast by ejaculating on purpose (during either masturbation or intercourse), nocturnal emission is not such a cause. They are still required to bathe prior to undergoing some rituals in the religion. Muslim scholars consider ejaculation something that makes one temporarily ritually impure, a condition known as junub; meaning that a Muslim who has had an orgasm or ejaculated must have a ghusl, before they can read the Qur'an or perform the formal prayer known as salat.[113]
Masturbation [ edit ]
According to most jurists, masturbation is generally considered Haram or prohibited in Islam.[114][115][116][117] But there are varying opinions on the permissibility of masturbation. The Qur'an has been cited as being ambiguous on the issue of masturbation. The hadith regarding masturbation are, too, not considered to take a definitive stance on the subject. As such, positions on masturbation vary widely.[118] According to alDin Tarbiyyah, it is permissible if done out of necessity.[119] He also permitted masturbation as a means whereby soldiers, far away from their wives on a tour of duty may remain chaste. The four Sunni schools of jurisprudence (known as Madhaahib - the Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali schools of Fiqh) have differing stances on the issue. Some see it forbidden in certain cases (i.e. if it leads a man/woman to ignore their spouse sexually) but recommended it when they see it as a lesser evil to illicit sex. It is generally prohibited according to the Hanafi and Hanbali Mazhabs, unless one fears adultery or fornication, or is under the desire pressure, in which case, it is permissible to seek a relief through masturbation. According to Ahmed ibn Hanbal, it is permissible for prisoners, travellers and for men and women who have difficulty in finding a lawful spouse.[116] It is prohibited all the time according to the Maliki and Shafi`i Mazhabs.[120] It is haram in Shi'ite jurisprudence.[114] There has always been a view to permit masturbation as the lesser of two evils (so as to ward of falling into fornication).[121] Thus it is categorically incorrect to state that all Islamic scholars of the early Islamic age have unanimously agreed upon its complete prohibition. Jurists distinguish between those who masturbate out of necessity and those who have these means yet still masturbate to gratify their lust.[118]
Contraception [ edit ]
The Qur'an does not contain explicit text regarding contraception. Muslims refer to the hadith on the question of contraception. According to Muslim scholars, birth control is permitted, when it is temporary and for a valid reason.[122] The companions of Muhammad are cited when addressing this issue. For example, Jabir, one of Muhammad's companions, relates a hadith in which a man came to Muhammad and said
"I have a slave girl, and we need her as a servant and around the palm groves. I have had sex with her, but I am afraid of her becoming pregnant." The Prophet responded, ″Practice coitus interruptus with her if you so wish, for she will receive what has been predestined for her.″[123]
As such, the withdrawal method of contraception is allowed according to the hadith. Muslim jurists concur with its permissibility[124] and use analogical deduction to approve other forms of contraception (e.g. condom usage).[125] Supporting Sunnah include:
A man said: "Apostle of Allah, I have a slave-girl and I withdraw from her (while having intercourse), and I dislike that she becomes pregnant. I intend (by intercourse) what the men intend by it. The Jews say that withdrawal method (Al-azl) is like burying the living girls on a small scale." He (the Prophet) said: "The Jews told a lie. If Allah intends to create it, you cannot turn it away."[126] Sunan Abu Dawood, 11:2166
"O Allah's Apostle! We get female captives as our share of booty, and we are interested in their prices, what is your opinion about coitus interruptus?" The Prophet said, "Do you really do that? It is better for you not to do it. No soul that which Allah has destined to exist, but will surely come into existence."[127] Sahih al-Bukhari, 3:34:432
Sterilization [ edit ]
It is not permitted to carry out operations on men or women that will lead to complete sterility, such as cutting the vas deferens (vasectomy) in men, or removing the ovaries or womb (hysterectomy or ligation) in women. Irreversible methods of contraception and birth control called sterilization are not allowed for both male and female, except in the case of the wife who becomes terminally ill and perpetually incapable of having babies.[128] Therefore, if the sterilization is irreversible and cannot be undone, it will not be permissible unless the woman is terminally ill.[129] Under normal circumstances, sterilization is considered to be absolutely and decidedly prohibited in Shari’ah. The irreversible nature associated with both the male and female sterilizations clearly contradicts one of the primary purposes of marriage which is to have children, as mentioned by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in his Ihya’ Ulum al-Din. Furthermore, sterilization is a form of mutilation of one’s body (muthla), which has been clearly forbidden in the Shari’ah. Allah Most High mentions in An-Nisa the words of Satan, when he said:
“I will mislead them, and I will create in them false desires; I will order them to slit the ears of cattle and to deface the (fair) nature created by Allah.” An-Nisa:119
However, in cases of absolute necessity, sterilization does become permitted. The well-known principle of Islamic jurisprudence based on the guidelines of the Qur’an and Hadith states:
“Necessities make prohibitions lawful.” — (Ibn Nujaym, Al-Ashbah wa al-Naza’ir 85)
[130]
Being sterilized permanently may mean one of two things:
– It may be done out of necessity, such as if it is determined by trustworthy medicinal evidence that pregnancy will pose a danger to the mother’s life, and there is no hope of a cure, so permanent sterilization will ward off that danger. In this case it is permissible to be sterilized. – When there is no need for it. Undoubtedly in this case it is a criminal act and a major sin, because it is a transgression against the creation of Allaah for no reason, and preventing the production of offspring which was encouraged by the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), and being ungrateful for the blessing of children which Allaah bestows upon His creation. And it is not permissible to do anything that will put a stop to pregnancy.[131]
The Islamic Fiqh Council stated the following:
It is haraam to sterilize both men and women, if there is no necessary reason for doing so unless there is a necessity which is to be determined according to the guidelines set out by sharee’ah. It is permissible to take temporary measures to space pregnancies or prevent them for a limited period of time, if there is a legitimate shar’i need to do so, so long as this decision is made on the basis of mutual consultation and approval between the spouses. That is subject to the condition that no harm should result from that, and that the means should be acceptable according to sharee’ah, and that there should be no harm caused to an existing pregnancy. — Islamic Fiqh Council, report no. 39 (1/5)
Based on this, if preventing pregnancy is for a legitimate reason as outlined above, then there is nothing to do anything. But if it was not for a necessary reason, then sterilizing is prohibited.[132][133]
Castration [ edit ]
Castration is removal of the testicles. The Arabic word translated here as castration may also refer to removal of the testicles and penis. Some scholars differentiated between the two and said: If his testicles only are cut off, then he is a eunuch; if his penis is cut off, then he is emasculated. It is prohibited for a person to do that deliberately to himself or to someone else. Castration of the human is prohibited in Islam, whether he is a child or an adult, because of the prohibition on hadith on that.[134] Ibn Hajar said:
it is prohibited, therefore it is haraam, and there is no difference of opinion concerning that in the case of the sons of Adam (i.e., humans).
Among the reports that confirm this prohibition is the following prophet Muhammad's era, when some followers wanted to be castrated in abstance of their wives, but the prophet forbade it and permitted three days temporary marriage for them for a certain period, but after the period he declered it permanently forbidden:
Abdullah (b. Mas'ud) reported: We were on an expedition with Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) and we had no women with us. We said: Should we not have ourselves castrated? He (the Holy Prophet) forbade us to do so He then granted us permission that we should contract temporary marriage for a stipulated period giving her a garment, and 'Abdullah then recited this verse: 'Those who believe do not make unlawful the good things which Allah has made lawful for you, and do not transgress. Allah does not like trangressers" (al-Qur'an, v. 87). Sahih Bukhari, Chapter: 62, Hadith no: 11, Sahih Muslim, 1404:
Sabra al-Juhanni reported on the authority of his father that while he was with Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon hm) he said: 0 people, I had permitted you to contract temporary marriage with women, but Allah has forbidden it (now) until the Day of Resurrection. So he who has any (woman with this type of marriage contract) he should let her off, and do not take back anything you have given to then (as dower). Sahih Muslim: Book 008, Number 3255
According to the hadeeth of Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqaas: The Messenger of Allah (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) forbade ‘Uthmaan ibn Maz’oon to be celibate. If he had given him permission, we would have gotten ourselves castrated. Sahih Bukhari, Chapter: 62, Hadith no: 12, Sahih Muslim, 1402:
It was narrated from Salamah bin Rawh bin Zinba', that : his grandfather came to the Prophet and he had castrated a slave of his. The Prophet manumitted the slave in compensation for having been mutilated. Ibn Majah, Vol. 3, Book 21, Hadith 2679
Narrated Qatadah: Samurah reported the Messenger of Allah as saying: Whoever kills his slave we shall kill him, and whoever cuts the nose of his slave we shall cut off his nose. If anyone castrates his slave, we shall castrate him. Sunan Abi Dawud 4516, Bulugh Al-Maram: 9, Hadith 120
Ibn Hajar said, commenting on these hadiths:
The reason behind the prohibition on castration is that it is contrary to what the Lawgiver wants of increasing reproduction to ensure continuation of struggle against the disbelievers. Otherwise, if permission had been given for that, then many people would have done that, and reproduction would have ceased, and the numbers of Muslims would have become less as a result, and the numbers of non-muslims would have increased, and that is contrary to the religious purpose.[135]
In vitro fertilization [ edit ]
Regarding the response to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) of Islam, the conclusions of Gad El-Hak Ali Gad El-Hak's ART fatwa include that:[136]
IVF of an egg from the wife with the sperm of her husband and the transfer of the fertilised egg back to the uterus of the wife is allowed, provided that the procedure is indicated for a medical reason and is carried out by an expert physician.
Since marriage is a contract between the wife and husband during the span of their marriage, no third party should intrude into the marital functions of sex and procreation. This means that a third party donor is not acceptable, whether he or she is providing sperm, eggs, embryos, or a uterus. The use of a third party is tantamount to zina, or adultery.
Abortion [ edit ]
Islamic schools of law have differing opinions on abortion, though it is prohibited or discouraged by most.[137] However, abortion is allowed under certain circumstances, such as if the mother's health is [seriously] threatened. If the abortion is necessary to save the woman's life, Muslims universally agree that her life takes precedence over the life of the fetus.[138] Muslim jurists allow abortion in this context based on the principle that what is considered the greater evil – the woman's death – should be warded off by accepting the lesser evil of abortion. In these cases, the physician is considered a better judge than the scholar. Abortions of pregnancies that are merely unplanned or unwanted are generally haram (forbidden). The Qur'an forbids the abortion of a fetus for fear of poverty:
...kill not your children on a plea of want; We provide sustenance for you and for them Quran 6:151
Kill not your children for fear of want: We shall provide sustenance for them as well as for you: verily the killing of them is a great sin. Quran 17:31
Muslim views on abortion are also shaped by the Hadith as well as by the opinions of legal and religious scholars and commentators. In Islam, the fetus is believed to become a living soul after four months of gestation,[139] and abortion after that point is generally viewed as impermissible. Many Islamic thinkers recognize exceptions to this rule for certain circumstances; indeed, Azizah Y. al-Hibri notes that "the majority of Muslim scholars permit abortion, although they differ on the stage of fetal development beyond which it becomes prohibited."[140] According to Sherman Jackson, "while abortion, even during the first trimester, is forbidden according to a minority of jurists, it is not held to be an offense for which there are criminal or even civil sanctions," so Muslims should not support legal restrictions on abortion rights unsupported by Islamic law, as opposed to solely moral activism.[141]
Most Muslim scholars hold that the child of rape is a legitimate human being and therefore subject to the same laws of abortion (i.e. its abortion is permitted only if the fetus is less than four months old, or if it endangers the life of its mother[142]). Some scholars disagree with this position. Some Muslim scholars[who?] also argue that abortion is permitted if the newborn might be sick in some way that would make its care exceptionally difficult for the parents (e.g. deformities, mental retardation, etc.).[143][dubious – discuss][clarification needed]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project references
References [ edit ]
Ayubi, Nazih (2004). Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World. New York: Routledge.
GeneralSet 1
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo ->
Big River
They Love Each Other
New Minglewood Blues
It Must Have Been The Roses
Cassidy
Deal
Looks Like Rain
Brown Eyed Women
Dancing In The Street
Set 2
Estimated Prophet
Scarlet Begonias ->
Fire On The Mountain
Terrapin Station ->
Playing In The Band ->
Comes A Time ->
Playing In The Band
*Matrix*
----------------------------------------------------
SBD (shnid=91970):
Recording Info:
Set 1: SBD -> Master Cassette -> Cassette -> ART DIO -> Cool Edit 2000 -> FLAC
Set 2: SBD -> Master Reel -> Dat -> Sonic Solutions -> CD
Transfer Info:
Set 1: FLAC -> Sampltiude Professional v9.02 -> FLAC
Set 2: CD -> EAC -> FLAC
All Transfers and Mastering By Charlie Miller
charliemiller87@earthlink.net
May 22, 2008
Notes:
-- Complete sbd supplied by David Gans
-- Thanks to David Minches for transferring David Gans' Set 1 SBD Cassette
----------------------------------------------------
AUD (shnid=17686):
Source: Sony ECM-33Ps>Sony TC-152 taped by Jerry Moore from orchestra row 6 or 8
A>D Conversion: Master played back on Nak Dragon > ART D I/O >HD> Cool Edit 2000 > Feurio by David Minches
EAC by Rango Keshavan
Shn encoding and info file prepared by mvernon54@attbi.com
---------------------------------------------------
Thank you to David Gans, David Minches, and Charlie Miller for the SBD transfer;
to Jerry Moore for recording the show;
and to David Minches, Rango Keshavan, and Matt Vernon for the AUD transfer.
Matrix by Hunter Seamons using Final Cut Pro (SHN & FLAC>AIFF>Final Cut>WAV>FLAC)
May 23, 2009
plus-circle Add Review
comment Reviews
Reviewer: FelaFan - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 1, 2019
Subject: AYEYAYAYAYAYAYAAAAA!!!! NYC-area shows from this time period seem to bring out aggressive audiences. There's quite a bit of yelling requests at the band between each song. Additionally, there is some strange guy yelling out "AYEYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAAAA!!!" throughout the entire Palladium run, as well as the Capitol Theatre runs in 1977 and 1976. Who is this guy and how did he get access to tickets for so many small venue shows?
Other than that, this matrix sounds dynamite. Hunter Seamons and Charlie Miller deserve statues in the Grateful Dead themepark. - February 1, 2019AYEYAYAYAYAYAYAAAAA!!!!
Reviewer: DustTizzle - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - May 4, 2018
Subject: never understood the hype of 5/08 I never have really understood why so many people consider that the HOLY GRAIL of Grateful Dead shows!! There entire spring tour of 77 is amazing. I can say as a Deadhead who missed Jerry by 7 years because I was only born in 1987 but saw my first show "Dead" related show Phil and Friends in 2001 or 2002, that I never listen to 5/8/77. TO me.. the shows leading up to it and after it are the hot stuff... like this show im only up to TLEO and im blown away! - May 4, 2018never understood the hype of 5/08
Reviewer: lilrichwhiteboy - favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 5, 2016
Subject: Beautiful Mix Nice show. Nice matrix with the board's vocals not being overly dominant. Jerry Moore's 6-8th row audience position is a critical component of this warm and fuzzy evening. In some respects, the AUD is good enough to listen to without having to be matrixed. But the little added extra clarity of the board is the key to this mixed effort. It really is a beautiful mix. Highly recommended. - October 5, 2016Beautiful Mix
Reviewer: hu75 - - July 22, 2011
Subject: Good show, bad times I was looking for Hunter Seamons' email and couldn't find it.
Some of the tracks have incorrect times listed(eg, Mississippi and Fire).
That is all. Keep up the good work, I pretty much only listen to your matrixes. Please do any/all 1973-1978 if you feel inclined. Great years! - July 22, 2011Good show, bad times
Reviewer: t.coffren - favorite favorite favorite favorite - July 20, 2009
Subject: Very Entertaining Overall a fun show that has a very passionate acoustic set and a good finish. Would have liked to heard a longer fire and terrapin and less playin in the band but that is just me. I am falling in love with each matrix i hear. So well done and mixed beautifully. Hooray for taking the time! - July 20, 2009Very EntertainingAlibaba went public in September 2014. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Alibaba, China’s equivalent of Amazon plus eBay plus Paypal plus insert-other-giant-Internet-companies-here, reported earnings for the quarter ending June 30 on Wednesday. Investors were hoping for some good news that might help Alibaba reverse a slide in its stock price that’s lasted for more than two months. But alas. While Alibaba narrowly beat expectations on earnings (with adjusted earnings per share of $0.59 versus an expected $0.58), revenue was light and a few key metrics showed that the company’s once-insane growth is starting to slow. Shares tumbled more than 7 percent after the morning bell.
Let’s look at two of those important company metrics. Most of Alibaba’s revenue comes from what sales merchants make on its online shopping platforms, which include consumer-to-consumer destination Taobao and merchant-to-consumer site Tmall. Alibaba takes commissions and fees on these transactions. To measure the health of its e-commerce marketplaces, Alibaba looks at two main things: annual active buyers and gross merchandise volume (basically, the total value of stuff sold over a certain period of time). In the lead-up to its September 2014 initial public offering, Alibaba’s year-over-year growth in both of those categories kept going up. But lately—and especially in the most recent quarter—those growth figures have dropped off. You can see that in the two charts below:
Data from Alibaba. Chart by Alison Griswold.
Data from Alibaba. Chart by Alison Griswold.
What’s causing this deceleration? At the macro-level, Alibaba is struggling to perform in a lagging Chinese economy. China has recently released a string of weak economic numbers and could likely miss its stated annual growth target of 7 percent. On Wednesday, the People’s Bank of China also devalued the yuan for the second consecutive day, pushing shares lower globally on fears that the nation’s economy is doing worse than had been widely acknowledged. Alibaba has been caught in this economic turbulence. Its stock has fallen about 17 percent since late May and is off about 35 percent from the highs it reached in November 2014, shortly after IPOing.
More particular to Alibaba, the company is attempting to combat a slowdown in the growth rate of Chinese Internet users, as well as ongoing concerns about the authenticity of goods sold on its platform. In late June, Alibaba announced a joint venture with online payments service Ant Financial for “capturing opportunities within China’s local services market.” And earlier this week, Alibaba said it was investing $4.63 billion for a 20 percent stake in Suning, a major Chinese consumer electronics retailer, in an effort to further integrate “digital and offline retail.” Under the deal, Suning will open a store on Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace, and Alibaba will gain access to Suning’s extensive delivery and logistics network.
On the bright side for Alibaba, the latest quarterly report indicated one area where growth is still picking up. Mobile GMV as a percent of overall GMV increased to 55 percent. Maggie Wu, the company’s chief financial officer, said Alibaba made “significant progress” in monetizing its mobile traffic. If only it could use that progress to turn around its broader financial performance, as well.Illustration by Lia Kantrowitz
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At 8:30 AM, the set of RuPaul's Drag Race is relatively quiet, save for burly crew members lumbering across the show's iconic catwalk, their masculine frames kissed by a purple glow from the stage backlighting. Even in the still of a pre-shoot morning, Drag Race performs subtle acts of gender-fuckery.
A man emerges from behind a black curtain, and it takes me a minute to realize he is RuPaul. Ru's gowns and lashes are absent this morning, and he wears instead a simple black button down shirt, with dark pants and his signature oversized frames. But even in simple garb he projects every ounce of his significant charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent.
RuPaul first sashayed onto the pop culture radar when his club anthem "Supermodel (You Better Work)" became a crossover hit in 1992. Ever since, he has flirted with mainstream acceptance—today, he has risen to become one of the best-known drag queens and media personalities in America—while refusing to compromise his uniquely subversive worldview. Now, with his first Emmy nomination this July, Season 9 of RuPaul's Drag Race in production, and spinoff Drag Race All Stars 2 set to premiere on Logo tonight, Ru's rebellious worldview is poised for more mainstream recognition than ever before.
Just because the establishment has recognized The Queen doesn't mean she's drinking their Kool-Aid—Ru's beverage of choice has always been tea. And Ru was candid as ever in our condensed and edited interview below, in which he described "Hollywood diversity" as a capitalist construct, called bullshit on the gay community, and explained what we can all learn from a man named Danny The Wonder Pony.
VICE: Thank you for meeting me at the ass crack of dawn.
RuPaul: Well, this is like noon for me. I usually get up at 4 AM.
Jesus—what are you doing then?
Well, first you stretch and pray and meditate, then you go to the gym and do some emails, then go on a hike, and then you go to work.
Do you have a specific meditation practice, like Zen Buddhism?
There's no real brand. Any way [I] can get it done—I quiet my brain, and I become the observer of my thoughts. That's what meditation is, it's that separation between your thoughts and consciousness. And whatever practice you can do to make that happen--whether it's Zen Buddhism or Tijuana Tango--get it going, girl! [Laughter]
Well, con-drag-ulations on your Emmy nomination! As much as we talk about diversity in TV, there aren't many exclusively queer shows on television—why do you think that is?
Well, the entertainment business is a business, and the bottom line is about money. If any group wants to have a niche in the industry, they have to buy the tickets. It's not a moral obligation that Hollywood has, it's a monetary obligation. People mix that up too much. They say, "well it should be this, it should be that." If you want it to be that, then buy a fucking ticket and you'll make it that. The industry is not a human with a consciousness—it's corporations with a bottom line.
Tell me about your personal history, specifically with famed 1980s/90s party scene The Club Kids. How did coming up in that scene shape who you are today?
Well, we all had a common starting point—we were all devotees of the Andy Warhol experience of pop culture, where you could move to New York, change your name, become very fabulous with your clothes and attitude and become a superstar in your own right. We all shared that idea of this guerrilla approach to creating a persona, your own superstar. Before [the Club Kids] you needed someone else to discover you, but with the Club Kids, you could discover yourself. You know, as humans evolve on this planet, all roads lead to "you are God." You are the architect of this experience.
Obviously, The Club Kids were a huge part of your rise to fame. But I also imagine that the gay community was a crucial part of your development as well?
With the gay community, that's a tougher question, because when you talk about community, you're lumping everybody in together. I remember thinking when I was young, "Well, I think outside the box because I'm gay." Then when I entered the gay community I thought, "No, you think outside the box because you are an outside-of-the-box thinker. And it just so happens that you're gay." I realized that a lot of the gay people I knew in my youth really just wanted to be straight people who suck dick. It's like in Orwell's Animal Farm, how the characters begin the book with the mantra "four legs good, two legs bad," but in the end, they really just wanted to be Farmer Jones. I've seen it throughout history—it's a component of human experience. It's not just gays, it's everyone. And it's a rare occurrence when people have the ability to cut their own swath.
What is drag's purpose in 2016?
It's to remind people not to take life too seriously and that this body you're in is temporary. You are an extension of the power that created the universe, and the mission statement is to experience life. It's nothing more than that. Experience it. Use all the colors, touch all the toys and lick all the candy! Do it all. There's no judgement, right or wrong.
Drag queens heckle the whole idea of identity. They say, "look, I'm a boy! Look, I'm a girl!" Back in the Club Kid days there was a guy called Danny The Wonder Pony, and he would walk around the club with a saddle on his back — and it was a fetish thing, but still it didn't matter, you could be whatever you wanted to be, no judgement. That's what it's about.
The tagline for this season of Drag Race All Stars is "Lip sync for your legacy." What do you want your legacy to be?
Well, my legacy is definitely RuPaul's Drag Race. It's launching the careers of, at this point, 100 queens. But in terms of how I'm remembered—that's really none of my business. My mission statement is: I came to this planet to have a great time, have fun, meet people, do fun things. And this body or experience isn't the beginning or end of me. I really don't care how history remembers me—I won't be here. I need to make today, this moment, the most fabulous moment ever. And that's really what it's about.
Now, you'll have to excuse me—I'm gonna go put some eyebrows on!
Follow Jonathan Parks-Ramage on Twitter.More than 100 British MPs have asked the UK Statistics Authority to include Sikh as a separate ethnic box for the 2021 census to give the community a fair access to all public services in the country. The MPs include Indian-origin lawmakers Virendra Sharma, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, Preet Kaur Gill, Seema Malhotra and Keith Vaz.
The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for British Sikhs, alongside the Sikh Federation UK, are leading calls for the change. The Sikh body recalled that in 2002, an Early Day Motion on the subject was tabled in the House of Commons and received support from 174 MPs, including current Prime Minister Theresa May and former premier David Cameron.
The letter to John Pullinger, the UK national statistician and head of the Government Statistical Service, released on Tuesday, states: “Sikhs are a legally recognised ethnic group and have been protected under the UK law following a House of Lords ruling in 1983. A number of issues faced by Sikhs ranging from the reporting of hate crimes through to accessing healthcare provisions in the UK are not receiving appropriate attention by public bodies as they often only monitor ethnic group categories specified in the census.”
“The minority Sikh community has therefore been campaigning in the last two censuses for inclusion of a separate Sikh ethnic tick box for the compulsory ethnicity question,” the letter reads.
The letter states that in the 2011 census, around 84,000 Sikhs objected to the existing ethnic group categories by using the write-in option and specifying “Sikh”.
A separate Sikh category in the forthcoming census will also provide a better estimate of the community in the UK, the letter adds.
“I believe that wherever possible, it is right that people should be given the opportunity to identify themselves. There are more than 4 lakh Sikhs in the UK, but there is no way to track them without a separate box on the census,” said Virendra Sharma, one of senior-most Indian-origin Labour MPs in the British Parliament, who is among the 113 signatories of the letter.
The authority oversees the Office of National Statistics (ONS) had revealed it was undertaking research on adding Sikh and Kashmiri as separate ethnic tick boxes in the 2021 census earlier this year. “We are a long way off as there is still a lot of research that needs to be done to ensure that the census held every 10 years collects all the right information,” an ONS spokesperson said.
“Ethnicity is just one aspect of this research and Sikhs and Kashmiris are among a number of requests we received,” the spokesperson said. The MPs welcomed the research in their letter and claimed the demand within the British Sikh community is “both high and continuing to grow”.
Sikhs are a legally recognised ethnic group under the UK’s Race Relations Act, 1976, and campaigners for the change believe this gives them a right to be able to identify themselves separately from current census options, such as Indian or British Indian.
“Local authorities with huge Sikh populations are not recording data |
News investigation has found.
13m
The Conservative Party contracted a secretive call centre during the election campaign which may have broken data protection and election laws, a Channel 4 News investigation has found.
An undercover reporter working for Channel 4 News secured work at Blue Telecoms, a firm in Neath, South Wales.
In an area plagued by unemployment and low wages, the call centre hired up to a hundred people on zero-hours contracts. For weeks, they contacted thousands of potential voters in marginal seats across the UK.
The investigation has uncovered what appear to be underhand and potentially unlawful practices at the centre, in calls made on behalf of the Conservative Party. These allegations include:
● Paid canvassing on behalf of Conservative election candidates – banned under election law.
● Political cold calling to prohibited numbers
● Misleading calls claiming to be from an ‘independent market research company’ which does not apparently exist
Tonight the Conservative Party admitted it had commissioned Blue Telecoms to carry out ‘market research and direct marketing calls’ during the campaign, and insisted the calls were legal.
A Conservative spokesman said: ‘Political parties of all colours pay for market research and direct marketing calls. All the scripts supplied by the party for these calls are compliant with data protection and information law.’
But a whistleblower at the call centre told Channel 4 News they had been making potentially unlawful phone calls to voters.
Fake ‘market research company’?
Voters contacted by the firm were asked who they intended to vote for and how they had voted in previous elections by callers claiming to be from ‘Axe Research – an independent market research company’.
However, no such company is registered in England and Wales. ’Axe Research’ does not have a live website, address or phone number and is not listed on the data protection register.
Workers were repeatedly told not to disclose that they were working for Blue Telecoms.
Asked what Axe Research was, one supervisor told Channel 4 News: ‘It’s just the name we do these surveys under, basically. I did a Google search, nothing comes up. But as far as anyone’s concerned, yeah, we’re a legit independent market research company.’
The practice appears to be in breach of data protection rules on transparency and privacy. Guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) states that market research companies must disclose ‘who you are; what you are going to do with their information and who it will be shared with.’
A spokesperson for the ICO said they intend to ask the Conservative Party ‘about the marketing campaigns conducted from this call centre’ and told Channel 4 News:
‘The Information Commissioner reminded campaigners from political parties of their obligations around direct marketing at the beginning of the election campaign. Where we find they haven’t followed the law we will act.’
Anya Proops QC, a leading barrister in the field of data protection said:
‘If you’ve got a situation where the company that’s calling you is concealing their true identity or is misleading the person who is receiving the call, then that is obviously a problem under the privacy legislation.’
The head of Blue Telecoms, Sascha Lopez, said that any questions about Axe Research should be put to the Conservative Party.
However, the Party refused to comment directly on the calls being made by Axe Research but said: ‘No data from the market research calls were recorded against individual records.’
Unlawful marketing calls?
During the investigation, callers were also tasked with making direct calls ‘on behalf of Theresa May and the Conservative Party’.
Voters who identified themselves as ‘undecided’ were then fed key Conservative Party messages. These included references to the Brexit negotiations, the danger of a hung Parliament and immigration. One survey stated:
‘… It was reported in the Daily Mirror in September last year that Jeremy Corbyn is not concerned about the numbers of people coming to live in the UK and it was reported on Sky News this year that Theresa May has restated her pledge to reduce net Migration.
‘Just thinking about these reports in the media and the reports that you live in a marginal constituency that may determine who is prime minister… Does that make you more likely to back Theresa May or more likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn?’
A Channel 4 News analysis also reveals that the vast majority of calls sampled were to numbers registered on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).
While genuine market research is permitted, marketing calls to TPS numbers on behalf of political parties are prohibited by EU regulations and the Data Protection Act, unless the person called has specifically given the organisation their consent.
Channel 4 News showed the content of these calls to Dr Darren Lilleker, Associate Professor of Political Communication at Bournemouth University.
‘This is canvassing,’ he said. ‘It can’t be research. All the questions are loaded, a lot of them are quite rhetorical in that sense of guiding you towards one answer. It’s canvassing. It replicates the sorts of scripts I’ve seen used on doorsteps by parties for many years.’
The head of Blue Telecoms, Sascha Lopez, said: ‘All scripts supplied made it clear during the call, either at the beginning or the end, that the calls were being made on behalf of the Conservative Party. Respondents have the right for their responses to be deleted if they so wished. No data from the market research calls to TPS numbers (which regulations allow) were recorded against individual records.
‘We followed the regulations given by the TPS, ICO and Ofcom in regards to indentifying who was calling, the reason for calling, as well as operating an opt-out list.’
Paid canvassing for candidates?
During election day, on the 8th of June, callers at Blue Telecoms were told that they would spend the day making calls on behalf of named Conservative parliamentary candidates in Wales.
Guidance from the Electoral Commission for candidates and agents says: ‘During the campaign, you must not…pay canvassers. Canvassing means trying to persuade an elector to vote for or against a particular candidate or party’
The candidates were named during the calls and, again, floating voters were subjected to key Conservative messages.
The script for undecided voters stated:
‘Does knowing that you live in a marginal constituency that will determine who is Prime Minister for the Brexit negotiations, does that make you a lot more likely to vote for Theresa May’s Conservative candidate or a little more likely to vote for Theresa May’s Conservative candidate, or are you still unsure, or does it not make a difference.’
Meanwhile, voters who had decided to vote Conservative, but had not yet cast their ballots were warned that every vote counts and time is running out’ and encouraged to head for polling stations.
The calls appeared to be a breach of Section 111 of the Representation of the People Act which prohibits ‘payment as a canvasser for the purpose of promoting or procuring a candidate’s election’.
Barrister Anya Proops QC said paid canvassing ‘can have very, very serious consequences, even if the candidate in question doesn’t know it’s happening’.
Channel 4 News obtained evidence that at least ten key marginal seats were targeted by the call centre on election day. Calls were placed to voters in Caerphilly, Camarthen East, Ceredigion, Pontypridd, Torfaen, Newport West, Bridgend, Gower, Clywd South and Wrexham.
Again, an analysis of the calls by Channel 4 News also revealed that the vast majority – more than 80% of those sampled – were to numbers that had registered on the Telephone Preference Service.
On election day, callers were again instructed not to mention Blue Telecoms on the phone. Instead, they were told: ‘Just say you are in the Conservative Office, Cardiff, and don’t mention Blue Telecoms.’
The Neath call centre was visited by a senior Conservative Party official – both on election day itself and the day before. Channel 4 News has identified the individual as Richard Minshull, the Director of the Welsh Conservatives.
Sascha Lopez and Blue Telecoms
Sascha Lopez is a failed Tory council candidate and CEO of Blue Telecoms, which receives lucrative contracts from the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party has worked with Blue Telecoms before. In the 2015 campaign, it declared £265,205 with the firm and spent a further £83,500 in 2016 during the Welsh Assembly elections.
This programme is also aware that Blue Telecoms carried out further calling for the Conservative Party at the 2017 local elections.
Lopez told Channel 4 News: ‘The scripts and lists of who to call and when to call were given to us by CCHQ [Conservative Campaign Headquarters] in London and were not influenced by my team. However I can advise we were engaged to conduct market research and polling for the Conservative party, and at no time were we engaged to conduct any form of marketing or canvassing by the party or its candidates.’Click on slides to enlarge
The other method of measuring violence in pre-state societies is ethnographic vital statistics. What is the rate of death by violence in people who have recently lived outside of state control, namely hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal groups?
There are 27 samples that I know of, where ethnographic demographers that have done the calculation. I've plotted them as war deaths per 100,000 people per year. They go as high as 1500, but the average across these 27 non-state societies is a little bit more than 500. Again, let's stack the deck against modernity by picking some of the most violent modern societies for comparison, such as, for example, Germany in the 20th century, with its two world war: its rate is around 135, compared to 524 for the non-state societies. Russia in the 20th century, with two world wars, a revolution, and a civil war, is about 130. Japan in the 20th century, about 30. United States in the 20th century, with two world wars plus five wars in Asia, is about a pixel.
Now, here is the world as a whole in the 20th century. This is another version of the figure that I alluded to earlier, which includes all the wars, genocides and man-made famines; it amounts to around 60. And this is the world in the first decade of the 21st century, which again is far shorter than one pixel.
So: not to put too fine a point on it, but when it comes to life in a state of nature, Hobbs was right, Rousseau was wrong.
What was the immediate cause? It was almost certainly the rise and expansion of states. Anyone who is familiar with world history knows about the various paxes—the pax Romana, pax Islamica, pax Hispanica, and so on. It's the historian's term for the phenomenon in which, when a state expands or an empire imposes hegemony over a territory, they try to stamp out tribal raiding and feuding. That is what drives the statistics down.
It's not that these early states had any benevolent interest in the welfare of their subjects, but rather, that tribal raiding and feuding is a nuisance to imperial overlords. For the same reason that a farmer will take steps to prevent its cattle from killing each other —it's a dead loss to the farmer—Imperial overlords tend to frown on tribal battles that just shuffle resources and destroy the tax base at a net loss to them.
The second major historical decline of violence can be captured in this woodcut of a typical day in the life in the Middle Ages. The decline has been called the "Civilizing Process."
It's best illustrated by looking at homicide statistics, which go back in many parts of Europe to the 13th century. The historical criminologist Manual Eisner has assembled every estimate that he could find of homicide rates from records in England going back to about 1200.
I've plotted them here on a logarithmic scale, so that the scale goes from 100 homicides per 100,000 per year, to ten, to one, to a tenth of a homicide. And as you can see, there's an almost two order-of-magnitude decline in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present.
So a contemporary Englishman has about a 50-fold less chance of being murdered than his compatriot in the Middle Ages. (By the way, this high point here of 100 per 100,000 per year comes from Oxford.)
This is a phenomenon that is not restricted to England. It is true of every European country for which statistics are available. Again, here is a logarithmic scale, and the homicide rates goes from between ten and 100 down to a very narrow window of about one per 100,000 per year.
Here is an average of the five western European regions. And just to connect it to the previous historical development, I've plotted the non-state societies average up here, which is about 500 per 100,000 per year. (This gap is what I called the pacification process.) Then the civilizing process consists of this additional 30- to 50-fold reduction in the rate of homicide to the present.
The immediate cause was first identified by Norbert Elias in his classic book The Civilizing Process, from which I got the name for this development. In the transition from Middle Ages to modernity there was a consolidation of centralized states and kingdoms throughout Europe. Criminal justice was nationalized, and warlords, feuding, and brigandage were replaced by "the king's justice."
Simultaneously, there was a growing infrastructure of commerce: a development of the institutions of money and finance, and of technologies of transportation and time keeping. The result was to shift the incentive structure from zero-sum plunder to positive-sum trade.
The third historical decline of violence pertains to the fact that those first states, though they did bring down rates of feuding and vendetta and blood revenge, were rather nasty contraptions, which kept people in a state of awe with techniques such as breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, sawing in half, impalement, and clawing. In a process that historians call the "Humanitarian Revolution", these forms of institutionalized violence were eventually abolished. The momentum for this movement was concentrated in the 18th century.
This graph shows the abolition of judicial torture (that is, torture as a form of punishment) in the major countries of the day, including the famous prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment by the 8th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Also during this period there was a reduction in the use of the death penalty for non-lethal crimes. In 18th century England there were 222 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, being in the company of gypsies, and "strong evidence of malice in a child seven to 14 years of age." By 1861 the number of capital crimes was down to four.
Similarly, in the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, the death penalty was prescribed and used for theft, sodomy, bestiality, adultery, witchcraft, concealing birth, slave revolt, counterfeiting, and horse theft. We have statistics for capital punishment in the United States since colonial times. As you can see, in the 17th century a majority of executions were for crimes other than homicide. In current times, the only crime that is punished by capital punishment other than homicide is conspiracy to commit homicide.
The death penalty itself, of course, has been abolished in most of Europe. Most of the abolitions were concentrated in the last fifty years. This is the number of European countries with capital punishment. Currently, only Russia and Belarus have it had on the books.
But interestingly, even before capital punishment was abolished by the stroke of a pen, it had fallen into disuse. You can see that the percentage of European countries that actually carry out executions has always been far lower, and the decline began much earlier.
Now the United States, of course, notoriously is the only Western democracy that has capital punishment (though only in two-thirds of the states), a number that has been dwindling. And to say that the United States has the death penalty is a bit of a fiction. If you look at the number of executions as a proportion of the population, it has been plunging since colonial times. Today, out of about 16,500 homicides per year, there are about 50 executions, and that rate has been in decline as well.
Other abolitions during the humanitarian revolution include witch hunts, religious persecution, dueling, blood sports, debtors prisons, and of course most famously, slavery.
This graph shows the cumulative number of countries that abolished slavery. For the first time in history, slavery is illegal everywhere in the world. The last countries to abolish it were Saudi Arabia in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980.
What were the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution? A plausible first guess is affluence. One might surmise that as one's own life becomes more pleasant, one places a higher value on life in general. However, I don't think the timing works.
This is a graph of per capita income in England over the last 800 years. Most economic historians say that the world saw virtually no increase in affluence until the time of the Industrial Revolution starting in the early decades of the 19th century. But most of the reforms that I've been talking about were concentrated in the 18th century, when income growth was pretty much flat. However, there is one technology that showed a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution, and that was printing. Here's a graph showing the efficiency in book production, which increased 25-fold by 1700. The efficiency was put into use, and resulted in an exponential growth in the number of books published per year in England, France, and other western European countries. And there were more literate people around to read them. By the 18th century a majority of men in England were literate. Why should literacy matter? A number of the causes are summed up by the term "Enlightenment." For one thing, knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance: beliefs such as that Jews poisoned wells, heretics go to hell, witches cause crop failures, children are possessed, and Africans are brutish. As Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Also, literacy gives rise to cosmopolitanism. It is plausible that the reading of history, journalism, and fiction puts people into the habit of inhabiting other peoples' minds, which could increase empathy and therefore make cruelty less appealing. This is a point I'll return to later in the talk. The fourth historical decline of violence has been called the "Long Peace." It speaks to the widespread belief that the 20th century was the most violent in history, which would seem to go against everything that I've said so far. Peculiarly, one never sees, in any of the claims that the 20th century was the most violent in history, any numbers from any century other than the 20th. There's no question that there was a lot of violence in the 20th century. But take, for comparison, the so-called peaceful 19th century. That "peaceful" century had the Napoleonic wars, with four million deaths, one of the worst in history; the Taiping Rebellion in China, by far the worst civil war in history, with 20 million deaths; the worst war in American history, the Civil War; the reign of Shaka Zulu in southern Africa, resulting in one to two million deaths; the war of the Triple Alliance, which is probably the most destructive interstate war in history in terms of percentage of the population killed, namely 60 percent of Paraguay; the African slave raiding wars (no one has any idea what the death toll was); and of course, imperial wars in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific. These remarks are all qualitative, meant to damp down the tendency to think that just because in Europe there was a span of several decades without war, that the world as a whole was peaceful in the 19th century as a whole. Now, it is undoubtedly true that the Second World War was the deadliest event in human history in terms of number of lives lost. But it's not so clear that it was the deadliest event in terms of percentage of the world population. Here is a graph that I've adapted from a forthcoming book by Matthew White entitled The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities. White calls himself an "atrocitologist." He tries to fit numbers to wars, genocides, and manmade famines throughout history. Here we see 2500 years of human history, with White's top 100 atrocities, which I have scaled by the estimated size of the world population at the time. As you can see, World War II just barely makes the top ten. There are many events more deadly than World War I. And events which killed from a tenth of one percent of the population of the world to ten percent were pretty much evenly sprinkled over 2500 years of history.
Now this funnel-like concentration of points in the last few centuries does not mean that in ancient times they only committed big atrocities, whereas now we commit both big and little atrocities. It's rather an artifact of "historical myopia": the closer you get to the present, the more information you have. The smaller atrocities in the past were trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them, or not even deemed worthy of being written down.
Let's zoom in now on the last 500 years. There is a data set from Jack Levy on trends in great power war. These are wars that involve the 800-pound gorillas of the day, that is the countries that can project military power outside their boundaries, which account for a disproportionate amount of the damage due to war (because wars fall along a power law distribution of damage).
The first graph shows the percentage of time that the great powers were at war. We see that five hundred years ago, the great powers were pretty much always at war with one another, and then the proportion of each quarter-century filled with great-power wars declined steadily. The next one shows the duration of wars involving the great powers—also a decline. Here is one that shows the number of great-power wars initiated per year, and that figure, too, declines steadily over the half-millennium.
But now we see a graph of the deadliness of war, which shows a trend that goes in the opposite direction—though wars involving great powers were fewer in number, they did more damage per country per year. Even that trend, though, did an about-face after 1950, when for the first time in modern history, great-power wars became simultaneously fewer in number, shorter in duration, and less deadly per unit time.
Now let’s zoom in on the last century, the 20th century. Here is a graph showing deaths in war all over the world, not just those involving the great powers. It shows that the increase in deadliness of war did indeed result in two horrific spikes of bloodletting centered on the two world wars. But since then there has been a long stretch without that degree of bloodletting. The fact that the 20th century comprises 100 years, not just 50 years, is one of the reasons why it's misleading to say that the 20th century was the most violent in history.
[QUESTION: Which population figures are you using to calculate rates of death in war?]
The denominator here is the world population, not the population size of countries involved in each war. There are arguments for doing it either way. The problem is that you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on the choice of the denominator, whether you choose the country that initiated the war, the collateral damage in other countries, the neighboring countries, and so on. So in all cases I've plotted deaths as a proportion of world population.
The extraordinary 65-year stretch since the end of the Second World War has been called the "Long Peace", and has perhaps the most striking statistics of all, zero. There were zero wars between the United States and the Soviet Union (the two superpowers of the era), contrary to every expert prediction. No nuclear weapon has been used in war since Nagasaki, again, confounding everyone's expectations. There have been no wars between any subset of the great powers since the end of the Korean War in 1953. There have been zero wars between Western European countries. The extraordinary thing about this fact is how un-extraordinary it sounds. If I say I'm going to predict that in my lifetime France and Germany will not go to war, everyone will say, "Yeah, yeah; of course they won't go to war." But that is an extraordinary statement when you consider that before 1945, Western European countries initiated two new wars per year for more than 600 years. That number has now stood at zero for 65 years.
And there have been zero wars between developed countries at all. We take it for granted nowadays that war is something that happens only in poor, primitive countries. That, too, is an extraordinary development; war used to be something that rich countries did, too. Europe, which traditionally has been the part of the world with the biggest military might, is no longer picking on countries in other parts of the world, or hurling artillery shells at one other with the rest of the world suffering collateral damage. This change has been extraordinary.
Now, what about the rest of the world? What has happened in the other continents while Europe has been racking up its peaceful zeros?
First let’s look at the number of wars. These graphs start at 1946 and they span the entire globe. I'll divide it into the different categories of war.
One kind of war has vanished off the face of the earth. The colonial war (red), which used to be quite destructive, no longer exists, because the European powers have given up their colonies. (This is, by the way, a stacked layer graph, so the relevant visual variable is the thickness of the layers.)
Here (blue) we see the fate of interstate wars, wars between two sovereign states. These have also been dwindling since the end of the Second World War. However, the number of civil wars—both pure civil wars within a country (green) and internationalized civil wars (orange), where some foreign country butts in, usually on the side of the government defending itself against an insurgency—increased until about 1990, and then has shown somewhat of a decrease as well.
So since 1946 there have been fewer wars between states, but there been more civil wars, mainly because newly independent states with inept governments were challenged by insurgent movements, and both sides were armed by the Cold War powers. But even civil wars declined after 1991 with the end of the Cold War and the stoking of these proxy wars by the superpowers.
The crucial question now is: what kills more people, the fewer number of wars between countries, or the greater number of wars within countries? This graph shows the deadliness of interstate wars since the 1950s, that is, how many people are killed in a particular year of war. As you can see, the numbers has plummeted (I've already talked about that fact).
The tall blue bars represent deaths in interstate war, and as you can see they have plummeted over the decades. Much shorter are the internationalized civil wars (orange) and the civil wars (green). The fact that we have more civil wars and fewer interstate wars means that the total number of people has gone down, because the interstate wars of the past killed far more people than the civil wars of the present.
Now let's put the numbers back together, and instead of looking at the number of wars, look at number of deaths, again scaled by world population. This stacked-layer graph shows the number of people killed in wars since 1946. Here are the colonial wars (red). Here we see the number of people killed in interstate wars (blue), with spikes corresponding to the eras of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iran/Iraq War. These are the numbers of people killed in civil wars (green) and internationalized civil wars (orange).
The trajectory has been, to be sure, bumpy, but in the first decade of the 21st century, we are actually living in a time that even in comparison to recent decades is comparatively peaceable. In fact, one could almost say that the dream of the 1960s folk singers is coming true: the world is putting an end to war.
What about genocide? The last couple of graphs plot what are called "state-based conflicts, where you have two organized armed forces fighting, at least one of which is a government. What about cases in which governments kill their own citizens? Again, there's a cliché that the 20th century was the Age of Genocide. But the claim is never made with any systemic comparison of previous centuries.
Historians who have tried to track genocide over the centuries are unanimous that the notion that the 20th was "a century of genocide" is a myth. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, their The History and Sociology of Genocide, write on page one, "Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history."
What did change during the 20th century was that for the first time people started to care about genocide. It's the century in which the word "genocide" was coined and in which, for the first time, genocide was considered a bad thing, something to be denied instead of boasted about.
As Chalk and Jonassohn say of ancient histories, "We know that empires have disappeared and that cities were destroyed, and we suspect that some wars were genocidal in their results. But we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved in these events. Their fate was simply too unimportant. When they were mentioned at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of ox and sheep and other livestock."
To give some examples: if Old Testament history were taken literally, there were genocides on almost every page; the Amalakites, Amarites, Canaanites, Hivites, Hitites, Jevasites, Midianites, Parazites and many other. Also, genocides were committed by the Athenians in Melos; by the Romans in Carthage; and during the Mongol invasions, the Crusades, the European wars of religion, and the colonization of the Americas, Africa and Australia.
We have something even resembling numbers only for the 20th century. But if we plot those numbers, they refute the impression that the massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur are indications that nothing has changed, that the world has learned nothing since the Holocaust. This graph shows the best estimates that we can find of rates of death in genocide. Is certainly true that there was a burst of genocides from the 1930s to the early '50s in Europe, and from the '20s through the '70s in Asia. But the trend since World War II has been downward. It is definitely not the case that "nothing has changed" since the era of the Second World War. Even with the Rwanda genocide, a small proportion of the world’s population, compared to earlier decades, is massacred by their governments.
So what are the immediate causes of the Long Peace, and what I call the new peace (that is, the Post-Cold War era)? They were anticipated by Immanuel Kant in his remarkable essay, "Perpetual Peace" from 1795, in which he suggested that democracy, trade and an international community were pacifying forces. The hypothesis has been taken up again by a pair of political scientists, Bruce Russett and John Oneal, who have shown that all three forces increased in the second half of the 20th century. In a set of regression analyses, they showed that all of them are statistical predictors of peace, holding everything else constant.
Specifically, the number of democracies has increased since the Second World War, and again since the end of the Cold War, relative to the number of autocracies. There's been a steady increase in international trade since the end of the Second World War. There's been a continuous increase in the number of intergovernmental organizations that countries have entered into. And especially since the end of the Cold War in 1990, there's been an increase in the number of international peace-keeping missions, and even more importantly, the number of international peace keepers that have kept themselves in between warring nations mostly in the developing world.
The final historical development I call the Rights Revolutions. This is the reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals.
The civil rights revolution saw a reduction in the once socially-sanctioned practice of lynching. There used to be 150 lynchings per year in the United States, over the course of the 20th century the number has gone down to zero. Hate crime murders of blacks, which started to be recorded in the mid-1990s, went down from the single digits to one per year. Non-lethal hate crimes such as intimidation and assault have also been in decline since they were first measured.
Also, the kinds of racist attitudes that encourage violence against minorities, such as the percentage of Americans saying that they would move if a black family moved in next door, or believe that black and white students should go to separate schools, has now fallen into the noise—the range of crank opinion—and is basically indistinguishable from zero.
This is a trend that has taken place not just in the United States, but worldwide. The number of countries that have laws on the books that discriminate against ethnic, religious, or racial minorities has been in steady decline. In fact, the number of countries that have tried to tilt the scale in the other direction with affirmative action and remedial discrimination policies has increased. So now more countries in the world discriminate in favor of disadvantaged minorities than discriminate against them.
The women's rights movement has seen an 80 percent reduction in rape since the early '70s when it was put on the agenda as a feminist issue. There has also been a two-thirds decline in domestic violence, spousal abuse, or wife beating, and a 50 percent decline in husband beating. In the most extreme form of domestic violence, namely uxoricide and matricide, there's been a decline both in the number of wives that are murdered by their husband's and the number of husbands that have been murdered by their wives. In fact, the decrease is much more dramatic for husbands. Feminism has been very good to men, who are now much more likely to survive a marriage without getting murdered by their wives.
The children's rights movement has seen a decline in the United States of the number of states that permit corporal punishment in schools, such as "paddling" and "hiding." In much of Europe, it's been abolished outright. But even in the United States, it's been in decline. The approval of spanking and the implementation of spanking have been in decline in every country in which they have been measured. Here are data from the United States, New Zealand and Sweden. In fact, spanking, even by parents, is illegal in many European countries now. Child abuse, too, has been in decline since statistics were recorded in the early 1990s. And violence in schools, such as fighting and bullying, has been in decline.
The gay rights movement has seen an increase in the number of states in the world, and American states, that have decriminalized homosexuality (it used to be a felony). Anti-gay attitudes have been in steady decline, such as whether homosexuality is "morally wrong," whether it should be made illegal, and whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity. Hate crimes of intimidation against gays have been in decline since they were first measured.
The animal rights movement has seen a decline in hunting, an increase in vegetarianism, and a decrease in the number of motion pictures in which animals have been harmed.
The key question now is: Why has violence declined over so many different scales of time and magnitude? One possibility is that human nature has changed, and that people have lost their inclinations towards violence. I consider this to be unlikely. For one thing, people continue to take enormous pleasure, and allocate a lot of their disposable income, to consuming simulated violence, such as in murder mysteries, Greek tragedy, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games and hockey.
But perhaps more to the point are studies of homicidal fantasies, which ask people the following question: "Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like?" When you ask that question of a demographic with a very low rate of actual violence, namely American university students, you find that about 15 percent of the women and a third of the men frequently fantasize about killing people they don't like; and more than 60 percent of women and three-quarters of men at least occasionally fantasize about killing people they don't like. (And the rest of them are lying—or at least might sympathize with Clarence Darrow when he said, "I've never killed a man, but I've taken great pleasure in reading many obituaries."
A more likely possibility is that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and inclinations that counteract them—what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature." Historical circumstances have increasingly favored these peaceable inclinations.
What are the parts of human nature that militate toward violence? I count five, depending on how you lump or split them.
There's raw exploitation, that is, seeking something that you want where a living thing happens to be in the way; examples include rape, plunder, conquest, and the elimination of rivals. There’s nothing particularly fancy in the psychology of this kind of violence other than a zeroing out of whatever inclinations would inhibit us from that kind of exploitation.
There's the drive toward dominance, both the competition among individuals to be alpha male, and the competition among groups for ethnic, racial, national or religious supremacy or pre-eminence.
There's the thirst for revenge, the kind of moralistic violence that inspires vendettas, rough justice, and cruel punishments.
And then there's ideology which might be the biggest contributor of all (such as in militant religions, nationalism, fascism, Nazism, and communism), leading to large-scale violence via a pernicious cost- benefit analysis. What these ideologies have in common is that they posit a utopia that is infinitely good for infinitely long. You do the math: if the ends are infinitely good, then the means can be arbitrarily violent and you're still on the positive side of the moral ledger. Also, what do you do with people who learn about an infinitely perfect world nonetheless oppose it? Well, they are arbitrarily evil, and deserve arbitrarily severe punishment.
Now let's turn to the brighter side, our so-called better angels.
They include the faculty of self-control: the ability to anticipate the consequences of behavior, and inhibit violent impulses. There’s the faculty of empathy (more technically, sympathy), the ability to feel others' pain. There’s the moral sense, which comprise a variety of intuitions including tribalism, authority, purity, and fairness. The moral sense actually goes in both directions: it can push people to be more violent or less violent |
gas,” said Zhao Huasheng, director of the Center for Russia and Central Asia Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “We have to recalculate all the costs and try to push for a price cut.”Waiting for 'Dow 36,000'
Interview by Carlos Lozada
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Remember "Dow 36,000," the 1999 bestseller that promised a "wealth explosion" as the stock market scaled ever higher? Co-author Jim Glassman went back to his only-in-Washington career as a financial columnist, media executive, technology maven, think tank scholar and, most recently, Bush administration point man in the global war of ideas. As for the Dow, well, we know where that went. Glassman sat down last week with Outlook's Carlos Lozada to explain why Barack Obama will disappoint the world's expectations, why al-Qaeda doesn't get the Internet, and why he still thinks the Dow will hit 36,000 -- he's just not saying when. Excerpts:
So, 10 years ago you predicted that the Dow would reach 36,000. Now it has fallen to its lowest level since 1997, and 6000 seems more likely than 36,000. On behalf of investors and readers everywhere: What happened?
I think that people who read my columns would consider me a level-headed person who doesn't get upset, either way, doesn't have tremendous enthusiasms. But it's true that in 1999 Kevin Hassett and I wrote "Dow 36,000," which really made two points: The more important was that for investors who could put their money away for the long term, stocks were a much better investment than bonds. A lot of other people have said that, but we really made the case for stocks.
The second point was that based on our calculations, we believed that stocks would rise to roughly 36,000. We said in the book that it is impossible to predict how long it will take for the market to recognize that Dow 36,000 is perfectly reasonable, but then, of course, we did take a guess.
You said three to five years.
Obviously that hasn't happened. I think the question investors are facing now is, "Is history a guide?" In "Dow 36,000" we looked at history in, I think, a completely reasonable way and said a) you ought to be in the stock market and b) stocks are very much undervalued.
So, does history still prevail? My conclusion is that it does and that the basis of "Dow 36,000" is a good one and people should be in stocks for the long term. But I think reasonable people can differ about that today. We face a really scary time.
Would you be willing to hazard a guess on where the market will be three to five years from now?
No, and I think if there was a mistake in "Dow 36,000," it was that we in that one sentence did hazard a guess. We sort of said two different things: It's impossible to predict when this is going to happen, and then we said, well, we'll predict it anyway.
Do you still think it will hit 36,000?
I have no doubt about that. I think that is absolutely true. But I'm not going to tell you what date.
Do you ever regret having written the book, or regret the title? Do people come up to you at cocktail parties and say "Oh, yeah, Dow 36,000 -- how's that working out for you?"
Yeah, people do say that. There is no doubt that people -- especially people who haven't read the book -- think this is some sort of wild-eyed book that was part of the high-tech boom and so forth. Kevin and I usually joke that we really wish we'd called the book "A Treatise on the Declining Equity Risk Premium." I have to say, I don't really regret it. I think if people read the book, its examination of the nature of investing is right on. I think it's exactly right.
Just not the number.
I think the fact that the book title is a number -- as things have turned out, maybe a calmer title might have been better.
But you don't feel the need to apologize to someone who read your book, went in and got creamed?
Absolutely not.
At the end of the Bush administration, you served as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, leading U.S. efforts against terrorist ideologies. How do you think you did on that?
I think we did pretty well. The undersecretary for public diplomacy has a broad portfolio, which includes traditional means of engaging the foreign public, such as cultural and educational exchanges. These we do very, very well. But what we haven't really done very much of is what some people call the war of ideas.... This is a tremendously important battle, and it's not just a military battle, as [Defense] Secretary [Robert M.] Gates has said. I only had this job for seven months, but I think we got on the right track.
What has the war in Iraq done for the war of ideas?
I think ultimately the war in Iraq will be beneficial to the war of ideas in the sense that a functioning democracy that we hope will be stable and prosperous now exists in the Middle East, and is showing other nations and other people what a democracy looks like. Now, you can argue that was a great cost in American lives and American treasure and it wasn't worth it. I would disagree with that, but I think that's a legitimate argument.
In your Senate confirmation hearing last year you said that "the problem is that the majority of people in the world have never met an American." How much of the problem is that people do know America but don't like it?
The question of why people don't like us is a very complex one. Part of it is they don't like our policies. Part of it is they don't understand our policies but then when they do understand them they don't like them. The third is -- and this is the one I think we can actually work on -- that they feel we don't respect their point of view, that we get out the megaphone and we yell at them: "Here is what we believe; here is how wonderful we are; listen to this, world!" That is the approach that I tried to get away from.
You also said that al-Qaeda is "eating our lunch" in getting its message out on the Internet.
Al-Qaeda is not eating our lunch anymore. Al-Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. What al-Qaeda uses the Internet for is to exhort, to educate, to train, and it's effective in that sense. But what the Internet is being used for today is something that much more involves criticism, dialogue, conversation -- the kinds of things al-Qaeda cannot stand. Al-Qaeda is basically a cult, a death cult, and it exploits young people. So like any cult trying to exploit new members, it needs to seal those people off from the outside world and then batter them with its message. The Internet is pretty good in doing that, because you can reach people from all around the world, but once you kind of open up the Internet space to other voices, the whole system breaks down. So Web 2.0 is anathema to al-Qaeda.... I think we have technology on our side if we use it the right way.
What do you think the presence of Barack Obama in the Oval Office will do for the war of ideas?
Obama's presence is very helpful. The world is very excited about President Obama, there is absolutely no doubt about that. But I do think there will be some disappointment because there is anticipation a) that President Obama will solve all the problems in the world, and b) that his foreign policy -- I don't think it's going to be all that much different from what we've seen.
Would you have wanted to stay in the job under Obama?
Yes.
Did it ever come up?
There were a lot of people advocating my staying, including Newsweek. But did it ever come up, like, did I ever have a conversation with anybody about it? No.
How did your stocks do last year?
I took a major hit last year, about the same as the market as a whole. I plan to start buying again soon. It is hard to resist stocks like GE at $7 a share with a dividend of 40 cents.
© 2009 The Washington Post CompanyThe Russia “hack theory” is Obama Propaganda
Both the United States and Russia engage in covert and clandestine information operations called espionage.
It is but one aspect of the broader intelligence activity also known as spying. Time for all you snowflakes in America to grow up and get a grip and deal with with reality. If the respective intelligence organizations in either country are not doing this they are guilty of malpractice and should be dismantled.
There are 2 basic types of espionage activity–Covert refers to an operation that is undetected while in progress, but the outcome may be easily observed.
Killing Bin Laden is a prime example of a “covert” operation. A Clandestine Operation is something that is supposed to be undetected while in progress and after completion.
For example, if the US or Russia had a mole at the top of the National Security bureaucracy of their respective adversary, communicating with that mole and the mole’s very existence would be clandestine.
So, the alleged Russian meddling in our election, was it covert or clandestine?
The whole “blame Russia” movement to account for Hillary’s unexpected failure to win the Presidency got a new shot in the arm with Friday’s announcement that Obama ordered: a full review into hacking by the Russians designed to influence the 2016 election, White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said.
The stupidity of this is profound.
If this review leads to the “discovery” that Russia is carrying out espionage activities in the United States then we have passed the threshold of learning that there is gambling in a casino.
The real irony in all of this is that Wikileaks, thanks to the hack of the DNC and John Podesta e-mails, exposed the reality of Democrats working surreptitiously to tamper with and manipulate the election.
Here are the highlights from that leak: DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz Calls Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver an “A–” and a “Liar”
In May the Nevada Democratic State Convention became rowdy and got out of hand in a fight over delegate allocation. When Weaver went on CNN and denied any claims violence had happened, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, once she was notified of the exchange, wrote “Damn liar. Particularly scummy that he never acknowledges the violent and threatening behavior that occurred.”
One e-mail shows that a DNC official contemplated highlighting Sanders’ alleged atheism even though he has said he is not an atheist during the primaries as a possibility to undermine support among voters.
“It may make no difference but for KY and WA can we get someone to ask his belief,” Brad Marshall, CFO of the DNC, wrote in an email on May 5, 2016. “He had skated on having a Jewish heritage. I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” DNC National Secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote in an e-mail to National Communications Director Luis Miranda on May 21. After detailing ways in which the Sanders camp was disorganized, Paustenbach concludes, “It’s not a DNC conspiracy it’s because they never had their act together.”
The London Observer noted that: The release provides further evidence the DNC broke its own charter violations by favoring Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee, long before any votes were cast.
It was the Hillary Clinton spokesman, Robbie Mook, who launched the claim on July 24, 2016 that these leaks were done by the Russians in order to help Donald Trump.
The source of the leak has not been revealed, though Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said on ABC News’ “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” Sunday that he believes the Russians were instrumental in it.
“Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these websites,” Mr. Mook said Sunday. “It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”
The Clinton campaign started planning to smear Donald Trump as a Putin stooge as early as December 2015. The Podesta e-mails showed clearly that the Clinton Campaign decided early on to clobber Donald Trump for his “bromance” with Putin.
It was Brent Buwdosky almost one year ago (December 21, 2015) who proposed going after Donald Trump with the Russian card in an e-mail to Podesta: Putin did not agree to anything about removing Assad and continues to bomb the people we support. We pushed the same position in 2012 (Geneva 1, which HRC knows all about) and Geneva 2 in 2014. Odds that Putin agrees to remove Assad are only slightly better than the odds the College of Cardinals chooses me to someday succeed Pope Francis. Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.
Going after Trump as a Russian stooge was in Hillary Clinton playbook long before Trump won a primary.
One the wedge issues for Clinton with respect to Trump was Syria. Donald Trump took a strong stand (which many thought would hurt him with Republicans) in declaring we should not be trying to get rid of Assad and that America should cooperate with the Russians in fighting the Islamists. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, called for imposing a No Fly Zone that would have risked a direct confrontation with Russia.
Blaming Russia for Hillary’s flame out is absurd.
The Russians did not create and lie about Hillary’s server. They did not force her to back the multi-lateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA and TPP. They did not set up The Clinton Foundation as a cash cow for the Clinton family. They did not force her to advocate imposing a No Fly Zone in Syria and having been a cheerleader for past wars, including Iraq and Libya. Vladimir Putin did not slip her a mickey and cause her to pass out at the 9-11 memorial, which fueled concerns about her health, and They did not infect her lungs and cause her to have extended coughing jags. They did not cause her to call Americans deplorables. They did not make her say that the coal industry should be shutdown.
With that kind of record, coupled with her shrieking, screechy voice, why are people surprised that she did not win?
So, now Democrats and several Republicans are in a lather over the Russians stealing the election for Donald Trump.
The list of conspiracy theorists pushing this nonsense include John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Angus King of Maine, Brent Budowsky and Adam Schiff.
I defy anyone, to explain to me how Russian meddling gave Donald Trump the Presidency.
The realities are these.
First, as noted in the Budowsky e-mail, the Clinton campaign came up with the idea of accusing Donald Trump of being a stooge of Russia. They thought they’d get political bang out of that. They didn’t.
Second, the hack of the DNC e-mails confirmed that the suspicions of many that the DNC and Hillary were collaborating to screw over Bernie and rig the election. That was not fake news. Cold, unwelcomed truth.
That is when this drum beat about the big, bad Russians started meddling in our election started.
Why?
To distract attention away from the ugly reality that the DNC and Hillary were cheating.
The subsequent Wikileaks avalanche of John Podesta’s e-mails reinforced as fact the existing suspicion that the media was in the bag for Hillary. But no amount of media help and foreign money could transform Hillary Clinto into a likeable candidate. She was dreadful on the campaign trail and terrible at talking to the average American.
Even her boy, Brent Budowsky, reluctantly acknowledged this in an e-mail to John Podesta on Wednesday, August 26, 2015: While I have been warning for some time about the dangers facing the Clinton campaign, aggressively in privately, tactfully in columns, during this latest stage I have been publicly defending her with no-holds barred, and here is my advice based on the reaction I have been receiving and the dangers I see coming to fruition.
I would recommend you assemble a short reading list of everything surrounding President Kennedy’s full acceptance of responsibility after the Bay of Pigs, beginning with the substance and tone of his unequivocal taking of responsibility and ending with his huge rise in the polls, to nearly 90% favorable ratings, after he did this.
And then I would suggest she plan the equivalent and take full, absolute and unequivocal responsibility for making a mistake with the private emails and give an honest, direct, explanation of the reasons I believe she used those private emails....
She could say she was right anticipating this, but wrong in overreacting by trying to shield her private emails, and she takes full responsibility for this, and apologizes to her supporters and everyone else, and now she has turned over all information, it will ultimately be seen that there no egregious wrongs committed.
She needs to stop talking like a lawyer parsing legalistic words and a potential defendant expecting a future indictment, which is how she often looks and sounds to many voters today. Instead, she should take full responsibility for a mistake with no equivocation, and segue into the role of a populist prosecutor against a corrupted politics that Americans already detest…..and make a direct attack against the Donald Trump politics of daily insults and defamations and intolerance against whichever individuals and groups he tries to bully on a given day, and while defending some Republican candidates against his attacks, she should deplore their being intimidated by his insults and offering pastel versions of the intolerance he peddles.
In other words, she should stop acting like a front-runner who cautiously tries to exploit the rules of a rigged game to her advantage, and start acting like a fighting underdog who will fight on behalf of Americans who want a higher standard of living for themselves, a higher standard of politics for the nation, and a higher level of economic opportunity and social justice for everyone.
Like JFK after the Bay of Pigs, the more responsibility she takes now the more she will succeed going forward.”
Give Mr. Budowsky credit for one thing, if Hillary Clinto had followed his advice she might have won the election. But she was too busy exploiting the rules of a rigged game and trying to smear Donald Trump as a Russian agent while failing to exercise genuine, sincere personal responsibility.
This is an extremely dangerous time now.
Barack Hussein Obama appears to be actively working to discredit the Trump election and has enlisted the intelligence community in the effort.
How else to explain this disconnect?
Last week, as noted above, Mr. Obama directed the intelligence community to: “conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” she said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “This is consistent with the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing.”
Then comes news last night that: The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the US electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
Why do you order a review if the CIA has already made a factual determination? In fact, we were told in October that the whole damn intelligence community determined the Russians did it. USA Today reported this in October:
The fact-checking website Politifact says Hillary Clinton is correct when she says 17 federal intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is behind the hacking.
“We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing,” Clinton said during Wednesday’s presidential debate in Las Vegas.
Donald Trump pushed back, saying that Hillary Clinton and the United States had “no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else.”
But Clinton is correct. On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The USIC is made up of 16 agencies, in addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
I heard from a knowledgeable friend in September that Hillary’s campaign was pressing the Obama White House to lean on the intel community and put something out blaming her woes on the Russians. That led to the October statement. And now we have the CIA via a SECRET report (that is leaked to the public) insisting that Donald Trump’s victory came because of the Russians.
This is a lie.
The CIA is now allowing itself to be used once again for blatant political purposes.
The politicization became a real problem under Bush (43). Let us not forget that these are the same cats who insisted it was a slam dunk that were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The same group who missed the rise of ISIS.
Barack Obama told CNN’ Van Jones the following the other night: “The ability of ISIL to not just mass inside of Syria, but then to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example, that was not on my intelligence radar screen,” Obama told Zakaria, using the administration’s term for the Islamic State terror group.
Also worth reminding ourselves that the head of the ironically titled “Intelligence Community” is a proven liar. Jim Clapper lied to the Senate about the NSA spying on Americans three years ago (December 2013):
In a letter issued the day after a White House surveillance review placed new political pressure on the National Security Agency, the 7 members of the House judiciary committee said that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, ought to face consequences for untruthfully telling the Senate that the NSA was “not wittingly” collecting data on Americans.
“Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony, witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress,” wrote representatives James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raul Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy and Blake Farenthold, citing “Director Clapper’s willful lie under oath.”
There is a consistent pattern in the Obama Administration of lying to the American people, especially when it comes to National Security matters. The NSA is not an isolated case. We also have Benghazi, Syria and Libya as other examples of not telling the truth and misrepresenting facts.
In my lifetime, going on 60 years, I have never seen such a display of incompetence as is being manifested by Barack Hussein Obama and mental midgets that surround him.
What they can say for sure is that the DNC and John Podesta e-mails were hacked.
Those hacked e-mails were passed to Wikileaks Those e-mails were then released to the public. What the intel community will be hard pressed to prove is that Russia government conceived of and directed such a campaign. The true information operation to meddle in the US election was not Russia. It was and continues to be Barack Hussein Obama.
By Larry Johnson, NO QUARTERS USA
Paul Ebeling, EditorApparently Vice President Joe Biden, who is reportedly readying a campaign against Hillary Clinton for the White House, has even creepier habits than we previously thought.
According to Secret Service expert and best selling author Ronald Kessler, Biden likes to skinny dip in front of female Secret Service agents assigned to protect him. Naturally, they find this offensive.
"Talk about a war on women. Biden likes to swim nude both at his Vice President's residence in Washington and also at his home in Wilmington which he goes back to several times a week, all at our expense. By the way, a million dollars in Air Force 2 expenses, and this offends female Secret Service agents," Kessler said to Fox News' Sean Hannity Thursday night. "You know, they signed up to take a bullet for the President as you said but they didn't sign up to...they certainly didn't sign up to see Biden naked. It is offensive, it's abusive."
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com">http://video.foxnews.com">video.foxnews.com
Joe Biden isn't just "uncle Joe," he's the Vice President of the United States and a potential presidential nominee with a long history of creepy, gross behavior that shouldn't be tolerated or laughed at. Further, his creepy behavior is a reflection of his character, which should be taken seriously should be decide to run for President.Marussia driver Max Chilton believes an outlawing of front and rear interconnected (FRIC) suspension could hurt Mercedes more than any other team.
A leaked letter to the teams on Tuesday revealed that the FIA have decided that the systems are in breach of Article 3.15 of F1’s Technical Regulations as they could be considered moveable aerodynamic devices.
The governing body's directive overshadowed the final day of testing at Silverstone, and the Marussia driver told Sky Sports News: “I hear the Mercedes system is very complicated so it could affect them more.”
Chilton dedicated much of his test day at Silverstone to running without the FRIC system on the Marussia in case it is banned ahead of next week's German GP.
“We had new parts to take off because the FRIC system is under investigation and we thought we might as well try the car and see what we could do without it in case it goes that way,” the Briton later informed Sky Sports Online.
“We did lots of different set up changes and I think we learnt a lot.”
The 23-year-old admitted he was worried about how the car’s balance would be affected by the change, but he was pleasantly surprised by how the MR03 handled without FRIC.
“It didn’t feel as bad as I thought,” he added. “It will depend on what circuit you are at. At Silverstone it didn’t seem to take a huge amount of balance away from the car and by the end of the day we kind of got it back to where it was so it was actually quite an encouraging sign.”
Whilst much of the talk around the change has centred on how much it will hurt performance, Chilton feels it could actually be a benefit on some tracks.
“It will have an effect, some circuits it will have others not so much. In simulation it can be anything from seven tenths to maybe a couple of tenths, so you won’t really know until you get to the circuit and try it out, but it has its gains by not running it as well,” he revealed.
“It is mainly to do with the straight line speed and the type of corners because it moves depending on what speed you are doing to give you the optimum speed in a straight line, so I guess it will affect the higher speed circuits more than the slow speed.
“It has its gains as the car is lighter without it and you can run higher, which isn’t best for the downforce, but it is better for kerbs so if there is a particular circuit where you want to run wide over kerbs then this is better.”GETTY/CEN Two migrants are on trial for arson in Dusseldorf after allegedly torching a refugee centre
The men, 27-year-olds from Morocco and Algeria, are accused of setting fire to the housing facility in a former exhibition hall in Dusseldorf, Germany. In the fire on June 7 last year, 28 people suffered from smoke poisoning when the hall on Dusseldorf's fairground that housed about 150 migrants burned to the ground. Prosecutors say the Algerian laid the fire, aided by the Moroccan.
CEN Prosecutors say that the Algerian migrant laid the fire which gave 28 refugees smoke poisoning
The Algerian is said to have poured a bottle of vodka over a mattress in a vacant living room in the rear of the building and then lit it. Only the quick response of caretakers and residents prevented there being any deaths or serious injuries. Prosecutors say the two Muslim migrants were angered by the fact that food and drink were served in the morning and at noon, even though the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan had begun the day before.
The many faces of Angela Merkel Wed, May 17, 2017 German Chancellor, Angela Merkel through the years Play slideshow 1 of 16
The man had decided to light the fire after an argument in connection with the issue of lunch, it is alleged. The Algerian has been in custody since he was arrested at the crime scene. The Moroccan was also arrested on the spot but has been free since August. The prosecutor's office had charged the accused with GBH and "particularly" serious arson charges, but the Dusseldorf court has downgraded the charges to "serious arson".
CEN The two migrants could face prison sentences of up to 15 years if convictedHaving previously reviewed the Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets, we at CoinGecko Buzz now move on to the next available hardware wallet on the market—the very beautifully designed KeepKey. We requested a device from KeepKey and a few days later a U.S. Postal Service parcel arrived at our doorstep.
Upon unboxing, we were greeted with a black box containing the device.
The box is plastic-wrapped and comes with a hologram sticker like the Trezor box did. It will be obvious to anyone if the sticker has been tampered with. Upon removing the seal, we found the process of opening the box to be relatively easy, and there was no additional glue to grapple with.
Below is what we found inside the KeepKey box.
The KeepKey device is sleek with an all-black design. It is also relatively heavy, with a sturdy feel of security. The instructions for the KeepKey are short and sweet, like the Ledger’s, and this scores with me. I am still horrified by the extremely long instruction sheet that I received with the Trezor; it confused me to the point where I had to read things twice to understand them.
Initializing KeepKey
The first step in initializing the device is to install the KeepKey Wallet Chrome Extension by navigating to keepkeywallet.com. This domain redirects to the Chrome Extension download page below:
Installation of this Chrome Extension was simple. The next step is to install the KeepKey Proxy Chrome app by navigating to keepkeyproxy.com. This domain redirects to the Chrome App download page below:
Installation of the KeepKey Chrome Proxy App is also very simple and straightforward. I do not know why the two installations are not combined, as both the Trezor and Ledger make do with one installation. Perhaps this is something that the KeepKey manufacturer can look into combining, but it’s not a big deal, as both installation processes are really quite painless.
Upon completion of the two installations, the next step is to click on the KeepKey icon on my Chrome menu bar.
There is only one button to click and initialize the device, which is what I did. I was then tasked with providing a name for my device.
I was prompted to set a PIN using a scrambled keypad on the device.
I like this security measure because I can initialize the device even on a compromised machine. The KeepKey follows the best practice set by the Trezor device, an ability that is not available on the Ledger Nano.
I was prompted to reconfirm my PIN; upon confirmation, I was presented with a 12-word recovery seed on the device; I had to copy it onto the provided recovery seed card.
One peculiar item included in the KeepKey box is a leather case to store my recovery seed card. I thought it was weird for this leather case to be included and for a while I wasn’t sure about its purpose.
I was curious about why the KeepKey uses only 12 words instead of the standard 24-word recovery seed. Darin Stanchfield, founder of KeepKey, in a comment on Reddit mentioned the following:
First, KeepKey can use 12, 18 or 24 words. We just default to 12 in our client. 12 words is actually quite secure. Trezor originally defaulted to 12 words, but changed to 24 because their recovery method wasn't quite secure with 12. We believe that more words means more opportunities to write down the incorrect mnemonic, and so this is why we default to 12.
Once I had written down my 12-word recovery seed, I had to press a button on the top right of the device and hold it for about two seconds. Once completed, a Bitcoin wallet with zero balance was shown, indicating that I had successfully initialized my KeepKey device.
Here is a video of the initialization process in a screencast.
I was surprised at the ease of initializing the KeepKey device. I have to say that among the Trezor, Ledger Nano and KeepKey, this feels like the easiest and fastest device to initialize. I am really glad that I did not have to eject and plug the device back into the computer. Initializing was a seamless process.
Sending and Receiving Bitcoins
I proceeded to try to send some bitcoins to my wallet. I generated an address on the wallet and sent 0.1 BTC to myself.
The process of receiving bitcoins is the same as that with any other wallet. I then proceeded to return the bitcoin to test the security credentials. This is where I was not too happy with the user experience. Whenever I navigate to another tab on Chrome to double check whether I have copied the address correctly, the wallet transaction data—such as the Bitcoin address and transaction amount—disappears. I have to click on the KeepKey icon at the menu bar to begin the process again.
The Send page has three options for Transaction Speed. I can customize the transaction fees so that the transaction is processed within 10 minutes, 30 minutes or over one hour. I think this step is unnecessary and simply confuses the user. The current transaction fee for 10 minutes is miniscule, at only 0.0001 BTC (roughly USD 0.03 at the current rate) and I think it should be left as the default option. I would not want to pay really low fees only for my transaction to be unconfirmed for over an hour. If KeepKey feels that this is an important feature, I think it could be hidden behind a link and the default 10-minute option should be presented for the average user.
I selected the 10-minute option and was then tasked with keying in my PIN using the scrambled keypad on my laptop. Upon completion, I was presented with the following screen on my device:
I double-checked that the amount and Bitcoin address listed on the KeepKey was correct. To proceed, I held the button on the top right of the KeepKey device for about two seconds to confirm the transaction. Upon completion, my transaction was broadcast to the Bitcoin network.
Conclusion
Overall, I find the KeepKey a great hardware wallet. It looks stunning and is really sleek. Its security credentials mirror those of the Trezor and are among the best in the market. The good thing about the KeepKey is that it can be initialized on a compromised computer. However, I wish that the KeepKey wallet on Chrome could be improved. That said, you can use KeepKey on other popular Bitcoin wallets such as Electrum and Multibit to avoid the problem mentioned.
The KeepKey retails for $239, which is 140 percent more expensive than the Trezor, which retails for $99.
UPDATE: The KeepKey now retails for $99 which is the same price as the Trezor! If you are looking for a really beautiful hardware wallet, KeepKey is a good device for you to purchase. Order your KeepKey now!
P.S. - While doing research for this review, I found the following article, which you may find helpful for understanding KeepKey under the hood (warning: technical post).WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump plans to nominate Brian Brooks, general counsel for Fannie Mae, as deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Axios reported on Saturday, citing three sources it said had knowledge of the pick.
Brooks oversees the legal department and government and industry relations at the Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored entity that provides financing for mortgage lenders. He is senior adviser to the chief executive and board of directors.
Brooks worked at California bank OneWest with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who wanted a loyalist for the post, according to two of Axios’ unidentified sources.
A White House spokeswoman would not confirm the report.
The position requires U.S. Senate confirmation.
Trump’s first pick for the job, Goldman Sachs Group Inc banker James Donovan, withdrew his name last month for personal reasons.
Earlier this year, the White House had considered Brooks to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to CNBC.Women are more likely to be depressed than men; about twice as likely here in the US, as I have been told. It’s an interesting finding, to be sure, and making sense of it poses a fun little mystery (as making sense of many things tends to). We don’t just want to know that women are more depressed than men; we also want to know why women are more depressed. So what are the causes of this difference? The Mayo Clinic floats a few explanations, noting that this sex difference appears to emerge around puberty. As such, many of the explanations they put forth center around the problems that women (but not men) might face when undergoing that transitional period in their life. These include things like increased pressure to achieve in school, conflict with parents, gender confusion, PMS, and pregnancy-related factors. They also include ever-popular suggestions such as societal biases that harm women. Now I suspect these are quite consistent with the answers you would get if queried your average Joe or Jane on the street as to why they think women are more depressed. People recognize that depression often appears to follow negative life events and stressors, and so they look for proximate conditions that they believe (accurately or not) disproportionately affect women.
Boys don’t have to figure out how to use tampons; therefore less depression
While that seems to be a reasonable strategy, it produces results that aren’t entirely satisfying. First, it seems unlikely that women face that much more stress and negative life events than men do (twice as much?) and, secondly, it doesn’t do much to help us understand individual variation. Lots of people face negative life events, but lots of them also don’t end up spiraling into depression. As I noted above, our understanding of the facts related to depression can be bolstered by answering the why questions. In this case, the focus many people have is on answering the proximate whys rather than the ultimate ones. Specifically, we want to know why people respond to these negative life events with depression in the first place; what adaptive function depression might have. Though depression reactions appear completely normal to most, perhaps owing to their regularity, we need to make that normality strange. If, for example, you imagine a new mouse mother facing the stresses of caring for her young in a hostile world, a postpartum depression |
ROMNEY: Mm-hmm. CAVUTO: And — and that would be appealing. ROMNEY: Well, we will see, won't we, Neil?
Ann Romney went on to say that she thinks Bush will end up running, and if he did, he "would draw on a very similar base that we would draw on." But Romney's supporters saw her remarks as just another indication Romney is seriously thinking about running. And even if Bush decides to run, some Romney supporters who would otherwise be inclined to go with Bush would still want the go-ahead from Romney first.
"I don't think Romney wants to run against Jeb," the supporter quoted earlier said. "We're going to wait and see. We're going to want clarity, if Jeb tips his hat either way after the midterms. If Jeb tips toward running, I can see a meeting with Mitt to ask his intentions." Whatever happens, this group of Romney loyalists — a significant number of people with a significant amount of money to contribute — will not move ahead without his OK.
If Romney did run, one thing the loyalists expect is a change in his top strategists. Recently one veteran Republican operative who was not involved in the Romney campaign said, "All his people want him to run again because they made so much money off it the last time." Now, Romney supporters say that if he mounts another campaign, they would demand that Romney not employ Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, the Republican strategists who played key roles in the 2012 campaign. Who would take their place is an open question.
What are the ultimate chances Romney runs? One member of the inner circle explained that there's no way to assign a percentage to it, and no way to say that the chances are greater than not. But he quickly added that the odds of Romney running are "definitely more than zero."
That in itself is a huge change from Romney's view during the 2012 campaign. In the intimate documentary "Mitt," Romney, discussing the aftermath of campaigns with his family, said, "I have looked, by the way, at what happens to anybody in this country who loses as the nominee of their party. They become a loser for life, all right? That's it. It's over."
That was then. This is now. And perhaps Romney is no longer quite as sure that it's really over.Katie Ledecky competes in the women's 400-meter freestyle at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium on Aug. 7, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro.
RIO DE JANEIRO — World records have been falling in almost every final in the Olympic Aquatics Stadium at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. And in the 400-meter freestyle, Katie Ledecky did not disappoint.
In fact, with a three-second-plus gap on the rest of the field, Ledecky’s main foe is the world record.
From the moment she hit the water, the 19-year-old freestyle phenom left everyone in her wake — flying almost over the surface of the water, rather than through it, as if she has a different relationship with fluid dynamics than her competitors.
Her time, 3:56.46, lowered her world record by almost two seconds. And she won her second Olympic gold medal — and third to date. She has a gold medal from the 800 at the London 2012 Olympic Games, which she won when she was 15, and a silver from the 4 x 100 freestyle relay on the first night of competition here in Rio.
Ledecky became the fifth female swimmer to win gold medals at two different Olympic Games as a teenager.
When she looked at the scoreboard after the race, she felt “pure happiness.”
She had achieved a goal that she and her coach Bruce Gemmell had set three years ago after the 2013 world championships, where she won her first world title in the 400.
“Just to see the 56 up there feels really good,” Ledecky said in her usual succinct fashion.
Her coach Bruce Gemmell was equally succinct. When asked what he said to her after the race, she replied, “He said something like, ‘3:56 is pretty good.’”
Ledecky seemed happy for her teammate, Leah Smith, as well. Smith — who as a kid didn’t like to put her face in the water — swam the 400 in 4:01.92 and won a bronze medal, just behind Jazz Carlin from Great Britain who claimed silver.
“This is my first Olympics, so I still haven’t registered that I’m even here, let alone that I won a medal,” said Smith.
It was the first time in 16 years that an American has won an Olympic gold medal in the 400 free and also the first time in 16 years that two American women have stood on the podium together in the event.
Brooke Bennett and Diana Munz went 1-2 in the 400 free at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
The 400 freestyle world record was one record that Ledecky had not touched in two years — the women’s 400 freestyle. She had lowered her other world records in the past year (in the 800 and 1,500 freestyle, which is not an Olympic event for women). But not in the 400 free. She came close at the 2016 U.S. Olympic Team Trials, swimming 3:58.98, the fastest time in the world this year coming into the Rio Games.
Ledecky’s previous world record in the 400 was 3:58.37 set at the Pan Pacific Championships in August 2014.
But 3:56 surprised no one who knows Ledecky.
“I trained with her for the past month,” said Smith. “The times that she put up in practice made me look like I was going to go 5 minutes. She is amazing. I knew she was going to go that time.”
Still, Smith was amazed when she saw 3:56 on the scoreboard and mouthed it in amazement as she hugged Ledecky in the pool.
Smith’s performance was almost as amazing as Ledecky’s, considering it was swimming in her first final in an international meet. A 21-year-old senior at the University of Virginia, Smith had bad jitters in the afternoon prelims, which made her tense. She struggled to the finish and didn’t even know if she would make the final.
Then Ledecky’s coach talked to Smith before the final.
“He was like, you’re swimming next to Katie, and that’s a position that you’re so comfortable in,” said Smith. “Normally when I swim, I like to be out front. But when I’m next to Katie, I still have really good races. If I’m anywhere near her, I’m probably having a good race.”
Smith swam solidly in third until the final 50, when she saw Boglarka Kapas from Hungary coming up in Lane 1.
“I was really nervous, but I wasn’t as dead as I was the last 50 of my morning swim,” she said.
She held on for the bronze, meeting her goal to bring home an Olympic medal for Team USA.
Ledecky has singlehandedly revived distance swimming in the U.S. The 400, 800 and 1,500 freestyle races were once dominated by legends such as Janet Evans, Shirley Babashoff and Debbie Meyer. But in the 2000s, distance swimming fell off the radar in the U.S. in part because NCAA programs typically recruit sprinters who can swim more relays and thus garner more points for their college teams.
At the Olympic Trials in late June, Babashoff gave Ledecky the ultimate praise. When Babashoff was training back in the mid-1970s in the Mission Viejo Nadadores’ program in California, she swam in what was called the Animal Lane, where distance swimmers pushed themselves to extreme lengths.
“She would have been in that lane,” Babashoff said of Ledecky. “She would have been the leader.”
Ledecky will return to the pool tomorrow afternoon for the heats of the 200-meter freestyle.
Although she is not favored to win gold in the 200, freestylers know to never count out Ledecky.
She is, after all, an animal.
***
When Dana Vollmer returned to the pool last April after having a baby, she coined her own hashtag: #MommaOnAMission.
Her mission?
To prove that she could be both an athlete and a mom.
After the women’s 100-meter butterfly at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, Vollmer might want to change it to #MommaWithAMedal.
The 28-year-old butterflier earned an Olympic bronze medal in the women’s 100 fly — two steps lower on the podium than her finish at the 2012 London Games.
She finished in 56.63, over a second behind Sweden’s Sarah Sjöström, who broke her own world record by 0.16 seconds. The Swede won in 55.48.
Download the Team USA app today for breaking news, 2016 U.S. Olympic Team bios, videos and more.
Vollmer’s 56.63 was 0.65 seconds slower than her gold-medal-winning swim in London four years ago. Her then-world-record time of 55.98 set at the London Games remains the American record.
It’s Vollmer’s first bronze medal and sixth Olympic medal overall. A three-time Olympian, Vollmer already has four Olympic gold medals — one from the 2004 Games and three from 2012 — and one silver medal from the women’s 4x100 freestyle last night.
A freelance writer based in Vermont, Peggy Shinn is in Rio covering her fourth Olympic Games. She has contributed to TeamUSA.org since its inception in 2008.There's nothing a history geek likes more than saying, "Actually, everything you think you know about [insert historical event here] is wrong. And here's why."
In this four-minute video, C.G.P. Grey tackles five historical misconceptions, contrasting the commonly accepted stories with what the historical record actually shows. My favorite is his explanation of Napoleon Bonaparte's height. To ruin the story ever so slightly, it turns out that France has a history of special measurements, so the "French inch" used during Napoleon's time differed from the English inch, making Napoleon average or even slightly above average for his time.
Anyway, with that aside, why not spend four minutes learning the real stories behind a handful of historical misconceptions? Away we go:
Surprisingly geeky easter egg: at 1:05, you can see a Minecraft Creeper hiding in the art. Well played, Grey. (There are other easter eggs too -- check out Napoleon's horse.)Lewis Hamilton has strongly dismissed suggestions he wants a clause in his contract stating that he is Mercedes' number one driver. Lewis Hamilton has strongly dismissed suggestions he wants a clause in his contract stating that he is Mercedes' number one driver.
Lewis Hamilton has denied asking for number-one status at Mercedes - a luxury which he believes both Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel have written into their contracts.
Despite agreeing to the terms of a contract extension last month with Mercedes, Hamilton is still yet to put pen paper on a new deal with the Silver Arrows, prompting speculation that the two parties may have hit an impasse after the world champion demanded number one billing ahead of team-mate Nico Rosberg.
But Hamilton has emphatically denied making any such demand for preferential treatment – and for good measure thrown in with what will be interpreted as a dig at Ferrari’s Vettel and McLaren driver Alonso, the Englishman's team-mate during a single turbulent season in 2007.
“I’ve never, ever, ever asked for a number one clause,” Hamilton told Sky Sports News HQ. “Sebastian will have that. Fernando always asks for that. I have never, ever asked for that.
“I want to beat the guy, at his best, next to me and then I’ll know where I stand. It’s never been a case of wanting to tie someone’s hands behind their back and beat them and be happy with it. I know a lot of people here would be happy with that, but that’s not me.”
Team boss Toto Wolff had already moved to dismiss claims Hamilton had sought number one status, assuring Sky Sports News HQ ahead of this weeeknd's Bahrain GP: “That’s not the case – and he wouldn’t ask for that clause because that is not what we do and I think he appreciates how we manage the team and give both drivers equal status.
Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport Toto Wolff says Lewis Hamilton would not ask for a number one clause to be placed in his new contract. Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport Toto Wolff says Lewis Hamilton would not ask for a number one clause to be placed in his new contract.
“It is down to the detail. We have discussed and negotiated for a long time. We have sorted out the main terms since a couple of months already and it’s just a little bit of ping-pong between the lawyers. This is the normal process.”
Having at one stage expressed hope that the deal could have been concluded even before the new season began, Wolff is now hoping they are soon ready to put the matter to bed.
He added: “I would really wish to sort it out in the next couple of days or weeks, without putting ourselves under pressure because this is a great relationship among us. We want to win races and just put the signed contract into the drawer.”
Once Hamilton's new contract is finalised then the Briton will again be team-mate to Rosberg in 2016, the German having signed his own multi-year extension last season to remain at the Anglo-German team.
The pair, once childhood friends when karting team-mates, have endured a tempestuous relationship since being pitched together in an exclusive battle for the world championship last year with tensions flaring for the first time in 2015 last week in China.
Lewis Hamilton celebrates on the Shanghai podium with Sebastian Vettel and Nico Rosberg
Rosberg accused race winner Hamilton of "compromising" his race by driving too slowly in the middle stint – a claim his team-mate has since dismissed – and has now only beaten the sister Mercedes once on a Sunday since last July.
Wolff, however, has played down suggestions that Hamilton has now gained a clear psychological edge and has backed Rosberg to start delivering strong race-day performances again as well.
The Austrian said: "It's difficult to look into the brain. They are very competitive and we have seen much worse with drivers losing out on a particular day - we have seen much worse from Lewis and seen much worse from Sebastian [Vettel] - and to be honest we all have emotions and sometimes we have a better day and sometimes have a worse day.
"You are always being judged in our fast-moving environment by the last race. If he has a good race and beats Lewis on Sunday there is no discussion anymore about his pace. He had a couple of races which were not perfect, he didn't win, but he wouldn't be a Formula 1 race winner if he wouldn't have the strengths to fight back. I have no doubt we will see very good Sundays from Nico as well."Two years from now we will be only days away from Black Panther hitting theaters. Marvel has previously received some criticism for the lack of diversity within the MCU, but this film is helping to change that. Chadwick Boseman is making his debut as T’Challa aka Black Panther in this May’s Captain America: Civil War before going on to star in 2018’s Black Panther.
And most recently, Ryan Coogler was confirmed as the director based on a script currently being written by Joe Robert Cole. Cole recently talked to Mother Jones about the process of joining the movie, staying true to the culture and comic, as well as reflecting society.
Cole has previous experience with Marvel going through their writers program. This connection gave him a foot in the door that helped him eventually land the job.
Having gone through the [Marvel] writer program, I knew Black Panther was in the pipeline and I knew they were big fans of my writing. But I had to compete with the other writers who were put up for it—no one hands out jobs. It familiarized Marvel with my work and with me as a person. Being able to interact with [studio president] Kevin Feige and have him know who I am and know me as a person, and be able to then sit down and have a conversation about story with someone who’s familiar and comfortable is invaluable.
As an African American, Cole understands just how important it is for them to get Black Panther right the first time around.
Black Panther is a historic opportunity to be a part of something important and special, particularly at a time when African Americans are affirming their identities while dealing with vilification and dehumanization. The image of a black hero on this scale is just really exciting.
Not only do Cole, Coogler, and Marvel have to get the character of Black Panther himself right, but they also have to figure out the correct way to portray the entire culture of Wakanda. While Cole couldn’t reveal too much regarding his take on Wakanda, he did stress that he knows the culture is important.
We’re in the process of figuring many of those things out. I think approaching the movie from a perspective that is rooted in the cultures of the continent is important. In terms of his culture, we’re thinking about where we are locating Wakanda within the continent, and what the people and history of that region are like. It’s a process of investigation to help inform the story at this point. But we are going to be engaged with consultants who are experts on the continent and on African history and politics.
There have been plenty of social movements over the last year to try and bring more awareness to equal rights, cop brutality, and more. The team around Black Panther understand what is happening and hope to address some of these issues in a few years.
Personally—and Ryan [Coogler] and Nate Moore, the executive producer—we all are cognizant of what’s going on in the world, in black communities, and in our country. We are aware of the importance of that, and the platform this movie provides us with. But I can’t give you the specifics.
Cole was also asked about the possibility of people being turned off from seeing the movie because of having a black lead. This is an absurd concept in and of itself, and one that he dismissed as well.
I don’t think so. There is a huge fan base for the Black Panther comic and for Marvel as a whole. And I think there is great anticipation across the board for the movie. I think that’s how Marvel is approaching it and I know that’s how I’m approaching it. I imagine Ryan feels the same way.
Black Panther is scheduled to hit theaters February 16, 2018.
Source: Mother Jones.Hillary Clinton, the front runner in the race to secure the Democratic party’s nomination to run for the White House, has seen her probability of becoming the 44th US President rise 5 percentage points over Super Tuesday’s result from just days prior. Teflon-coated Donald Trump’s odds meanwhile have not shifted hugely despite various recent State wins.
The findings from trading on Matchbook.com, which is the fastest growing betting exchange that operates a 'peer-to-peer' platform, indicate that the chances of Chicago-born Clinton being inaugurated as the President of the US this November jumped to 64% from 59% between last Monday (1 March 2016) and Wednesday following Super Tuesday.
This was ahead of the Democratic candidate securing a big win in the Louisiana Democratic primary on ‘Super Saturday’.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Super Tuesday victories saw the Republican candidate continuing to confound his critics and extend his lead in the race to be his party’s nominee for the US Presidential election on 8 November. This Saturday he won in Republican caucus in Kentucky and the primary in Louisiana to cement his lead over political rivals.
Now it’s coming down to which one of his Republican rivals - Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio - decide to admit defeat and stand aside for a ‘one-on-one’ race with the New York-born billionaire.
According to the betting exchange, which is regulated and licensed by UK Gambling Commission, Trump’s probability of securing the nomination had risen marginally by 1.5 percentage points - moving up from 77.84% to 79.32% in the betting post Super Tuesday.
But despite having doubled his probability of becoming president over the past six weeks, Trump’s gains are fairly slight in the ‘Next President’ market from Matchbook following Super Tuesday, increasing just marginally from 25.57% to 25.6%.
Not even comments last week about Trump from Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s nominee for US president back in 2012, or observations from comic and political commentator John Oliver have derailed the momentum. Although I guess it could if - and it's a big if - enough voters are swayed and reconsider.
Still, Trump has certainly made a few sound investment bets in the market over the years including on Bank of America stock, Boeing, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Morgan Stanley and Yahoo amongst others.
By contrast to traditional bookmakers where betting is against the house, Matchbook allows bettors to wager against fellow bettors. And, since the odds are set by the market - not the bookmaker - the exchange’s prices should in theory offer an accurate reflection of current sentiment.
Ian Noctor, a Matchbook spokesman, commenting on trading in the US election market says: “The insight to be taken from this data is that our bettors believe the closer Trump comes to winning the Republican nomination, the better Clinton’s chances are for being President.”
He adds: “With more than £14m (c.$20m) already matched on this election and with eight months to go, the race to be the 44th US President has already surpassed its 2012 counterpart in volume traded on the Matchbook exchange.” Clearly, there is huge interest in this election race and who knows how much more will wagered on Trump.
Turing to the prospects of Bernie Sanders upsetting Clinton’s candidacy aspirations, this was viewed according the Matchbook data as being small by the market just ahead of this weekend’s primaries.
The Senator from Vermont is nevertheless refusing to throw the towel in just yet. He can at least take some positives from winning the Kansas and Nebraska Democratic caucuses at this weekend. But it’s a big hill to climb for sure.
Gaining the backing of four US states on Tuesday gave him a 1.5% boost - from 4% to 5.5% - to become the Democratic nominee. The knock-on effect on Clinton’s campaign has been a drop in her probability from a 94% on Monday to 91.75% by Wednesday to secure nomination. But it's small beer.
Clinton, who lost in Kansas and Nebraska, has nevertheless maintained her ‘front-runner’ status in the Democratic race after a big victory in Louisiana. Highlighting her lead over her nearest rival in the Democrat camp, as of this Saturday her campaign had gained 1,121 pledged/super delegates versus Sanders’ 481. A figure of 2,383 delegates is required for nomination.
It’s highly unlikely the probability on her for President will have changed much from the +90% mark come this Monday. Or, if they do it will likely be only by a modest percentage.
Rubio, who had been Trump’s nearest rival for the Republican nomination according to Matchbook’s as of 2 March had a bad showing on ‘Super Saturday’. He has seen his probability all but halved in recent days - declining from 19.32% to 10%. Surely now he needs a robust showing later this March in Florida, his home state, to still have any chance.
On the spread betting front, it’s been a pretty similar picture with Sporting Index, the leader in sports spread betting that offers punters political and novelty bets. The firm marked Rubio’s odds down by eight points - from 16 to 8 - between 6 November last year and 1 March 2016. (Note: This market is suspended at 8pm GMT each day and also at times of debates and primaries).
Cruz, who prior to winning the Republican caucuses in Kansas and Maine over the weekend, had over that same time slipped one point. That said and showing the current state of play, his campaign had secured 300 delegates versus Trump’s 382 and Rubio’s 128 as of 6 March. To gain the Republican nomination a candidate needs a total of 1,237 delegates.
And, as one might expect given the latest boost for Clinton on the matched-money betting front via Matchbook's exchange, the ‘Winning Party’ probability and fair-value had strengthened - from 62.63% to 65.54% - between 29 February and 2 March in favor of the Democrats. For the Republican party, their probability had receded just under 3% - from 37.46% to 34.65%.
The next stage in the US election race now moves to primaries and caucuses in Michigan and Mississippi on March 8, with Republican primaries and caucuses in the aforementioned states plus Hawaii and Idaho taking place on that day. A week later (15 March) it will be the turn of Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Can’t wait for events to unfold.I’ve never flown a drone before, so of course I crashed the GoPro Karma. Okay, "crashed" might be a strong word for it — I broke a rotor when I landed the quadcopter too close to a rock. Other than that, my first flight was a blast.
GoPro’s been teasing Karma since May of 2015, and the no-longer-just-an-action-camera company finally unveiled the drone this morning during an event at Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California. After the event ended, I headed up to the top of one of the mountains here to test the thing out.
GoPro’s biggest selling point with Karma is how easy it is to use. And for the most part, it’s right. The drone has auto-takeoff and landing modes, an "easy" flight mode, and some semi-autonomous modes. (There’s a cable-cam mode, where you can set two points and have Karma travel in a line between them. There’s a version of that where Karma will tilt the camera up as it travels. There’s a "dronie" mode, where the camera will start on you and zoom up into the sky. And there’s an "orbital" mode, where the camera will stay locked on you while Karma loops around you.) Unfortunately, Karma does not offer a "follow" mode that locks onto you as you pedal down a mountain, kite across a lake, or snowboard down a slope — and that's surprising from a company that's become synonymous with self-recording adventure.
Since I only had a few minutes to fly it, I decided to go full manual.
Karma isn't foolproof, and I'm a fool
There’s a GPS unit in the drone itself, as well as in the clamshell controller, so Karma does a really good job of hovering in place when you’re not sending it flight commands. This was no easy feat — we were 10,000 feet up, and there were wind gusts of at least 10–20 miles per hour.
Flying it was easy, too, and that’s in large part due to the controller. To me, a rookie, it’s severely uncomplicated in the best way. On the bottom half you have the two standard joysticks you’d expect on a drone — the left controls altitude and yaw, or the direction the drone faces, and the right controls pitch and roll, the movements that tilt the drone so it can fly in different directions.
Between the two joysticks are two buttons: one to start and stop Karma’s motors, and one for the automatic landing. And on the shoulders of the controller — think where the triggers would be on a gamepad — are a button for recording and a wheel that lets you tilt the drone’s camera.
On the top half of the controller is a touchscreen LCD, where you can manage settings, change modes, and watch a live view of what the drone is seeing. I had Karma about 300 feet above me and at least 500 feet away from me and the video never cut out. The image looks great, and the screen was bright enough for me to see, even at high noon. (The controller has about two hours of battery life, by the way, and in a pinch you can charge the controller from a spare Karma battery.)
The controller is dead simple and fun
Of course, Karma’s battery only lasts about 20 minutes (extra batteries will run about $100–$150) and this is displayed in a bar that stretches across the top of the LCD. As it shrinks, it goes from green to orange to red, and Karma will start to return to its takeoff spot once you’re under about four minutes of remaining flight time. (You can cancel this and take control back, but inevitably the drone will land itself if it is too close to running out of battery.)
My flight was going smoothly, even with all the wind. I zoomed Karma out over the ravine in front of me, and even tried to pull off some cinematic tilts and pans while I was flying. So by the time the drone’s battery had four minutes left, I felt confident enough to try to land the thing myself. I got it back within about 50 feet from me, but I was lowering it too fast. Before I could tap the auto-landing button, the drone set itself on the ground right next to a rock. Karma only stands about three inches off the ground, so the rotor clipped the rock. Oops.
So I got a little cocky. I won’t be the last. With Karma, GoPro is getting into a product category that is inherently more dangerous than a camera, one that’s even regulated by the government. There are going to be accidents with Karma, especially because it doesn’t have any sense-and-avoid capabilities.
Otherwise, it really did feel easy to use. And I’ve spent the rest of the day wanting to get my hands on that controller again.
The other big part of Karma’s approachability is the size and modularity — Karma even comes with a backpack carrying case. The four arms fold against the side, and the landing gear underneath folds up as well. When everything is compacted it only takes up about a foot and a half of space. GoPro says those arms can be swapped out pretty easily if you break one, and — take it from me — the same is true for the rotors, which snap and spin on in just a few seconds. (You get a set of spares when you buy Karma.)
Karma's not just one product
The coolest thing about Karma other than the actual flying is that the three-axis gimbal that stabilizes the camera can be removed and attached to a handheld mount. This turns your GoPro into something like the DJI Osmo, and save for Karma, it was the thing I had the most fun playing with today. The handheld mount has a battery in it that powers the gimbal and also charges your GoPro, too.
Karma will cost $799 when it goes on sale in late October, but the real killer selling point for GoPro will probably be the bundles. You can get a Karma and a Hero 5 Black for $1,099, or a Karma and a Hero 5 Session for $999 — a $100 savings in either case. That’s a drone, a handheld stabilizer, and a camera all in one bundle. It’s too early to say just how well Karma stacks up against the likes of drones like the DJI Phantom 4, or how far GoPro’s "easy to use" claims really stretch. But when you consider GoPro’s massive retail presence, and the apparent value of those bundles, it’s easy to see how they’ll compete.People walking past the Yukos logo at the entrance to the headquarters building in Moscow, Russia | Yuri Kochetkov/EPA Yukos shareholders declare war on Russia’s assets Properties in France, Belgium, the U.S. and the U.K. will be seized in the $50 billion suit.
Belgian and French authorities have moved to seize Russian assets in connection with a lawsuit brought by the former majority owner of Yukos Oil Company, which won a $50 billion claim against the Russian Federation last year.
The assets are the first to be publicly identified in the suit, which could eventually ensnare properties belonging to Russian state-owned companies like Gazprom, Rosneft, and RT.
The Hague court ruled last July that Russia must pay $50 billion to GML Ltd to compensate for dissolving Yukos. Russia has since petitioned the court to annul that ruling, and missed a January deadline to pay the full sum. The Kremlin said Thursday that it was examining the Belgian claims.
“Russia hasn’t paid us, interestingly, so we are left with the prospect of enforcing it,” said Tim Osborne, executive director of GML.
GML’s shareholders collectively own 70 percent of Yukos, which was forced into bankruptcy in 2006 as a result of the Russian government’s decision to expropriate the company’s assets and sell them to state-owned gas companies Rosneft and Gazprom. Ever since then, Osborne has been working to reclaim those funds from his London office, and recently began the process of petitioning national courts to seize Russian state assets in Europe and America.
The Belgian Court of Arbitration approved a claim on Wednesday from the Yukos Universal Limited, a subsidiary of GML, to the tune of €1.65 billion, according to Russian media reports. "Several dozen" Belgian companies have been notified of the seizure, Reuters reports.
In France, law enforcement officials seized a number of small funds belonging to Russian companies as well as the French subsidiary of Russia's OAO VTB Bank. The companies involved have 15 days to declare the Russian funds and debts they hold.
"They're freezing orders. We're not grabbing anything, we're just not letting them use it anymore," said Osborne. "We started in Belgium yesterday, we started in France about two weeks ago."
But only this week did the Russian press leak the news that papers had been served. Osborne emphasized that the seizures are only "pre-judgment attachments" to make sure Russian assets are not spirited out of the countries where GML has brought claims forward. So far, the list includes the U.S., U.K., France, and Belgium, and will soon include Germany as well.
"It does not come as a surprise," Andrey Belousov, a presidential aide in the Kremlin, told Interfax. "I personally believe that these decisions were much politicized."
Missed deadline
The news comes after the Russian Federation failed to meet a Monday deadline set by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which it was supposed to present with a distribution plan for the €1.9 billion it owes to some 55,000 shareholders of Yukos Oil Company. No such plan was produced.
Russian Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov told Interfax that Russia was unlikely to honor the ruling.
"We have no certainty that Russia will be able to comply with this decision because, in our view, it runs counter to the case-law practice of the court itself and is not based on real, factological circumstances," he said. "We will write to them that we have not drawn up the plan."
GML would also receive 70 percent of the €1.866 billion from the separate European Court decision, which Russia unsuccessfully appealed in 2014, and which GML regards as a telling sign about whether Russia intends to honor the Hague decision.
“If it’s not paid, then it will be a very clear indication to the national courts that we’re talking to that Russia isn’t going to pay international awards,” Osborne said.
“The Russian authorities have claimed that the decision was made in the interest of several tens of thousands of people who do not need the money, it’s possible that they do not even want to reclaim the money,” Dmitry Gololobov, deputy general counsel for Yukos from 1995 to 2003, told Radio Svoboda in an interview on Monday. “Russia has called the ECHR decision irrational, and said that it can not and will not execute it.”
GML plans to reclaim its assets by other means — by seizing Russian state assets, mainly bank accounts and real estate, held outside the country. It will petition the Berlin regional court to begin recognition and enforcement procedures this summer. GML has crossed off several countries from the list of where it will introduce claims, including China, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Canada.
“We will shortly have cases going in most of the western European countries, and then we will look farther afield,” Osborne said. The company is represented by Shearman & Sterling in Paris, as well as by teams of lawyers in each jurisdiction where it is seeking enforcement, including Berlin, Brussels, and New York.
GML expected to present this week’s missed ECHR deadline as evidence to the national courts that it should be able to get on with seizing the Russian Federation’s accounts and properties.
Not many people have been successful in wresting funds from the Russian government. One notable precedent is the case of Franz Sedelmayer, a former personal friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who spent 20 years battling 140 court cases against the Russian Federation to reclaim the assets of his seized company. In the end, Sedelmayer won $6.8 million by seizing a total of seven Russian trade mission properties, one in Sweden and six in Germany.
“There’s always an attempt by the debtor to camouflage the purpose of the assets,” Sedelmayer said. “That is one lesson that we learned. The other lesson, which we haven’t finished, is whether or not it’s possible to seize state-owned companies. In GML’s case that would be the only way of recovering that [amount] of money.”
Sedelmayer said he and Osborne talk from time to time. “We send each other little congratulation notes.”
The long game
Emmanuel Gaillard, the Shearman & Sterling partner representing Yukos shareholders, emphasized that now that the papers have been served to the Russian Federation, the Russians may argue that the assets identified are covered by sovereign immunity. Only properties used for commercial purposes, not diplomatic ones, can be seized.
“Typically, it takes years,” said Gaillard.
To collect the full $50 billion, GML will indeed have to look into seizing the assets of Russia’s state-controlled companies such as Gazprom, Rosneft, and Aeroflot.
“We’ve looked at the assets, we know where they are, we know what they’re doing, and we’re watching, but it’s premature because we can’t really have those arguments until we’ve completed the recognition and enforcement procedures,” Osborne said.
He has written to the Kremlin multiple times to open a dialogue about a possible settlement, and has tried using former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien as an intermediary, thus far to no avail.
“We get no joy. We don’t get a response, |
didn’t start marking down CDOs until six month later, and the process took another six months. Yet it should have been impossible to downgrade the RMBS and not the CDOs at the same time. The downgrades were based on the failures of the underlying loans. You can’t have it show up in one product and not the other.
And S&P continues to screw up MBS ratings in the wake of heightened scrutiny.
Here are a few questions the S&P ought to have considered before it issued its debt downgrade:
Is government spending so high that it is competing with private sector spending plans? Certainly not – substantial amounts of plant and equipment remain idle, unemployment remains at depression like levels, and there is ample capacity for firms to expand if they want to do so.
Businesses, however, are constrained by inadequate demand for their output, a phenomenon which would become even worse if the US were to follow the prescribed level of cuts advocated by S&P to retain its AAA rating with these economic blackmailers. That is a real cost (and it also drives those “horrible” government deficits higher, as tax revenues plunge and social welfare expenditures via the automatic stabilizers rise).
Is government issuing so much debt that it is causing interest rates to skyrocket? Not in the slightest. Rates have actually gone NEGATIVE in term yields under 12 months over the past few weeks (so much for the notion that the end of QE2 would drive rates sky-high). We have a deflation problem, not inflation. And the political dysfunction that Mr. Beers describes could have easily been avoided through a number of options which would not have left the country in the hands of irrational deficit terrorists. As Joe Firestone notes:
Treasury can cease issuing long-term bonds, and sell only three-month bonds. Three-month bond interest rates are generally controlled by overnight rates for bank reserves, and overnight rates can be driven down to near zero by flooding the banks with excess reserves. That’s basically how the Japanese keep their bond interest rates near zero, and that’s how we can do the same.
Firestone is right: A sovereign government like the US only sells securities in order to drain excess reserves to hit its interest rate target. It could always choose to simply leave excess reserves in the banking system, in which case the overnight rate would fall toward whatever rate the central bank offers to pay commercial banks for excess overnight reserves.
As far as the short term impact goes, yes, US bonds are down in response to the news of the downgrade. How long lasting is this likely to be? For historical comparison, consider the case of Japan (thanks to Bill Mitchell): In November 1998, the day after the Japanese Government announced a large-scale fiscal stimulus to its ailing economy, Moody’s Investors Service began the first of a series of downgradings of the Japanese Government’s yen-denominated bonds, by taking the Aaa (triple A) rating away. The next major Moody’s downgrade occurred on September 8, 2000.
Then, in December 2001, Moody’s further downgraded the Japan Governments yen-denominated bond rating to Aa3 from Aa2. On May 31, 2002, Moody’s Investors Service cut Japan’s long-term credit rating by a further two grades to A2, or below that given to Botswana, Chile and Hungary. This at a time when the Japanese economy was then almost 1,000 times the size of Botswana’s, had the world’s largest foreign reserves, $446 billion; the world’s largest domestic savings, $11.4 trillion; and about $1 trillion in overseas investments.
In a statement at the time, Moody’s said that its decision “reflects the conclusion that the Japanese government’s current and anticipated economic policies will be insufficient to prevent continued deterioration in Japan’s domestic debt position … Japan’s general government indebtedness, however measured, will approach levels unprecedented in the postwar era in the developed world, and as such Japan will be entering ‘uncharted territory’.”
“Uncharted territory” – well, the last time anybody looked, the Japanese government was still comfortably issuing 10 year government debt at around 1%. That Japan’s debt is largely domestically held is irrelevant: the denomination of the debt, NOT the debt holder is the key consideration.
There are only two sectors to issue bonds to, the domestic private and international. US and Japan are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with the US issuing a lot to the latter (though still more domestically in fact), and Japan issuing a lot to the former. The interesting thing is that this hasn’t mattered at all in the determination of rates–the key difference affecting relative interest rates between the US/Japan and, say, the periphery countries of the euro zone, has been the nature of the monetary system–the US/Japan are currency issuers under flexible foreign exchange, whilst the member states of the European Monetary Union are not. As Professor Scott Fullwiler indicated to me in a recent email exchange, “For the former, rates follow monetary policy; for the latter, rates follow markets’ perceptions of default risk. This is why for the former credit rating downgrades are complete monetary non-events, like QE. Note further that if the int’l sector were to stop buying US debt, this just means that the US trade balance improves and the breakdown of governmnet debt sales starts to look more like Japan’s.”
To argue otherwise is to ignore the actual causation of the transaction, which is that China exports something to the US in exchange for dollars, and then that money goes into their checking account at the Federal Reserve. It’s called a reserve account because it’s the Federal Reserve, and they give it a fancy name. But in reality it is a checking account, just like you or I use. Now China has 3 choices with what they can do with the money in their checking account. They could spend it and buy real assets in the US, which would be great for our economy, or they can put it into another currency (say, euros), in which case the dollar declines, which enhances our export position, or they can put it in another account at the Federal Reserve called a Treasury security, which is nothing more than a savings account. In other words, the bond purchase, if it occurs, comes at the end of the transaction and actually ‘funds’ nothing.
Economist Warren Mosler has noted on numerous occasions that China and others buy US Treasury securities primarily to support the dollar versus their own currencies, and thereby drive exports to the US, and not because they are looking for safe investments per se. That is, it’s a consequence of their drive for ‘competitiveness’ and their desire to net save in US dollars. It takes two to tango. And with no Treasury securities China would be forced to buy state debt, corporate debt, euro debt (say, Greek bonds?), equities, etc. which is highly problematic for them for a variety of reasons.
A final question for Mr. Beers: Is government spending so high that the dollar is crashing in international exchange markets? No. Certainly the dollar has its ups and downs — we’ve got a floating exchange rate and it is supposed to go up and down. So let’s assume that our dollar falls because China no longer wishes to net save in greenbacks. In fact, this has been occurring over the past several months and the bond market has gone up during this period. If this were to go on long enough, the ultimate impact would be that our external balances improve significantly (as does the likely desire of foreigners to accumulate cheap US assets via FDI), because our exports increase, which means the current account deficit goes down and less bonds are available for China to ‘fund’ us”.
Now that’s not the way I would go as a growth strategy, as it entails a “race to the bottom” as far as wages go. Moreover, if budget deficits are not allowed to grow large enough to enable private domestic agents reduce their overall debt levels, then the economy will remain mired in its stagnant state. With austerity being pursued everywhere it is a fool’s hope to think that net exports are going to swing enough to save the day. But from a straight sectoral balances point of view, IF we did export more, these increased exports would mitigate the ability of countries like Japan or China to net save in our currency. By definition, this would also correspondingly reduce their holdings in US Treasuries.
Floating rates float. This is not synonymous with economic and financial degeneracy, as our economic moralists, or the gold bugs seem to imply. Over the past 10 years, the Australian dollar has fluctuated between 50 cents to $1.08 against the greenback. The last time I looked Australia was still surviving and thriving. One can also consider the more extreme case of Russia in 1998, during which its entire financial system imploded and the ruble lost two thirds of its external value against the dollar. Yet the currency itself did not “evaporate” and the ruble remains Russia’s currency unit of account today.
And for those who argue that “markets rule”, it’s interesting to see the initial response: money flooding into the yen, despite the fact that Japan has a credit rating lower than the US (remember, neither Moody’s, nor Fitch, followed the S&P downgrade), in a country which has a public debt to GDP ratio twice that of the US (not that we think that’s a horrible thing per se). As for the Swiss franc, the other beneficiary of this move, it is worth recalling that but for the Fed opening up dollar swap facilities with the SNB in 2009, the Swiss franc wouldn’t be worth the value of a piece of toilet paper that you scrape off your shoe in Grand Central Station.
It is questionable how much of the furor surrounding the downgrade is ideological and how much is really a misunderstanding (an “innocent fraud” in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith).
Governments around the world have been led to believe that they need to issue bonds and collect taxes to finance government spending, and that good policies should be judged by their ability to enforce fiscal austerity. Mainstream economists and ratings agencies such as S&P have guided policymakers into imposing artificial constraints on fiscal policy and government finances, such as issuing bonds when running deficits, debt ceilings, forbidding the central bank to directly buy treasury debt, allowing the markets to set interest rates on government bonds, etc. While last Friday’s downgrade per se probably won’t do much, if anything, to interest rates, growth, and employment, ratings agencies like the S&P reinforce the current deflationary state of affairs because their perverse rating actions simply reinforce efforts for further substantial deficit reduction and a balanced budget amendment. Ironically, if the siren songs of “sound finance” are followed, we will get exactly the outcome now predicted by the likes of Michelle Bachmann: the US WILL become like Greece.Iggy Pop and Josh Homme have announced plans to release a joint record — which up until now was a top-secret project — as reported first by the New York Times. Titled Post Pop Depression, the album will see its release in March via Loma Vista.
According to the Times, the project began with just a text message from Pop to Homme. “It basically said, ‘Hey, it would be great if we got together and maybe write something sometime — Iggy,'” said Homme, who also plays in Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal.
“We paid for whatever ourselves,” Pop told the Times. “But it was made to be heard — not to be some quirky thing that we did with our own money…”
“He is the last one of the one-of-a-kinds,” Homme said of Pop’s longstanding legacy. “This is a much deserved victory lap for a man who’s not sure if he won. But he did. He may have tunneled underground for lots of that, but he still got to the destination.”The movie player can show subtitles. Contact me to request subtitles for any movie and I'll see if I can find any online.
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More black and white films are added to the site constantly. I hope you'll enjoy this ever growing collection of free classic movies! Remember the history of the American film industry by watching the best free movies online!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit to Moscow this week will be an early test of whether the Trump administration can use any momentum generated by a missile attack on a Syrian air base to craft and execute a strategy to end the Syrian war.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson makes a statement about the visit of China's President Xi Jinping and about the situation in Syria, at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., April 6, 2017. REUTERS/Joe Skipper
Even before Trump ordered last week’s strike in retaliation for a nerve gas attack, Tillerson’s visit was certain to be dominated by thorny issues, including Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, an apparent violation of an important arms control treaty, and seeing what cooperation, if any, is possible in the fight against Islamic State.
Now, Tillerson, a former oil executive with no diplomatic experience, is charged with avoiding a major U.S. confrontation with Russia while exacting some concessions from Moscow. Those include getting rid of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s remaining chemical weapons and pressing Assad to negotiate Syria’s future.
The Kremlin said on Monday Tillerson was not scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his visit, a move that could point to tensions.
It may also suggest that Tillerson will instead follow strict diplomatic protocol and only meet his direct counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The State Department said last week a meeting had not been confirmed with Putin, who met with Tillerson when the Texan headed Exxon Mobil.
Russia, along with Iran, is Assad’s primary backer, and its intervention in Syria’s war has been crucial to ensuring his grip on power, although no longer over the entire country.
Tillerson said he had not seen hard evidence that Russia knew ahead of time about the chemical weapons attack, which killed at least 70 people, but he planned to urge Moscow to rethink its support for Assad in the April 12 talks.
“I’m hopeful that we can have constructive talks with the Russian government, with Foreign Minister Lavrov and have Russia be supportive of a process that will lead to a stable Syria,” Tillerson told ABC’s “The Week” on Sunday.
The U.S. cruise missile strike on Thursday, meant to dissuade Assad from using chemical weapons again, gives Tillerson more credibility with Russian officials and will boost his efforts, observers and former officials said.
“The demonstration of the administration’s willingness to use force has the potential to add some leverage to the diplomacy,” said Antony Blinken, a deputy to former Secretary of State John Kerry.
The U.S. strike - ordered less than three days after the gas attack - could make it clear to Russia that the United States will hold Moscow accountable for Assad, Blinken said.
Tillerson ought to be “very matter of fact” in his meetings, Blinken said, sending Russia a message that: “If you don’t rein him in, we will take further action.”
Tillerson said on Thursday that Russia had “failed in its responsibility” to remove Syria’s chemical weapons under a 2013 agreement, which he argued showed Russia was either complicit with the gas attacks or “simply incompetent.” Securing a Russian commitment on eliminating Assad’s chemical weapons is likely to be first on his agenda, said Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration.
RUSSIAN LEVERAGE WITH ASSAD
The talks will be a major test of Tillerson’s diplomatic skills. As a former chief executive at Exxon Mobil, he has experience doing business in Russia, but no background in the often public negotiations that international diplomacy requires.
It also is unclear if Trump, who has expressed skepticism about multilateral institutions such as the European Union and United Nations, will have patience for the protracted negotiations that a comprehensive deal on Syria would require.
Russia condemned the missile strike as illegal and Putin said it would harm U.S.-Russia ties. Moscow also said it would keep military channels of communication open with Washington, but would not exchange any information through them.
It was an unforeseen turn of events for Trump, who praised Putin repeatedly during last year’s election campaign and said he would like to work more closely with Russia to defeat Islamic State. Just over a week ago, top administration officials were signaling that removing Assad is no longer a U.S. priority.
But one senior official said it was significant that Russia suspended, and did not cancel, cooperation with the United States after the air strike. Nor did Lavrov cancel Tillerson’s visit to Moscow, suggesting Russia may be willing to tolerate the single strike. As of this weekend, the talks were still on.
“They’re going to try to draw a line around this incident,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia during the George W. Bush administration. “They are still not giving up on working with the Trump administration.”
The Trump administration also wants to keep the focus in Syria on defeating Islamic State rather than opening a conflict with Russia or Syria’s government.
Another U.S. official said one hope is that Moscow will see Tillerson’s visit and a discussion about how to cooperate to stop Assad’s use of banned weapons as a tacit acknowledgement of Russia’s great power status, one of Putin’s main ambitions.
“The strikes aren’t necessarily a bad thing for Russia,” said Andrew Tabler, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Russia’s had a very hard time getting President Assad to come to the negotiating table in any kind of meaningful way.”
Now, Tabler said, the Russians can point to more U.S. strikes as the price of further intransigence by Assad.
(This version of the story corrects paragraph 9 to remove sentence on Tillerson meeting with Putin on Wednesday)A 32-year-old Seattle man is behind bars while awaiting a federal hacking trial for launching a DDoS attack. He is being held without bail on allegations that he attacked a US-based legal services website to force it to remove a link to a case citation about his past criminal conduct. The authorities also say the suspect launched distributed denial of service attacks on various overseas media outlets for not removing stories about his credit-card scam and other crimes.
The FBI says that the day after a DDoS attack in January, 2015, the suspect sent an e-mail to Leagle.com pretending to be the hacking group Anonymous. The e-mail explained that the DDoS attack was launched because the defendant, Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, "is being unjustly victimised by you" for not abiding by his numerous requests to remove the link and even pay $100 in cash to get the job done.
"If you do not remove it immediately, more severe attacks will hit your website in the coming days and weeks, and your users will be deprived of your service," the e-mail to the Dallas-based legal services site said, according to an FBI affidavit. (PDF)
The site was hit with the attack on January 24, 2015, the FBI said. According to the bureau, the attack subsided shortly after Leagle.com removed the link.
A similar e-mail, the FBI said, was sent the following month to Fairfax Media5, which publishes the Sydney Morning Herald and other publications. The bureau said the defendant also issued bomb threats in his demands to remove stories about his previous criminal conduct.
In all, federal prosecutors said that DDoS attacks were carried out on Leagle.com, Fairfax Media5, The Metro News, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Canada.com.
"At times, federal prosecutors said, the defendant "escalated his threats from DDoS attacks to threats of bomb attacks."
Jahanrakhshan was denied bail Friday by Magistrate James Donohue in Seattle federal court.
"Defendant has multiple identities and social security numbers. He has previous convictions in Canada for multiple accounts of fraud, being in possession of devices used to make fake credit cards. He was also convicted for impersonating a police officer and obstructing justice," the judge wrote (PDF) in denying bail.
The defendant is expected to appear in federal court on August 14.Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — The archaeologist Mylene Lising says she “came into the game pretty late.”
Growing up in Tuguegarao, Cagayan, she lived 40 minutes east of modern-day Kalinga, where stegodon fossils were found, and 40 minutes west of Callao Cave in Peñablanca, where the oldest human fossil in the Philippines was excavated. “That kind of stuck to the back of my mind,” she says about her childhood.
But it was only when her fine arts professor asked her to do a research paper on prehistoric art in the Philippines that she first did any in-depth learning on archaeology. From then on, she never looked back.
As she specializes in cultural heritage management, Lising likes to think of herself as an interpreter. “You have to understand both languages,” she says. “I needed to be able to read the papers, the articles, and I need to be able to ask them the proper questions for clarification before I can interpret it and make it understandable and interesting to the general public.” Photo by KITKAT PAJARO
While studying to get where she is today, Lising found herself asking questions that could change the course of her career: “Why am I going into this field? Is it only for my amusement? Parang, that’s so vague.” She said that her work in archaeology had to serve a bigger purpose. It had to add value to people’s lives. That’s how she decided to focus on cultural heritage management.
Cultural heritage management involves the identification, interpretation, maintenance, and preservation of various heritage assets. While it mostly concerns physical cultural elements, such as ruins and remains, it can also refer to languages and practices. It’s not something that is meant to be kept only within the confines of the archaeological world, though: Specialists like Lising are the link between the experts and the communities they are excavating in.
As a kid, Lising was already living near a historic site, which influenced her eventual interest in archaeology. “Peñablanca is where the paternal side of my family is from,” says Lising. “So Callao Cave, where the oldest human fossil in the Philippines was found in 2007, was practically my backyard.” A 3-D printed replica of the third right metatarsal bone of this fossil is pictured on the right side of the foreground. Photo by KITKAT PAJARO
Whether she is asked to speak about her team’s research to government officials or everyday civilians, she is concerned with interpreting and presenting these cultural elements in a way that makes these findings relevant to people’s lives.
However, cultural heritage management is not as simple as making a presentation on someone’s work. “As an interpreter, you have to understand both languages,” Lising says. “I need to be able to read the papers, the articles, and I need to be able to ask [archaeologists] the proper questions for clarification before I can interpret [them] and make [them] understandable and interesting to the general public.”
When she joined excavation teams in both the province of Kalinga and the Cagayan municipality of Peñabalanca — the two sites she has been familiar with ever since she was a child — Lising learned that making prehistory relevant went beyond making prehistory interesting. Her biggest challenges have a lot to do with with a group of people that are normally found in fairy tales: treasure hunters. “There would always be a persistent rumor [among the residents of the town] whenever there’s an archaeologist that shows up,” she explains. “‘Oh, they’re treasure hunters. They’re looking for gold.’” And actual treasure hunters have beat Lising and her team to the sites multiple times, leaving deep holes that Lising and some of her colleagues have nearly fallen into. “They excavate recklessly,” she laments. “They destroy the sites.”
Whenever she travels, Lising likes to collect replicas of historic artifacts and symbols that are important to a country’s history and culture. Some countries she’s traveled to include Thailand, Austria, France, South Africa, and Ethiopia. Photo by KITKAT PAJARO
While Lising’s teams do not search for gold, it’s because of these rumors that it has been difficult for them to convince the towns otherwise. But this ignorance is not at the fault of the townspeople. “Archaeology in the Philippines [is] a very expert-centric field,” Lising explains. “[Archaeologists] are so particular about not talking about [a find] until it’s published in a peer-reviewed journal.” This is the kind of behavior that has been prevalent in the field ever since excavations started in the 1970s.
When Lising joined the Kalinga excavation team of the University of the Philippines Archaeological Society in 2014, she was determined to change that. She then made what was considered a radical move in the field of archaeology: She invited the locals to come to their site in Kalinga and see how they worked. Within one week, she saw at least 750 students walk three kilometers through mountains just to learn more about their research. “They didn’t realize the value of it to them,” she says. “They didn’t realize what the value of their town is in the bigger picture.”
“I came into the [archaeology] game pretty late,” says Mylene Lising. Pictured are a few titles from her small home library, which she is currently building. Photo by KITKAT PAJARO
Lising’s work in cultural heritage management doesn’t stop at the northern end of Luzon. For one thing, while she was working toward her master’s degree in 2013, her coursework gave her the opportunity to excavate in the historic archaeological site in Dmanisi, Georgia, where the remains of the earliest humans outside of Africa had been found. (It’s where the most remarkably preserved skull in human history was excavated, along with many other artifacts. So well-preserved were these fossils, in fact, that experts in the field initially couldn’t believe that they were real.) When the general director of the Georgian National Museum asked Lising if she would be interested in making an exhibit of the Georgian hominids in the Philippines, she jumped at the opportunity.
She then founded Traveling Museum PH, and with Marites Cuisia, owner of the brand management firm Cozos, she mounted the exhibit “The First Humans Out of Africa.” They are currently touring universities around Metro Manila, and so far, the response has been overwhelming. The exhibits of the skulls themselves are geared toward college students and professors, but those in primary and secondary schools have been stopping by their school’s libraries to see the historic finds. While the lectures are always full, the most popular aspect of the exhibit is the sandbox activity, where attendees are welcome to join simulations of excavations. Having allotted only 20 slots for the activity, Lising has been shocked to find at least 60 students across all levels signing up to participate. “This experiment is showing that there is a lot of interest in prehistory, in human evolution, in archaeology,” she says, “so it’s a matter of delivering the information in a way that is interesting and relevant to them.”
Lising uses this view to fuel her desire to expand Traveling Museum PH. “We live in a society that kills flying lemurs because it believes that they are the pets of aswangs,” Lising says. “We need not live with our superstitions. We need a stronger program in the sciences. We need to promote education in more ways than one, not just the traditional way.”
Scientific replicas of the Homo neanderthalensis from La Ferrassie, France (left) and the Australopithecus afarensis or the famous “Lucy." Photo by KITKAT PAJAROBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Aug. 10, 2017, 7:25 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 10, 2017, 9:38 PM GMT By Ali Vitali and Corky Siemaszko
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump threw the weight of the White House behind the fight against the opioid crisis Thursday and declared it a national emergency.
"The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially, right now, it is an emergency," Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. "It’s a national emergency. We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis."
Trump's surprise announcement came two days after he vowed the U.S. would "win" the fight against the epidemic but stopped short of acting on the recommendation of the presidential opioid commission to “declare a national emergency.”
It was not immediately clear what prompted Trump's change of course. But he called the crisis "a serious problem the likes of which we have never had."
"You know when I was growing up they had the LSD and they had certain generations of drugs," Trump said. "There’s never been anything like what’s happened to this country over the last four or five years. And I have to say this in all fairness, this is a worldwide problem, not just a United States problem."
Related: One in Three Americans Took Prescription Opioid Painkillers in 2015, Survey Says
Experts said that the national emergency declaration would allow the executive branch to direct funds towards expanding treatment facilities and supplying police officers with the anti-overdose remedy naloxone.
It would also allow the administration to waive some federal rules, including one that restricts where Medicaid recipients can get addiction treatment.
And while the declaration could put more pressure on Congress to provide additional funding, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Juliet Sorensen told NBC News earlier this week it would be a rare move for Trump that both Republicans and Democrats could agree on.
"Everybody agrees this is a crisis," she said.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who chairs the presidential opioid commission, thanked Trump "for accepting this first recommendation of our July 31 interim report."
Related: ‘Mass-Casualty Event’: Ohio County Now Tops U.S. in Overdose Deaths
"I am completely confident that the President will address this problem aggressively and do all he can to alleviate the suffering and loss of scores of families in every corner of our country," Christie said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing the Commission's efforts and to working with this President to address the approximately 142 deaths a day from drug overdoses in the United States."
In Ohio, which has been devastated by the nation's opioid problem, Attorney General Mike DeWine chimed-in with more applause.
"Additional resources from the federal government will help hard-hit states like Ohio," said DeWine.
DeWine in May filed a lawsuit against five of the biggest drug makers, accusing them of flooding Ohio with prescription painkillers and creating “a population of patients physically and psychologically dependent on them.”
“And when those patients can no longer afford or legitimately obtain opioids, they often turn to the street to buy prescription opioids or even heroin,” the suit states.
But Daniel Raymond of the Harm Reduction Coalition, an advocacy group, said Trump's words "need to be accompanied by actions."
"After 200 days into the Trump administration, we have yet to see a clear and consistent strategy emerge," Raymond said.
Among other things, Trump stridently supported Republican-backed Obamacare replacement proposals that would have drastically cut Medicaid funds for opioid addiction treatment. And Trump allies like Attorney General Jeff Sessions have proposed dealing with the epidemic by dusting-off tactics from President Ronald Reagan's 1980s so-called war on drugs.
"We need to say, as Nancy Reagan said, 'Just say no,'" Sessions said in March.
Nearly 35,000 people across America died of heroin or opioid overdoses in 2015, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. But a new University of Virginia study released on Monday concluded the mortality rates were 24 percent higher for opioids and 22 percent higher for heroin than had been previously reported.
Ali Vitali reported from Washington and Corky Siemaszko reported from New York.An honour guard made up of Canadian Forces personnel and police greeted Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and almost 1,000 other guests this morning at the private funeral service for Patrice Vincent, the Canadian Forces warrant officer killed in a targeted hit-and-run last week.
The closed service for Vincent took place at St-Antoine-de-Padoue Church in Longueuil Saturday morning. Many onlookers gathered on the street outside the cathedral to pay their respects.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, centre, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, left, and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau leave the church following the funeral of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, in Longueuil, Que. (Chris Wattie/Reuters) Vincent, 53, was struck and killed by Martin Couture-Rouleau on Oct. 20 in a St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., parking lot in what CSIS described at the time as a "violent expression of an extremist ideology."
Couture-Rouleau was shot and killed by police following a high-speed chase after he fled the scene.
Two days later, Canadian Forces reservist Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was killed by a lone gunman while standing guard at the National War Memorial in downtown Ottawa.
The gunman, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, was shot and killed shortly after making his way to Parliament Hill and getting into the Centre Block.
Cirillo was buried Oct. 28 in Hamilton, Ontario, after a military funeral.
Sister calls Vincent a 'hero'
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who also attended Cirillo's funeral, addressed the private audience and said their pain is shared across the country.
A Canadian flag is held aloft in front of a cathedral where the funeral for warrant officer Patrice Vincent. was held. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)
"The whole career of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent represents the very opposite of the savage ideology that cost him his life," Harper said.
"That ideology of hate is not Canadian, and it will never prevail here," he said.
After the funeral, a bugler played the Last Post followed by Flowers of the Forest on bagpipes. Canadian Forces helicopters flying in missing-man formation flew overhead.
Vincent's sister, Louise, spoke briefly to journalists gathered outside the church to impart the message she believed her brother would want to give to Canadians.
"Patrice's message is to go home tonight, look at those who contribute to your happiness, to your life, and have gratitude for the love they give you, for the help they give you... Love them, share with them your help any way you can. This is what Patrice was doing — trying to be a better man every day of his life. This made him a hero," she said.
Vincent had 28-year career with Canadian Forces
Vincent's military career spanned 28 years at nine bases across Canada.
He joined the Forces in the spring of 1986 as a combat engineer. After completing his initial trade training, he was posted later that year to CFB Valcartier, near Quebec City.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is greeted by military personnel at the funeral for Patrice Vincent. (CBC)
In 1990, he redeployed as a military firefighter and served at a number of Canadian Forces bases, including Comox, B.C; Trenton, Ont; Edmonton; and North Bay, Ont.
Vincent also served around the world on several warships.
He had served as a military firefighter and was a member of the military's personnel support staff when he was killed.
Several days after his death, Vincent's family issued a statement and asked to be allowed to grieve in private.
"His passing will create a huge void in our hearts," it read. "Patrice was very proud to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces. He did what he loved and we supported him during the 28 years he served.
Vincent in firefighter training on a Royal Canadian Navy warship. (Hommage à l'Adjudant Patrice Vincent Facebook page)
"Patrice loved life; he was well liked by everyone and he always spoke passionately about his involvement with the Canadian Armed Forces. Serving was his way of making a difference in our world."
The statement also said the family's thoughts were with Couture-Rouleau's relatives.
A relative said Vincent was considering retiring from the Canadian Forces and looking to the next phase of his life.
A big heart
Daniel Drouin, Vincent's former firefighting colleague at CFB Edmonton, met Vincent in 2003 on a fire supervisor's course in Borden, Ont.
He remembered Vincent as a lovable, dedicated firefighter and friend.
Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in an undated photo provided by the Department of National Defence. (Associated Press)
"He was really loved by his friends. His career spanned 28 years, so a lot of people will be missing him," Drouin told CBC News.
"He was always the guy you could go to and get help. He was always the last guy there to help clean up, to pack up the truck. You can count on him.”
By chance, Drouin came across Vincent's old fire helmet last week and will present it to his mother after the funeral. He met with Vincent's family Friday night alongside other friends and colleagues and said the non-stop stories about their son and brother brought some relief.
"They’re strong, they’re a united family. It’s amazing how they’re coping with this. They’re grieving, but they’re enjoying all the stories about Patrice that everyone is bringing to them," he said.Officials plan to revive 'Drive Less` ad campaign
Transit use is on the rise in cities across the country as commuters respond to higher gasoline prices, but not in metro Denver, where sagging ridership has helped prompt RTD to dust off an old ad campaign to promote more bus and light-rail use.
For all of 2010, total transit ridership for the Regional Transportation District was down about 1 percent from 2009, and in January, bus and light-rail boardings declined 2.5 percent from January 201 |
hanged herself at her Hyderabad hostel. Samyuktha, who had scored 95% in class 12 and enrolled at a coaching institute to prepare for the entrance exams, left a note behind, which mentioned the growing pressure of expectations. Last month, unable to tolerate the jibes of his teachers who insisted he wasn’t good enough, another 17-year-old student in Andhra Pradesh jumped off a building. In the last two months alone, more than 50 students have reportedly committed suicide across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. On Wednesday, disturbed by all this, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu met managers of educational institutes. New rules introduced in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana stop teachers from subjecting students to verbal or physical assault. There have been many instances of teachers telling students that they will not make the grade. Also, they can’t be made to attend classes for more than eight hours a day at a stretch and institutes must hire trained staff to counsel students.
In all these cases, the impressive track record of students from the two states in clearing exams to coveted institutes such as IITs and medical colleges was blamed for the mushrooming of pressure-cooker like coaching institutes. But Andhra and Telangana are not alone. In the coaching hub of Kota in Rajasthan, where 1.75 lakh students go every year dreaming of clearing engineering and medical entrance exams, a hostel association has installed ‘suicide-proof’ fans in students’ rooms, in a short-sighted and bizarre move to address the problem without going into the root causes. The 2016 National Crime Record Bureau said at least 17 students committed suicide in Kota owing to the fear of failure. Because of the limited number of medical and engineering seats in State-run institutes, for every successful person, there are thousands of others who don’t make the cut.
Although there are many more private universities in the country now, but their tuition fees are prohibitive for many students. The availability of seats keeps shrinking as the student moves from primary to secondary to higher education. The fear of letting their parents down, peer pressure and low self-esteem drives students to suicide. Earlier this year, in April, the HRD Ministry had written to states asking them to regulate private coaching institutions, expressing concern over the spate of student suicides. A report by the Ashok Misra committee, submitted to the HRD ministry in November 2015 also proposed setting up a regulatory mechanism. Since the regulation of secondary education is a state subject, the onus of evolving such a mechanism also falls upon the states. The government’s efforts aside, the inability to procure admission into an engineering college should not be viewed as worth ending one’s life for. Despite the obsession with engineering, 80% of the engineers in India are unemployable, says the National Employability Report 2016 by Aspiring Minds. The curriculum is outdated and geared towards rote learning. It is because education is solely focused on a competitive job market that so much pressure is being put on students, but the aim of the authorities should be to convince students that education is part of a larger process of acquiring knowledge.
First Published: Oct 22, 2017 17:30 ISTBy
This is an account of how magical thinking made us modern.
When people talk about magical thinking, it is usually as a cognitive feature of children, uneducated people, the mushy-minded, or the mentally ill. If we notice magical thinking in ourselves, it is with a pang of shame: literate adults are supposed to be more sophisticated than that. At the same time, magical thinking is obviously rampant in the world. It’s hard not to be fascinated, even if it’s a horrified fascination.
Matthew Hutson’s popular book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking attempts to get beyond the low-status connotations of magical thinking, as indicated in the subtitle (How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane). Hutson notes that the concept of magical thinking is vague and problematic. He quotes Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin:
[T]he variety of things to which [magic] refers is far-reaching, ranging from a social institution characteristic of traditional societies, to sleight-of-hand or parlor tricks, to belief in unconventional phenomena such as UFOs and ESP, to sloppy thinking or false beliefs, and even to a state of romance, wonder, or the mysterious. One must at least entertain the possibility that there is no true category here at all. Instead, the term “magic” in current usage has become a label for a residual category—a garbage bin filled with various odds and ends that we do not otherwise know what to do with. (Nemeroff, C., an P. Rozin, 2000, “The Making of the Magical Mind,” p. 1)
Nonetheless, Hutson argues that the underlying similarity among things called “magical thinking” is “a confusion of subjectivity and objectivity”:
There’s the world of the mind, defined by intention and conscious experience, and the world of outside reality, defined by matter and deterministic forces. But we instinctively treat the mind as though it had physical properties, and we treat the physical world as though it had mental properties…. We perceive mind and matter mingling together, working on the same wavelength. (Hutson at p. 8.)
I think that the reason that it has been so difficult to precisely define “magical thinking” is that what we call “magical thinking” is a collection of stigmatized examples of a more general, and generally useful, cognitive capacity. This is the ability to think in “as if” mode: “as if” inanimate objects had minds, “as if” thoughts could affect reality, “as if” symbols had power over their referents.
Vaihinger’s Useful Fictions
As moderns, we are thrown into a confusing mess as we come to terms with the world through the lens of literacy, and especially through the hyper-literacy of internet-mediated reality (through which I am making these claims). We grapple with a sense of unreality, with the suspicion that layers of illusion underlie our world. Making sense of fakeness seems to be a pressing problem. Hans Vaihinger (in The Philosophy of As If, 1911, C. K. Ogden trans. 1924) provides a refreshingly clear model for thinking about unreality and its bearing on our world.
Vaihinger reveals the complexity of the “as if” mode of thinking. When we say, “we must live as if we were free (Adam Michnik, arguably paraphrasing Kant),” or “one treats the dead as if still alive (Xunzi),” or “we must conduct ourselves as if God existed (Diderot),” this implies a strange kind of reasoning:
Even though something is not the case (or is not expected to be proven to be the case), We must nonetheless act as though it were the case (opposite to reality).
But why might we do that? Why would we treat something untrue as if it were true? There are, in fact, two missing parts of this reasoning. The whole “as if” moment looks like this:
Even though something is not the case (or is not expected to be proven to be the case), We must nonetheless act as though it were the case (opposite to reality), Within some context, For some purpose.
It is easiest to see with Vaihinger’s geometric example: treating a circle as if it were a polygon with an infinite number of infinitely small sides. We know that a circle is not a polygon, but for the purpose of calculating the properties of a circle, it may be useful to regard it as such. Unlike a hypothesis, we do not ever expect to discover that a circle actually is a polygon. But being able to treat the circle as if it were a polygon, for a particular purpose in a particular context, is useful.
Consider the progressive degeneration that we might imagine happening to this message, in a game of telephone, presented by Vaihinger (p. 195):
The circle is to be regarded as a polygon of infinitely numerous and infinitely small sides. The circle is a polygon of infinitely numerous and infinitely small sides. The circle is a polygon.
Of course there will be slippage. Context and nuance will be lost in translation. “Many a statement made by the founder of a religion was originally meant by him merely as a conscious fiction,” says Vaihinger. “But the poverty of language in primitive times, the pleasure derived from short, pregnant, rhetorically effective sentences, and consideration for the less educated, childlike minds of his hearers, led, or rather misled, the founders of religions into expressing in the linguistic form of a dogma what they themselves took only in the sense of a conscious fiction (ibid.).”
Vaihinger asserts that “less educated” people will have more trouble with “as if” thinking. The Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria would provide evidence for this a few decades later. Rather than living in a childlike world of imagination, illiterate people seem to keep their capacity for “as if” thinking under tight control.
Luria’s White Bears
In The Making of Mind (1979, esp. Chapter 4, “Cultural Differences in Thinking”), Alexander Luria reported on the cognitive differences between older, uneducated, illiterate nomads in Uzbekistan and Khirgizia in Central Asia, and the younger people who were attending school and beginning to participate in centralized farms. Luria found that the older, illiterate people focused on personally-experienced reality and pragmatic context for categorization. When given an assortment of skeins of yarn to organize, the illiterate women didn’t use color names, like “green,” but said what each resembled: spruce trees, or new spring grass. They organized them in some cases based on intensity of hue rather than color. On the other hand, the younger women with more education organized them by color term (green, blue, red). The older people organized representations of shapes (circles, triangles, filled in or empty, sometimes missing their tops) by what useful items they resembled—a kettle stand, a cup. Younger people organized the shapes by the abstract taxonomy they had been taught.
Luria and his colleagues presented people with “one of these things is not like the other” problems. The older, illiterate peasants organized the items based on whether they could be useful in a common context: they lumped wood together with hand tools, because hand tools, they said, need wood to be useful. (One informant mentioned that many useful tools could be made from wood, such as door handles.) They lumped a sparrow together with a gun and a dagger, because without the sparrow, you have nothing to hunt or divide. On the other hand, younger, educated subject easily classified objects on the basis of abstract categories (tools, made of glass, weapons, etc.).
The younger people were more willing to organize the world based on abstract categories—”as if” these categories existed. Older people were engaging in “as if” reasoning of a kind (“as if” each skein of yarn was a thing in the world, “as if” one were attempting to use several things at once). But, crucially, the older, illiterate people did not base their answers on “as if” realities on the symbolic, logical, analytic constructs that the younger people took (and most WEIRD people take) as utterly obvious.
The most famous example from Luria’s studies concerns the color of bears. Can the uneducated nomads understand syllogistic reasoning? They were asked, for example,
In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north. What color are the bears there?
The illiterate elders were very hesitant to answer that the bears were white, though the younger, educated people easily did so. The elders hedged that they themselves did not know. They did not seem to be able to grasp the “as if” context presented by the syllogism. The young people, on the other hand, easily recognized the syllogism as an opportunity to show off knowing the “correct” answer.
Even when the elders did produce the “correct” answer, they refused to endorse it, as if they expected there to be reputational consequences if they spoke about something they did not know (Everett describes a similar insistence on an evidentiary basis for statements among the Pirahã). The younger people, meanwhile, understand that the syllogism form is an invitation to an “as if” world, and that one’s statements about that world aren’t subject to the same real-world verification (e.g., having personally seen a white bear) as ordinary statements.
In reading Luria’s transcripts, the elders seem to hold themselves back from participating in “as if” worlds. The literate young people, however, have no hesitation about doing “as if” reasoning. In each young person’s brain is a portal to unreality, unconstrained by old-fashioned codes of evidence. If anything, these logical unrealities are of high status, associated with education, achievement, and power.
Logic and Magic
Logic is related to magic, in that both involve the mental representation of “as if” alternate worlds. The logical world of syllogism and abstraction, useful at it is, corresponds to nothing in the immediately perceptible world. Accessing the power of the world of logic, math, and theory means getting unreal. Discerning patterns is an essential component of human intelligence, but it can get out of hand (like a sorcerer’s apprentice might discover about a spell).
It’s hard to say how things used to be. It’s hard to remember what things were like ten years ago. But there is some evidence that there used to be less “as if” thinking in earlier modes of cognitive and social organization. Magical thinking is not some embarrassing remnant of primitive life that pops up now and again; it is an ancient capacity long kept in check through cultural and technological means, and now running wild.
In Language and the Discovery of Reality (1961), Joseph Church (after Piaget) highlights three modes of (educated) children’s causal experience. These modes are not limited to children, but persist into adulthood under the radar of conscious experience. First, realism is the tendency to treat all things “as equally real and real in the same sense and on the same plane: pictures, words, people, things, energies, dreams, feelings (Church p. 15).” Realism underlies the “magical thinking” tendency that mind and matter “work on the same wavelength,” as Matthew Hutson puts it in a passage quoted earlier. Second, phenomenalism is the tendency to accept things as given, without inquiring into how they function. Adults are able to use bicycles and can openers without knowing just how they work. They just do! Church (p. 17) reports that all elementary school children and the vast majority of college-educated adults in a sample reported that an island floats unattached to solid ground (although some islands, though floating, are apparently moored to the ocean floor by roots or seaweed). If we can’t understand how islands work, what hope have we for genuinely grasping servers and blockchains? Finally, dynamism is the idea that some generalized energy links together objects and events; magicalism is a species of this. This energy is much simpler for a human to grasp than electricity, though it is not reducible to consistent physical laws.
All three of these are “as if” stances. And all three work together:
In a “realistic” world, where images and feelings have the same status as objects, their interactions can only be dynamistic. Phenomenalistic explanations make sense because implicit dynamic forces fill in the logical gaps and obviate inquiry beneath the surface. (Church, p. 18-19.)
We moderns have less understanding than our ancestors, not more, of how our technology works and where our food, clothing, tools, and dwellings come from. The more complex a technological package, the more a phenomenalistic stance toward technology is valuable. Insisting on understanding each implementation detail of our world would drastically inhibit our ability to live in it. We must take more and more things for granted—”as if” they were only their functionality—risking abstraction leaks, but reaping rewards in the successful domestication of unrealities. Using a map is “as if” mode. So is reading.
“As If” Slippage
Of course, levels of unreality slip into each other, and even into our own world. The scope and purpose of “as if” modes are sometimes elided or changed: “we must live as if God exists” becomes “God exists,” or vice versa. In many cases, it is quite obvious what the scope and purpose of “as if” mode are. Attending a play at the theater, people get emotionally caught up in the action “as if” it were real—but nobody attempts to interfere with the action, for instance, by “protecting” a character from being murdered.
In addition, if a conscious fiction is useful enough within its scope and context, it might be useful to just believe it in general rather than trying to keep it cognitively bounded in its proper place. Behaviors identified as “magical thinking” in our world, such as unrealistic fears of contagion or refusing to sell one’s soul, seem to reflect unusually useful fictions that refuse to yield ground to the intrusion of newer, more logical fictions.
The Great Flip
In pre-literate societies, “as if” thinking was limited by unfamiliarity with symbolic reasoning and, in some cases, by evidentiary honor or politeness codes by which speculative or imaginary reasoning was tabooed. “As if” thinking was expressed in stories and ritual, but kept constrained to certain domains of life.
As societies became literate (and then hyperliterate), “as if” thinking jumped out of its box, and useful fictions proliferated. Only the old forms of “as if” thinking, the shameful remnants of an ignorant past that we think of as “magical thinking,” were tabooed.
Magical thinking “confuses” the relationship between symbol and referent, between mind and world. Our modern world, to confuse matters even more, is mostly made of minds. In an attention economy completely translated into symbols and words, it is the case that symbols and words have power over the material world. Toppling statues and meme magic are the hallmarks of an ever-more “as if” world: symbols have power, and mental attention is power.President Trump walks out to speak about the U.S. role in the Paris climate agreement in the White House Rose Garden on June 1. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
First thing President Trump did when he got up Friday morning was retweet a number of people who praised his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. Among those he retweeted were two Republican members of the House, one Republican from the Senate, his vice president and a guy who works for him. But he also retweeted two items related to the economy: A tweet of his son’s about the Dow Jones industrial average hitting a new high Thursday and one from his friends at “Fox and Friends” that offered that same bit of data, with a twist.
Wall Street hits record highs after Trump pulls out of Climate pact https://t.co/PDmwj13Lus — FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) June 2, 2017
“Wall Street hits record highs after Trump pulls out of Climate pact,” the headline reads, and that’s true. On Wednesday, the Dow closed at 21,008. On Thursday, after that announcement, it closed at 21,144.
Most of that gain, though, happened before the announcement. The markets close at 4 p.m., after all, and Vice President Pence didn’t start introducing Trump until 3:29 p.m. The Dow had already gained 120 points over the Wednesday close by 1:30 p.m., hitting a new high at that point. It then receded a bit by 3:30 (about 17 points) and then gained 31 in that last half-hour.
Ergo: Record highs after pulling out of the climate pact.
Perhaps, you might argue, the markets started moving higher based on reports that Trump would announce the U.S. withdrawal. Perhaps! But those rumors actually began over the weekend, and the Dow dropped Tuesday and Wednesday.
Trump and his team, of course, have consistently pointed to jumps in the markets as evidence that the country supports what he’s doing. This is the businessman president, after all, so fluctuations in the Dow seem like an appropriate metric to use to evaluate him. The problem with how the Trump team does this, though, is that they cherry-pick only the good news.
For example, Trump in February said this …
Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism – even before tax plan rollout! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2017
… while in March — on a day when the markets sank, White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that “to look at any one day is — is nothing that we’ve ever — we’ve always cautioned.”
Interestingly, while the Dow has hit more highs as a percentage of days Trump has been in office than other presidents, his actual record on the daily fluctuations of the markets is more mixed. Only on half of the days that the markets have been open under Trump’s presidency has the Dow closed higher than it opened — a lower percentage than any other recent president.
Of course, Trump also likes to take credit for the good news of the markets’ rally after the Nov. 8 election. If we take that transition period away from Barack Obama and give it to him, his overall percentage of days with market gains is … the same as Obama’s overall.
The broad point here is that the Dow, as Spicer said, is in fact a stupid way to evaluate how a president is doing over the short term. Daily fluctuations occur for any number of reasons, and markets often price in expected actions in advance of their occurring.
In this case, his linking the Dow’s rise to his climate change decision is a bit like his taking credit for January’s jobs numbers despite being president for only one-third of the month. Can the case be made? Sure. Is it cherry-picking of the first order? Pretty much.
As of writing, that 30-minute surge of enthusiasm for Trump’s Paris announcement from 3:30 to 4 p.m. Thursday was the extent of the run. After the first half-hour of trading Friday, the Dow had dropped slightly.Authorities are searching for a homeless man suspected of beating his 21-year-old girlfriend to death with a hammer in East Los Angeles.On Saturday, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies responded to a call reporting an assault with a deadly weapon in the 470 block of South Sydney Drive around 1 a.m.When deputies arrived, they found Kassandra Ochoa bleeding and unresponsive. She was pronounced dead at the scene.On Monday, the victim's mother, Elizabeth Dolores, pleaded for the suspect, 28-year-old Antonio Medina, to turn himself in."My daughter was a beautiful person. Everybody loved my daughter," she said. "Turn yourself in, please...we trusted you when you came into our house. We trusted you and you did this to my baby."During a preliminary investigation, deputies learned that the couple was trying to illegally stay in an empty converted garage for the night.Witnesses said they heard Medina arguing with Ochoa and saw him flee the scene. He was spotted wearing a gray thermal shirt and dark pants."There was a witness who actually saw the two go in. They were engaged in some kind of a verbal argument He alerted the homeowners, who went out to check and tell the people that they had to leave and then basically she discovered the victim on the floor, bleeding," LASD Lt. Victor Lewandowski said.Medina is described as 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs about 180 pounds. He is believed to frequent the East Los Angeles area. Homicide detectives think he may still be in the area, staying with friends and family who may not know about the murder.Medina had been released from prison earlier this year and has an extensive criminal record, including several charges for domestic violence.Anyone who recognizes him is asked to contact the LASD homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500. Those wishing to be anonymous may call Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477.Ochoa's family has set up a GoFundMe account to receive help paying for her funeral at gofundme.com/dmbrn98cHorror Channel FrightFest has unveiled the line-up for its upcoming 17th edition, taking place at its new home of the Vue Shepherd’s Bush from Aug 25-29.
Sean Brosnan’s revenge thriller My Father Die [pictured] receives its European premiere as the opening film, while the UK premiere of Sang-ho Yeon’s Cannes title Train To Busan closes this year’s festival.
In total, the 62-strong feature line-up includes 19 world premieres and 35 UK & European premieres. Ivan Silvestrini’s Monolith, Tricia Lee’s creepy chiller Blood Hunters and Nick Jongerius’ gory The Windmill Massacre are among the world premieres.
Meanwhile, Adam Wingard’s eagerly anticipated The Woods will receive its European premiere in the Main Screen strand, playing alongside the likes of Stephen King adaptation Cell, Italian box office hit They Call Me Jeeg Robot and Cody Calahan’s Let Her Out.
Other Main Screen titles include Rob Zombie’s 31, Darren Lynn Bousman’s Abbatoir, Jackson Stewart’s Beyond The Gates, Simon Rumley’s Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word and Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas.
Festival changes
Talking to ScreenDaily, FrightFest co-director Alan Jones explained that despite the relocation, they’ve been conscious not to change too much about the festival’s structure.
“We’ve had to bear in mind that we can’t have too many changes at one particular time,” he noted. “Our audience wants their seat throughout the festival, but they also want the freedom to go into the Discovery Screens as well.”
It means that the previous structure of the Main Screen strand playing across three screens for passholders will be the same, just with the possible addition of a fourth screen showing the same programme for single ticket holders.
One big change allowed by the relocation has been the opportunity to put on repeat screenings. “Last year, people were disappointed that they couldn’t get to see as much as they wanted. This year, we have the time and space that if some films do sell out, we will put on extra screenings of them,” Jones outlined.
He added that the line-up for this year’s edition includes a lot of “under-the-radar” genre efforts and if there’s a trend to be found, it’s in the diverse subject matter of the features selected.
“We have so many different things. OK, we’ve got the usual quota of zombie films, but the range of subjects this time is just quite amazing,” Jones teased. “There are a couple of British movies that are just so good, they are going to blow people away.”
British titles
This year’s edition will showcase 12 world premieres of British genre films, five of which make up the festival’s ‘First Blood’ strand focused on the debut features of home-based directors.
Titles include Shaun Robert Smith’s Broken, Wyndham Price’s dark fantasy Crow, Kate Shenton’s Egomaniac, Ben Parker’s The Chamber, Lawrie Brewster’s PTSD-inspired The Unkindness Of Ravens, Stewart Spark’s The Creature Below and Andy Edwards’ Ibiza Undead.
FrightFest will also be presenting seven films from South America, featuring the likes of Daniel de la Vega’s White Coffin, Patricio Valladares’ Downhill, Isaac Ezban’s 60s sci-fi homage The Similars and Emiliano Rocha Minter’s Cannes title We Are The Flesh.
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, Tim Reis’ Bad Blood: The Movie, Steven DeGennaro’s Found Footage 3D, Ali Abbasi’s Berlin hit Shelley and Shelden Renan’s controversial documentary The Killing Of America are among the films in the Discovery Screen strand.
Special events, retrospective screenings, guests and the Short Film Showcase titles for this year’s FrightFest will be announced in the coming weeks. Festival and day passes go on sale tomorrow [July 2] at noon and will only be available to buy online.
Screen International is the official media partner of this year’s Horror Channel FrightFest, offering digital dailies during the festival, chairing a panel about the future of British horror and hosting the Director’s Lunch.
Full line-up
WP - world premiere; EP - European premiere; UK - UK premiere
Main Screen
My Father Die, Sean Brosnan (EP)
, Sean Brosnan (EP) Cell, Tod Williams (UK)
, Tod Williams (UK) Let Her Out, Cody Calahan (EP)
, Cody Calahan (EP) From A House On Willow Street, Alastair Orr (WP)
, Alastair Orr (WP) The Chamber, Ben Parker (WP)
, Ben Parker (WP) Mercy, Chris Sparling (EP)
, Chris Sparling (EP) They Call Me Jeeg Robot, Gabriele Mainetti
, Gabriele Mainetti Pet, Carles Torrens (UK)
, Carles Torrens (UK) White Coffin, Daniel de la Vega (UK)
, Daniel de la Vega (UK) The Rezort, Steve Barker
, Steve Barker Abattoir, Darren Lynn Bousman (EP)
, Darren Lynn Bousman (EP) The Master Cleanse, Bobby Miller (EP)
, Bobby Miller (EP) The Woods, Adam Wingard (EP)
, Adam Wingard (EP) Beyond The Gates, Jackson Stewart (EP)
, Jackson Stewart (EP) Blood Feast, Marcel Walz (WP)
, Marcel Walz (WP) Downhill, Patricio Valladares (UK)
, Patricio Valladares (UK) Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word, Simon Rumley (WP)
, Simon Rumley (WP) Broken, Shaun Robert Smith (WP)
, Shaun Robert Smith (WP) Realive, Mateo Gil (EP)
, Mateo Gil (EP) 31, Rob Zombie (UK)
, Rob Zombie (UK) The Windmill Massacre, Nick Jongerius (WP)
, Nick Jongerius (WP) Monolith, Ivan Silvestrini (WP)
, Ivan Silvestrini (WP) Director’s Cut, Adam Rifkin (EP)
, Adam Rifkin (EP) Red Christmas, Craig Anderson (EP)
, Craig Anderson (EP) Train To Busan, Yeon Sang-ho (UK)
Discovery ScreenORANGE COUNTY, NC — Hillsborough police are investigating an incident that occurred overnight at the Orange County Republican Party headquarters.
The building, located at 347 Ja-Max Drive in the Shops at Daniel Boone, was struck overnight with hate graffiti and with a flammable material thrown through a front window of the headquarters. The graffiti — which included a swastika and the words “Nazi Republicans leave town or else” — was spray-painted in black on the side of an adjacent building, Balloons Above Orange, 353 Ja-Max Drive. The damage was discovered this morning by another business owner, who reported it before 9 a.m.
The flammable substance appears to have ignited inside the building, burned some furniture and damaged the building’s interior before going out. The substance was housed in a bottle thrown through one of the building’s front windows. No damage estimates are available yet, and Hillsborough police are continuing to investigate the incident with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“This highly disturbing act goes far beyond vandalizing property; it willfully threatens our community’s safety via fire, and its hateful message undermines decency, respect and integrity in civic participation,” Hillsborough Mayor Tom Stevens said. “I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of people who make Hillsborough their home: Acts like this have no place in our community. Our law enforcement officials are responding quickly and thoroughly to investigate this reprehensible act and prosecute the perpetrators.”
Last night the Orange County Republican Party in NC was viciously fire bombed. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/TayJcdMMX1 — NCGOP (@NCGOP) October 16, 2016
Spray painted on the side of the OCGOP when it was fire bombed “Nazi Republicans leave town or else” pic.twitter.com/gvduwIpjMw — NCGOP (@NCGOP) October 16, 2016
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commentsWhat’s in a name? For Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ community, the answer is everything.
News that the Pittsburgh’s Pride parade would be renamed after a natural gas company responsible for fracking has reignited tensions in a city long divided over the yearly event. Delta Foundation, which hosts the June festival, announced last month that it would be renamed the “EQT Equality March” in honor of its lead sponsor, Equitable Gas (EQT). This was the company that was fined $4.5 million by environmental regulators in Pennsylvania in 2014 for damage resulting from a drilling leak.
Fracking, which has been banned in Germany, France, and the state of New York, is the controversial process that includes extracting oil and gas trapped under subterranean rocks. The practice has long been criticized both for potential health risks and an adverse impact on the environment, with opponents saying it taints local water supplies.
But what has made EQT a particularly controversial choice among LGBTQ Pittsburghers is the company’s numerous donations to anti-gay Republicans.
In 2014, the corporation donated $14,000 to Republican state Rep. Bill Shuster, who has voted to add a Constitutional amendment limiting the state’s definition of marriage to one man and one woman several times. Following the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex unions across the U.S., he said in a press release that he was “disappointed,” claiming that a “handful of activist judges attempted to destroy traditional marriage and legislate from the bench.”
EQT has also given more than $68,000 to Shuster’s Republican colleague, Sen. Tim Murphy, who has also repeatedly lobbied against marriage equality as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature. He has received a 0 percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign, the lowest possible score.
Following the announcement that the 2017 parade—which no longer has words like “Pride” or “LGBTQ” in it—would be named for EQT, numerous groups announced they would not be marching. Rainbow Alliance, the LGBTQ student group at the University of Pittsburgh, will be sitting out for the second straight year. Sisters PGH, a community organization for transgender folks and people of color, will be holding their own festival directly after the EQT Equality March.
Called “The People’s Pride,” it’s one of several alternative celebrations that have sprung up in recent years, as LGBTQ groups in Pittsburgh grow dissatisfied with what they believe is an event that doesn’t speak for them and doesn’t represent the diversity of the community.
“EQT Equality March is not a Pride,” said Ciora Thomas, founder of Sisters PGH. “It’s for rich people and rich organizations. It’s essentially a huge party for people with money.”
The controversy began in earnest two years ago, when Iggy Azalea was announced as the headliner of Pittsburgh Pride. That decision was unanimously condemned following revelations that the Australian rapper, who has been criticized for using a “black accent” in her music, also has a history of using homophobic slurs like “dyke” and “homo” in her tweets. Prior to becoming a household name, Azalea posted to her Twitter account: “When guys whisper in each others ears I always think its kinda homo.”
Delta initially stood by its choice in performer, saying in a press release that it didn’t “believe she would have agreed to come if she was racist or homophobic.” Azalea would eventually be dropped after groups like the First United Methodist Church and the local chapter of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) threatened to boycott the parade.
But LGBTQ community members say that the controversy over EQT shows that the root of the problem hasn’t been addressed.
This year’s Pride event will feature a performance by Jennifer Hudson, an Oscar-winning singer with a history of supporting the LGBTQ community. Bringing Hudson to Pittsburgh, though, comes with a significant price tag. Sources say that it cost as much as “quarter of a million dollars,” and that expense is reflected in the admission. Tickets to the concert will set you back $45, and VIP passes go all the way up to $150.
That high cost is likely to be a major barrier to entry for LGBTQ people of color. A 2016 report from the University of Pittsburgh found that one-third of black city residents are impoverished. Considering that LGBTQ folks are disproportionately likely to live below the poverty line across the U.S., being queer and trans only adds to that enormous disparity.
“What’s ironic is that Delta has been trying to get black people to come out to their events because Pride has always been very much segregated in Pittsburgh,” Thomas said. “It’s on the street. Why do we have to pay to see someone on the street?”
Adding insult to injury, LGBTQ advocates say that tabling during the Pride festival has become prohibitively expensive for community groups who often have extremely modest budgets. Sue Kerr, editor of the Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents blog, said that back in the day, it cost between $25 to $50 to rent a table at Pride—and even less if you brought your own table. Now it’s hundreds of dollars. While $350 or $500 might not seem like much, it is for a local food bank or shelter that services the LGBTQ homeless population.
“A friend of mine told me that all the other Prides in Pennsylvania put together don’t cost the same as one booth at Pittsburgh Pride,” Kerr said. “Pride is the one time that so many different groups of people come out from our community. It’s important that when they get there, they get connected with community groups and get the support they need.”
Theresa Bosco, director of development at the Gay Lesbian Community Center (GLCC), said that putting an event like Pride does indeed cost money. Although the Pittsburgh metro area has one of the smallest LGBTQ populations of any city in the country, thousands of people turn out to the parade every year. Organizers have to pay for security, which Bosco said costs around $98,000, and yearly events include a bouncy house for same-sex couples with kids. The 2017 festival will also include a zip line.
To paraphrase the Milton Friedman saying, there’s no such thing as a free Pride. But critics argue that it doesn’t make it OK to charge community groups the same as major corporations to table at the event.
“I do understand that an event of that magnitude is expensive,” Bosco said. “I’m not saying in any way that it’s not. But I don’t see |
most revived songs, including Joan Osborne's glorious finale in the Funk Brothers documentary. (BH)
24 "The Hucklebuck" Paul Williams (Savoy) 1949
Before "The Twist," the definitive Detroit-rooted dance craze was Paul Williams' suggestively titled "The Hucklebuck." The R&B hit regenerated itself in wave after wave of subsequent versions by everyone from Bo Diddley to Count Basie, Frank Sinatra to Ralph Kramden (in a Honeymooners episode). Arguably, "the earliest instance of the crossover that became a pop phenomenon in the 1954-56 period and that spelled the end of R&B as a segregated music," said music historian Arnold Shaw. Lyrics came later; the original was a bluesy big-band vehicle for Williams. Jazzbos heard Charlie Parker's 1945 "Now's the Time" slowed for dance-floor salaciousness. Williams argued otherwise. Did folks on the floor care? (WKH)
25 "Respect" Aretha Franklin (Atlantic) 1967
Aretha was already on a roll when she went into the studio on Valentine's Day 1967. Raised on gospel (influential preacher Rev. C.L. Franklin was her father, giants such as Mahalia Jackson were family friends), she'd spent six moderately successful years at Columbia, largely in a Dinah Washington mold. Her first Atlantic hit, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You," smashed the mold with a new funkier, gospel-hued sound (backed by the Muscle Shoals rhythm section). Now she upped the tempo (and the ante) with the 1965 Otis Redding tune she'd been transforming on the road, creating an anthem of the time. Civil rights, black power, feminism; when she spelled out R-E-S-P-E-C-T, she spoke for legions. (WKH)
26 "War" Edwin Starr (Gordy) 1970
Asking and answering the timeless question ("War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!"), Starr's hog-calling vocal was recorded in just one take. A paint-peeling series of sonic explosions, the Whitfield-Strong composition rocketed to No. 1. Faithfully covered by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, whose recorded-in-concert version hit the Top 10 in 1986. How soon we forget... (DW)
27 "I Found a Love" The Falcons (Lupine) 1962
In 1959, the Falcons detonated soul music with their gospel-tinged smash hit "You're So Fine," recorded in a basement on Alexandrine Street using primitive equipment that Berry Gordy would later purchase for Hitsville USA. That same year, the group's ever-shifting lineup (Mack Rice and Eddie Floyd were members) brought a young Wilson Pickett aboard. In 1962, with Dayton's Ohio Untouchables (later the Ohio Players) shimmering behind them, Pickett rocketed the group to the top again with his devastating "I Found a Love." Guitarist Robert Ward's magical stereo vibrato licks answered every one of Pickett's fervent wails. Later a Mitch Ryder & Detroit cover. (MH)
28 "Search and Destroy" Iggy & The Stooges (Mainman/Columbia) 1973
Cut in London after the Stooges had officially broken up, "Search and Destroy" — and the album it came from, Raw Power — may have been their "last stand," but, even more so than ever before, it seemed like the soundtrack of a high school geek finally wreaking his havoc-filled revenge. For the first time, the Stooges' science-gone-wrong ouvre — always evident in their music, rarely spelled out in their lyrics — was laid bare with anthemic glory: "Look out, honey," Iggy advises menacingly, "'cause I'm usin' technology." In the few years since Fun House, he'd risen from declaring himself "Dirt" to becoming "the runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb." (MH)
29 "Baby, I Need Your Loving" The Four Tops (Motown) 1964
In the midst of Beatlemania, the Four Tops went to No. 11 in the summer of '64 with their first Motown single, a beautiful and poignant ballad composed and produced by Hitsville's superstar Holland-Dozier-Holland production team. Introducing Levi Stubbs' extraordinary lead vocals to the world, it featured fellow Tops Renaldo "Obie" Benson and Lawrence Payton on backing vocals, as well as session vocalists the Andantes, who also served as the faux Supremes on "Love Child." Johnny Rivers covered the song in '67; his comparably limp version reached No. 3, proving there's no accounting for taste in America's pop market. (BH)
30 "A Child Is Born" Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra (Blue Note) 1970
A few tunes by Detroit-area jazz artists have become jazz standards, most notably Milt Jackson's "Bags' Groove." This one, penned by composer, trumpeter and bandleader Thad Jones, has become a crossover classic. One of the famed Jones brothers of Pontiac — with pianist Hank and the late drummer Elvin — Thad worked with Basie in the 1950s, and was proclaimed as "Bartók with valves" by Charles Mingus. This ballad surfaced on the album Consummation during Thad's time as a big band co-leader and later, with lyrics from Alec Wilder, took on a new life. While it conveys the wonder at any birth, it's become a Christmas favorite. (WKH)
31 "The Money Is Made" Detroit's Most Wanted (Bryant Records) 1992
Detroit's Most Wanted sent word to the world outside Detroit, as early as the '80s, that the terrain between the river and 8 Mile was its own planet. Motsi Ski, Lee and DJ Duncan Hines came with their own style, ethic and swagger. And their sound represented Detroit streets. "The Money is Made" was an anthem for gangsters who rocked Dobbs hats and bluejean outfits, and drove Jeep Cherokees with silver rock-molding on the side. (KKT)
32 "Village of Love" Nathaniel Mayer & The Fabulous Twilights (Fortune) 1962
The epitome of Fortune Records' primitive aesthetic, "Village Of Love" was the eccentric local imprint's biggest hit, crashing the national pop charts at No. 22 with a histrionic doo-wop-meets-garage sound that rarely made it out of the Motor City. Drummer Butch Vaden and bassist Ted "Mac" Smith drove the beat like a singular force of nature, while Mayer's high register vocals accented highly original lyrics with exclamatory shout-outs to both Jackie Wilson ("Hey! Hey!) and Ray Charles ("Tell your ma! Tell your Pa! We're goin' back! To Arkansas!"). Then there's that head-splitting guitar solo... (MH)
33 "Fever" Little Willie John (King) 1956
There's a reason James Brown once titled an album Thinking of Little Willie John... And a Few Other Nice Things. And one listen to John's smouldering vocal on this, still the best version of this oft-recorded classic — or "Need Your Love So Bad" (covered by Peter Green's version of Fleetwood Mac), "Leave My Kitten Alone" (covered by the Beatles), "Talk to Me" (covered by Sunny & the Sunglows), "I'm Shakin'" (covered by the Blasters), and "All Around the World" (aka "Grits Ain't Groceries," when covered by Little Milton) — will tell you why. (DW)
34 "City Slang" Sonic's Rendezvous Band (Orchide) 1978
Formed in Ann Arbor in 1975, Sonic's Rendezvous Band was a Michigan proto-punk supergroup, consisting of the MC5's Fred "Sonic" Smith, the Rationals' Scott Morgan, the Stooges' Scott Asheton, and the Up's Gary Rasmussen. The band released one single during its career, both sides featuring "City Slang" (one in mono; the other in stereo). Living up to Smith's nickname, "City Slang" was a guitar-powered sonic assault, an anthem that reflected the Detroit notion of a "guitar army." There was no promotion and the band hardly ventured outside the state, but "City Slang" reached international classic status totally via word-of-mouth. (BH)
35 "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" The Bob Seger System (Capitol) 1967
Bob Seger kicked off his rock 'n' roll career by gigging around the legendary Hideout circuit of teen clubs as organist for Doug Brown and the Omens, fronting his own combo the Last Heard, and unleashing the huge area hits "East Side Story" and "Heavy Music." After both stubbornly refused to break out nationally, Seger reorganized his band, inked with Capitol and released his first album in 1967. Its pounding, primitive title track, built around his soulfully raspy vocals, became his first hit, rising to No. 17 on Billboard's pop charts, though superstar status was still a good decade away. (MH)
36 "Dancing in the Street" Martha & the Vandellas (Gordy) 1964
This call to liberation, an inversion of P-Funk overlord George Clinton's later dictum — free your ass and your mind will follow (and an antecedent of the Stones' "Street Fighting Man") — is true urban music concrete, what with those krruuussshhing sounds of snowchains accenting the beat. Notably covered by Van Halen, the Mamas &the Papas, and Mick Jagger and David Bowie, among many others. Notable also for an unforgetable, pre-MTV promo film of Martha & the Vandellas lip-synching the tune as they ride down an auto assembly line in a '64 Mustang convertible. Doesn't get any more Detroit than that. (DW)
37 "Shotgun" Junior Walker & the All-Stars (Soul/Motown) 1965
Does any song scream "Detroit!" more than this one does? The All-Stars were originally signed by legendary R&B entrepreneur Harvey Fugua. When Berry Gordy took over Fugua's label, the band became part of the Motown family. Produced by Gordy himself and composed by Walker, this debut track went to No. 4 on the pop and No. 1 on the R&B charts, becoming the All-Stars signature song. They hit No. 4 (pop)/No. 1 (R&B) again in '69 with "What Does it Take (To Win Your Love)," although latter-day rock fans may sadly recognize Walker better as the saxophonist on Foreigner's "Urgent." (BH)
38 "Cool Jerk" The Capitols (Karen) 1966
Detroit's '60s soul scene wasn't all about Motown. Producer Ollie McLaughlin scored hits with Deon Jackson ("Love Makes the World Go 'Round"), Barbara Lewis ("Hello, Stranger"), the Fabulous Counts ("Jan Jan"), and this insanely infectious dance number, which dovetailed so perfectly with the 1980s New Wave, girls-just-wanna-have-fun aesthetic, the Go-Go's covered it on their first album. (DW)
39 "You Can't Hurry Love" The Supremes (Motown) 1966
The gals were at the top of their game when they released what some consider their signature song. Featuring the original lineup (Ms. Ross, Mary Wilson and Flo Ballard) and perhaps inspired by the Shirelles' "Mama Said," the song was another Holland-Dozier-Holland composition-production. It was recorded the same day as "You Keep Me Hangin' On," but Motown's Quality Control department deemed this the superior cut. Both songs would eventually hit No. 1. Phil Collins topped the charts with a lame cover in '82, but we preferred versions by the Stray Cats and Dixie Chicks. Nothing tops the original, though. (BH)
40 "Maggot Brain" Funkadelic (Westbound) 1971
George Clinton told guitarist Eddie Hazel to play the first half like he'd heard his mother had just died and the second half like he'd learned she was still alive, and the resulting, 10-minute showpiece equals any of those FM radio standards from any of those multi-guitar Southern rock outfits. So popular among P-Funk fans that Clinton re-recorded it with Michael Hampton doing the fretgrinding in 1978. Also covered by alt-rock bass hero and current Stooges member Mike Watt with Dinosaur Jr. riffslinger J. Mascis essaying the solo in 1995. (DW)
41 "Give Me Just a Little More Time" Chairmen of the Board (Invictus) 1970
When Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown to head up their own Invictus and Hot Wax labels, they (pseudonymously) took the type of material they'd previously tailored to the talents of the Four Tops to the Chairmen of the Board, led by General Norman Johnson. An incorrigible vocal stylist, Johnson — who formerly fronted the Showmen of 1962 rock-anthem "It Will Stand" fame — certainly pulls out all the glottal stops on this utterly irrepressible, alternately stuttering 'n' sputtering groove thang. (DW)
42 "Smiling Faces Sometimes" The Undisputed Truth (Gordy) 1971
In this case, the Undisputed Truth (vocalists Joe Harris, Billie Rae Calvin and Brenda Joyce) came in the sonic shape of the dark, swirling, dusted 'n' busted psychedelic soul (courtesy producer Norman Whitfield) that framed yet another timeless message of pragmatism — or is it paranoia? — from lyricist Barrett Strong. Like Edwin Starr's "War," this tune was first recorded in a markedly inferior version as a Temptations album track. (DW)
43 "Do You Love Me" The Contours (Gordy) 1962
Written and produced by Berry Gordy, it was intended for the Temptations. When Gordy couldn't locate them, however, he gave it to the Contours. It went to No. 3 on the pop and No. 1 on the R&B charts, guaranteeing the Contours a headlining spot on the first Motown Revue. The novelty-comical approach led to similar songs, but the group never had another big hit (although the song went to No. 11 in 1987 when featured in Dirty Dancing). The Dave Clark 5 scored with a cover version, but it became more notorious as Johnny Thunders' onstage signature song in the late '70s. (BH)
44 "Let's Get it On" Marvin Gaye (Tamla) 1973
Has there ever been a better (or more romantic) sex song? Gaye had severe writer's block when he came up with this tune, which originally had political lyrics. Co-writer Ed ("For Your Love") Townsend protested the tune was about "making sweet love" and helped rewrite the words. The song hit No. 2 on the pop and No. 1 on the R&B charts, with a subsequent album surpassing What's Going On in sales. An inspiration to later sexually charged soul singers, it received its most apt review when paired with What's Going On on a single CD: "The world's going to hell, so let's fuck." (BH)
45 "My Girl" The Temptations (Soul/Motown) 1964
The Temptations had so many phases to their career, it's impossible to pick just several songs to represent their achievements. But if any song stands as a signature, this Smokey Robinson-penned and co-produced classic would be the one. The first to feature lead singer David Ruffin, it was also their first to hit No. 1. Smokey originally intended it as a cut for the Miracles, since it was written for his wife, Claudette. The Rolling Stones would cover it in '66, starting a trend that found the band later covering the Temps' "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" and "Just My Imagination." (BH)
46 "My Guy" Mary Wells (Motown) 1964
It would seem that Smokey Robinson was an equal opportunity kinda guy. Not content with writing an ode to "My Girl," he obviously felt inclined to write a song from the female perspective, giving it to Motown's first big female star. It became Wells' biggest hit, reaching No. 1 on the pop charts. Aside from several duets with Marvin Gaye, it was also her last hit for the label. She signed with 20th Century Fox that same year, hoping for better royalty rates and perhaps movie roles... but she never again reached the same heights she'd reached at Motown with this Smokey-produced gem. (BH)
47 "You Really Got a Hold on Me" The Miracles (Tamla) 1962
Berry Gordy found a true dynamo in Smokey Robinson. Not only a superb singer, he was also a great songwriter and one of the label's best producers. Smokey delivered the goods again with this track, his second million-seller (following "Shop Around"). The Miracles' performance of it was one of the more memorable moments in The TAMI Show (which is saying a lot). It was one of many Motown songs covered by the Beatles during their club days and ended up on the band's second album. "I don't like you but I love you..." Has there ever been a better pop lyricist? (BH)
48 "We're An American Band" Grand Funk (Capitol) 1973
Ironic that the Grand Funk track on this list should be one neither written nor sung by Mark Farner. Nevertheless, this was the Flint-based band's first No. 1 single. Inspired when drummer Don Brewer argued with Humble Pie about American rock, Brewer wrote the song the next day, using events from the band's Phoenix tour (including playing cards with Freddie King and doing, um, whatever with super-groupie "sweet, sweet Connie" Hamzy). Produced by Todd Rundgren, it was a rock anthem from day one. "We come into your town, we'll help you party down." The Ramones never came up with anything more brilliantly stoopid. (BH)
49 "Fell in Love With a Girl" The White Stripes (Sympathy For The Record Industry) 2001
So raw, so primitive, so concise. First time I heard this — Jack and Meg White's big breakthrough disc — I thought my car radio's speakers had broken. (I'd seen the dynamic duo live, but it'd been a long, long time since I'd heard that sort of beauty in distortion on the commercial airwaves.) Great funky, gender-flipped cover by Joss Stone — with Roots drummer?uestlove producing — on her 2003 album debut too. (DW)
50 "Come See About Me" The Supremes (Motown) 1964
Woeful love-addiction has never been this bouncy, this agreeable, this infinitely commercial. (Reached No. 1 on the pop charts twice in '64.) It's misleadingly sugary too — we easily miss Ross' codependent cries of need, of inner turmoil born of love's pain. Maudlin? Nah. It's an ache and honesty that's universal. This is pop music. Twenty-year-old Diana Ross pulls the Holland-Dozer-Holland sing-song model with an adrenaline that matches the Funk Brothers' oomph, right off West Grand Boulevard. (BS)
51 "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" Stevie Wonder (Tamla) 1966
Powered by drumming that sounds like a can-press, this rompin', stompin', four-on-the floor track — topped by Wonder's joyous, gloriously all-over-the-place vocals — is the sonic definition of what, owing to its enduring popularity in the north of England, green-teethed record collectors like to call "Northern soul." (DW)
52 "Work With Me Annie" The Midnighters (Federal) 1954
Led by Hank Ballard, who'd eventually receive top billing, this Detroit quintet — originally known as the Royals — racked up a half-dozen major hits, including the original versions of "Every Beat of My Heart," the song that jump-started Gladys Knight & the Pips' career, and "The Twist," which did the same for Chubby Checker; but it was this tune's left-right combination of risqué "leer-ics" and grinding beat that really put the sin in syncopation, spawning not only the group's hit sequel ("Annie Had a Baby"), but also a sanitized cover by Etta James ("Dance With Me Henry"). (DW)
53 "Looking at You" The MC5 (A-Squared) 1968
Originally issued on Jeep Holland's Ann Arbor-based indie label, this is the wilder, woolier, far more muscular version of the tune that the Five later recorded on Back in the USA. Highly imaginative usage of the group's trademark dueling lead guitars — and the MC5 were perhaps the best-ever, certainly the most underrated, when it comes to this sadly now-lost art. Dig how Fred "Sonic" Smith holds that single note of feedback all the way through an entire verse. (DW)
54 "Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get" The Dramatics (Volt) 1971
Issued on a Memphis-based Stax subsidiary, but recorded in the Motor City, this was the veteran Detroit vocal group's first major hit. You've gotta love the message — and that crucial key change. (Hah!) Heard to spellbinding effect in the opening sequence to the long out-of-print — now finally available on DVD — concert film and documentary Wattstax. (DW)
55 "(I Wanna) Testify" The Parliaments (Revilot) 1967
After migrating from New Jersey and marinating in Detroit, George Clinton's original quintet locked into a droning, mind-blown, secularized gospel groove that they rode all the way to infinity (and back). The P-Funk starts here. (DW)
56 "Jailbait" Andre Williams (Fortune) 1957
"Seventeen-and-a-half is still jailbait..." Given the subject matter — even though it's played for laughs — this was never gonna get played on Top 40 radio. But as a shining example of the raunchy R&B that concerned '50s parents 'n' preachers were always complaining about, it's been a cult jam since the day it dropped from the presses. (I first heard it on free-form FM radio in 1968.) (DW)
57 "Superstition" Stevie Wonder (Motown) 1972
Like the Temptations, Stevie Wonder's career has so many phases that it's hard to choose just several to represent his eclectic output. But this is the one where audiences knew that the 22-year-old man was undoubtedly no longer "Little" Stevie. The song was originally written for guitarist Jeff Beck (who played guitar on the concurrent Talking Book album), but Stevie's manager convinced him to record it himself. Good call, as the single — which remains about as funky as it can get — immediately shot to No. 1 on the charts. And Stevie Wonder's career and image would never again be the same. (BH)
58 "Big Fun" Inner City (Virgin worldwide, KMS in Detroit) 1988
When the rest of the world caught up to Detroit techno, it was largely due to the efforts of Brit dance music impresario Neil Rushton, who compiled 13 local tracks on the ground-breaking Techno: New Dance Sound of Detroit LP. The song that grabbed most of the attention was "Big Fun," a colossal party anthem perfectly in sync with Europe's growing rave culture. Produced by Kevin Saunderson with vocals by Chicago house diva Paris Grey, its structure more resembles a traditional song than probably anything else that exists in the genre, then or now. (WW)
59 "Into the Groove" Madonna (Sire) 1985
There were some angry arguments among voters as to whether the Bay City-born Ms. Ciccone even belongs on this list. But, as Herb Jordan argued, the songs she wrote and produced with Detroiter Stephen Bray are pure homegrown. And this is probably the best of the bunch, as hypnotic as its title suggests. Her fourth single, it immediately went to No. 1 on dance charts throughout the world and remains a club favorite to this day. Bonus points for the non-ironic cover version by Ciccone Youth (aka Sonic Youth and a programmer friend), which used snippets of the Material Girl's original vocal track. (BH)
60 "Money" Barrett Strong (Anna/Tamla) 1959
Co-written and produced by Berry Gordy, this was his label's very first hit record, reaching No. 1 on the R&B and No. 23 on the pop charts. Its influence would become much more pervasive than No. 23 would indicate; in many ways, it kicked off a musical revolution. The timeless sentiment of its lyrics didn't hurt, of course. It's the only cover recorded by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Some of the more memorable versions include John Belushi's raunchy rendition in Animal House, Jerry Lee Lewis's wild take, and the Flying Lizard's positively Germanic postmodern 1979 hit single. (BH)
61 "Every Little Bit Hurts" Brenda Holloway (Tamla) 1964
This original version of the oft-covered (the Steve Marriott-led Small Faces, the Steve Winwood-fronted Spencer Davis Group, the Clash, the Jam, and — most recently — Alicia Keys) bluesy ballad has never been bettered, thanks mainly to Holloway's cat-footed, gospel-drenched vocal. And, yeah, it was a product of Motown's mid-'60s L.A. office — 'twas written by erstwhile Four Preps member Ed Cobb, who worked similar songsmithing miracles for the Standells ("Dirty Water," et al.) and Gloria Jones (the original version of "Tainted Love") — but that only reinforces the scope of Berry Gordy's accomplishments. (DW)
62 "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" The Temptations (Gordy) 1972
Penned by staff writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" employed three different lead singers — four if you count the wah-wah guitar — discussing the rumors heard about the late father who deserted them. Papa was a stone-cold hustler: part-time bluesman, pimp and storefront preacher known for "stealin' in the name of the Lord." Despite the fact that Dennis Edwards' dad actually had died on the third of September, Whitfield forced him to sing the famous opening line, later losing his job with the group over it. Later memorably covered by iconoclasts Was (Not Was). (MH)
63 "Mind Over Matter" Nolan Strong & the Diablos (Fortune) 1962
A local smash upon its release, "Mind Over Matter" sounded like nothing that came before it and nothing that's come since. Built around a six-string riff that Keith Richards would later swipe for "Start Me Up," this genre-defying single was as much about the ground-breaking approach of guitarist Chuck Chittenden as it was the ethereal-voiced delivery of its lead singer. Surf drums, doo-wop harmonies, country chord changes and a blazing guitar solo compounded Berry Gordy's attempt to cash in with a cover version by the aptly named Pirates (actually the Temptations in disguise). Good as it was, some magic just can't be duplicated. (MH)
64 "Reach Out, I'll Be There" The Four Tops (Motown) 1966
The definitive Motown — well, H-D-H, anyway — mid-'60s production. Melodic, propulsive bassline. Drop-forge drumming. Flutes. Exotic percussion. Wailing harmonies that seem to echo from the cold distance of the void itself. And Levi Stubbs singing like he's about to burst into flames at any moment. "Just look over your shoulder!" H-bomb. Wipeout. All she wrote. (DW)
65 "Where Did Our Love Go" The Supremes (Motown) 1964
This was the big bang for the Supremes. Holland-Dozier-Holland originally intended the tune for the Marvelettes, who hated it. The Supremes had little choice — all their singles had bombed up to that point. They also disliked the song, however, and after the Marvelettes warned them not to let the producers boss them around, there was some animosity during recording; Eddie Holland originally wanted Mary Wilson to sing lead, but his partners objected. Nevertheless, the song went to No. 1, leading to a string of chart-toppers for the most famous girl group in history. They outsold the Beatles the following year. (BH)
66 "Goin' to a Go-Go" The Miracles (Tamla) 1966
Although best-known as balladeers, the Smokey Robinson-fronted group cut more than their fair share of songs that were designed to wear the shine off the dance floor, as evidenced by the rock-solid drumming — the inspiration for the Knack's "My Sharona" — and the cushy harmonies that propel this track as smoothly and forcefully as wind-blown clouds across an Indian summer sky. Covered by the Rolling Stones, who stripped everything down to the drumbeat — and lost the subtle nuances in the process. (DW)
67 "Bye Bye Baby" Mary Wells (Motown) 1960
Wells was all of 17 years old when she wrote this song, hoping Jackie Wilson would cut it. She brought it to Berry Gordy — then best-known for co-writing a fistful of Wilson's hits — who promptly whisked her into the studio. And 22 throat-shredding takes later, she cut it — to the bone, Jim. A volcanic performance; sounds nothing like any of her Smokey-composed hits. Forcefully covered by the Detroit Cobras a few years back. (DW)
68 "One Nation Under a Groove" Funkadelic (Warner Bros.) 1978
Eight minutes of various vocal refrains that reference everyone from James Brown to Stepin Fetchit make for a dance floor anthem so loose-limbed it sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a really good block party. Given the collective nature of the P-Funk operation, it's difficult to assign individual credit, but it's worth noting that this was the first single with keyboardist Walter "Junie" Morrison — who co-wrote the song with George Clinton and Gary Shider — in the lineup. (DW)
69 "RESPECT" The Rationals, (A-Square) 1966
Predating the Queen of Soul's bra-burning version by a year, Ann Arbor's Rationals' take on Otis Redding's "Respect" was a wondrous wallop of Southern-soul-meets-garage, highlighted by a take-your-head-off harmonica part. Produced by Hugh "Jeep" Holland at D-town's United Sound, and led by Scott Morgan's gut-bucket R&B vox, the tune went Top 5 at local radio and was soon picked up by Cameo-Parkway for national distribution. It then saw brief life in the Billboard Pop Charts, peaking at No. 92. It's rumored that Atlantic records' Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin nicked the idea to cover "Respect" from this wonderfully tanked-up take. (BS)
70 "Piece of My Heart" Erma Franklin (Shout) 1967
Although this disc wasn't cut in Detroit, she — like her big sister, Aretha — grew up in the D, and this still-smokin' original version helped make Janis Joplin a star when she covered it with Big Brother & the Holding Company. (DW)
71 "Journey to the Center of the Mind" The Amboy Dukes (1968) Mainstream
The Amboy Dukes took their name from a defunct Detroit band of the same moniker, who in turn adapted it from Irving Shulman's 1940s era JD novel about gangland Brooklyn. But "Journey" seemed to point to an entirely more modern form of youth rebellion. From the psychedelic concept album of the same name, complete with a sleeve depicting what appeared to be the entire contents of an above-average head shop, Amboy Dukes founder — and staunch drug opponent — Ted Nugent always pleaded ignorance on the subject of this early, mind-expanding hit, despite recording a new version on his most recent LP. (MH)
72 "Night Moves" Bob Seger (Capitol) 1976
So it's been tattooed on our brainpans by oldies radio. Big deal. It's still a classic lust-driven song that skillfully details waning teen innocence — trusty images of drive-ins and Chevys abound, neatly tied together by a thunder-as-orgasm metaphor. It's a teen-schtupp anthem masquerading as a Top 40 ballad (it went to No. 4)! A gentle three-chord roundelay, piano-plunked chorus, and Seger's black-man-in-a-white-dude voice reveal a heart beating just below the surface. The song also helped reinvent the Seeg's career, for better or worse. (BS)
73 "Loose" Iggy and the Stooges (Elektra) 1970
The Stooges had already gone where no band had gone before with their self-titled 1969 debut. Now they delved further into the acid-drenched gutter with 1970's appropriately titled Fun House. Recorded in L.A. by Don Gallucci, a producer who knew something about brutal rock 'n' roll as former organist with the Kingsmen and his own hard-hitting combo Don & the Goodtimes, Iggy and company were given free rein and captured in full roar. From the banshee wail of "TV Eye" to the free jazz dirge of "Dirt," Fun House's songs are of a piece but, amazingly, "Loose" stands completely on its own. (MH)
74 "Hamtramck Mama" The York Brothers (Mellow) 1939
Natives of Kentucky, hillbilly blues duo the York Brothers moved to Detroit in the '30s to entertain the city's large Appalachian population, hitting pay dirt in '39 with this double-entendre classic. A statewide jukebox hit, it was banned outright in the Polish enclave, which added to its notoriety and propelled sales to more than 300,000 copies in Detroit alone. Popular enough to be recut by the brothers several times, it was later paired with their even more explicit "Highland Park Girl" and pressed throughout the coming decades, influencing Ray Taylor's late '50s rockabilly cult classic "My Hamtramck Baby." (MH)
75 "Tainted" Slum Village (Virgin/Barak Records) 2002
How did Slum Village respond after the late J-Dilla, the member widely perceived as the cornerstone of the group, left? T3, Baatin and newcomer Elzhi became the first Detroit rap group to score an urban summer anthem. "Tainted" was played in the roughest hoods and coolest clubs. The song introduced Detroit crooner Dwele, who would later score his own hit with "Find A Way." SV would not score a hit that big again, but they gained the respect of none other than Kanye West, who produced their second biggest hit, "Selfish." (KKT)
76 "The Rubber Band Man" The Spinners
There was debate as to whether the Spinners belong here; their biggest hits were recorded in Philadelphia after the group left Motown. But not only did they first form while students at Ferndale High but they're known as "the Detroit Spinners" in the U.K. Tracks like "Could It Be I'm Falling in Love" are perhaps more representative of the Spinners' oeuvre, but this one — written by Philly legend Thom Bell about his overweight son — is so infectious (and a breath of fresh air during the disco era), we had to include it. Sadly better known today as an Office Max jingle. (BH)
77 "Fingertips" Stevie Wonder (Tamla) 1963
Recorded live at Chicago's Regal Theater, this introduced 13-year-old "Little" Stevie Wonder to the world, although it spotlighted his harmonica and bongo playing more than it did his vocals (and the song wasn't written by the young "genius," as Motown was calling him at the time). Divided over both sides of the single, it became the label's second No. 1 pop hit after "Please Mr. Postman." Wilder than most fare on the radio at the time, the crowd noise made it somewhat reminiscent of "What'd I Say" by Stevie's idol, Ray Charles. And the drumming was done by Marvin Gaye. (BH)
78 "2 +2 =?" The Bob Seger System (Capitol) 1968
Take one monster fuzztone guitar riff, throw in some trash-can drumming, a whole lotta blue-eyed soul shoutin', and a populist ("I ain't sayin' I'm a genius, but...") anti-war message. Then there's "Heavy Music" (as good as description of being under the sway of the subject), "East Side Story" (everything that Bruce Springsteen ever wanted to say in a single but years earlier)"Rosalie" (about longtime CKLW program director Rosalie Trombley; covered by Thin Lizzy), "Get out of Denver" (covered by Dave Edmunds and Eddie & the Hot Rods) and, and, and... Good writers make it sound so E-Z! (DW)
79 "Scorpio" Dennis Coffey & the Detroit Guitar Band (Sussex) 1971
Scorching instrumental from the local session guitarist who contributed psychedelic textures to innum |
Sochi Olympics, did it? In its intro to the opening ceremonies — in which Putin’s Russia trotted out a gigantic hammer and sicle to celebrate its nation — NBC called perhaps the bloodiest and most oppressive tyrannies in human history “one of modern history’s pivotal experiments” (via Twitchy):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlZSumrWfDs
A pivotal experiment? Perhaps … in mass murder, subjugation, and paranoia. This “experiment” lasted more than 70 years and it was so “unsuccessful” that its satellites tried repeatedly to depart from it, resulting in brutal crackdowns from Moscow. The West didn’t lift a finger when Russians sent tanks into Hungary in 1956 to put down an end to that part of the “experiment,” nor did they do much in 1968 when the Czechs wanted to call the experiment a failure. Communism was an evil, tyrannical system of both government and economics, not an “experiment” in a lab somewhere. In this case, all the rats ran the experiment.
If there was a gold medal in selling out, NBC won it yesterday.
Update: In case you missed this, be sure to read Fr. Marcel Guarnizo’s essay in the Green Room on the incompatibility of socialism and communism with Christianity. His opening goes directly to the point:
There has been much discussion in recent weeks over the debt of Christianity to—and its compatibility with —the ideas and praxis of the socialist revolution, and even of communism. Many, even in the Catholic Church, believe that we share some of the ideals of the socialist revolution because it seems to them that communism, socialism and Christianity are for the poor. In addition to this most unfortunate error, the opposite fallacy has also been made popular in the minds of many, namely that capitalists and advocates of a free market economy, hate the poor. But the historical record of communism tells an entirely different story. I have worked with the countries of the former Soviet Union for over 20 years, and I have seen what communism does to populations and nations. The scourge of the socialist revolution around the world gave us 6 million people killed by artificial famines in Ukraine and, as documented by The Black Book of Communism, 20 million victims in the U.S.S.R., 65 million in China, a million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, another 2 million in Cambodia, a million more in the rest of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan and through the international Communist movement and related parties about 100,000 more victims in various nations. This is a body count that reaches to 100 million victims worldwide. Communism completely destroyed the economy, social fabric, and political culture of dozens of nations. It hollowed out the intelligentsia, ruined every economy where the seed of socialism fully “bloomed,” and abrogated fundamental rights and individual freedoms of the nations it subjugated. Clearly the Judeo-Christian commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is not among the doctrinal teachings of communism and the socialist revolution. It is hard to believe that the socialist revolution—unlike Nazism—still finds promoters and defenders in the West. The compatibility of Christianity and its legitimate concern for the poor owes nothing to the violent and inhuman regimes created by the socialist revolution. No system in human history has produced more poverty and misery than communism.
But it’s just a “pivotal experiment.” Riiiiiight. Also, NBC won the silver medal in selling out:
Russia’s anti-gay laws have been a major focus in the lead-up to the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, and during his address at today’s opening ceremony IOC president Thomas Bach made a strong statement against “any form of discrimination” and in favor of tolerance. Viewers worldwide heard the statement; NBC viewers in the U.S. did not, because the network edited it out.
Update: Even though it’s been in the headlines for an hour or more, I just caught Ed Driscoll’s post on this. Be sure to read it.If the Lions really want to keep Rocky... THEN
If the outs in Smith and McGovern are worrying... then the ins of Sloane and Otten slightly ease that feeling. But only slightly.
If the Lions really want to keep Rocky... then they're going to have to up their initial offer. Don't think they will. Blues looming larger by the minute, Port Adelaide still in the mix
If the final ladder positions in the past four seasons read 16th, 14th, 18th, 13th... then supporters deserve a whole lot better in 2018. 'Hope' can be sold for only so long.
Dejected Blues trudge off the ground following another loss in 2017. Picture: AFL Photos
If the final ladder positions in the past four seasons read 13th, 12th, 12th 11th... then supporters deserve a whole lot better in 2018. 'Hope' can be sold for only so long.
If the vibe we're getting is right... then the Bombers are ready to play big-time in the trade season. They need to.
If you win just two games in the final 13 of the season... then when added to the horrors of 2016 you've got no wiggle room at the start of next year.
If there's one thing we love in September... then it's a prelim final selection bolter. Those who matter at the Cats love what Nakia Cockatoo offers even when physically underdone
Nakia Cockatoo at the airport as the Cats head off to Adelaide. Picture: Getty Images
If John Barker was the early favourite to become coach... then he's still short odds at this late stage. The marathon process assisting his cause. Dew and Kingsley also in the market.
If all the selection talk this week has been about Stevie J... then that's just how it works. But another player who also got the call-up for last week's semi-final looms as crucial. Tim Taranto. Born to play in September.
Tim Taranto and Stevie J celebrate a goal during the Giants' big win over West Coast
If we look ahead to the trade period... then we won't be convinced the Hawks aren't interested in Stringer until he actually signs elsewhere.
If the chase is half the fun... then the real fun only begins now. Actually landing Jake Lever deal is going to test resolve and relationships, as he will be coming in at big cost.
Jake Lever gives it to Harry Himmelberg during the Crows' first final against GWS
If everyone keeps saying no... then get the message. Under the current set-up no one wants to go there
If we watched in amusement when North Melbourne needlessly rushed to extend Scott's contract because of the Suns' coach search... then we actually laughed out loud when Port did the same with Ken. In the off-season AFL poker game, North blinked. And Port had eyelid spasms.
Ken Hinkley and Port chief Keith Thomas face the media on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images
If you think you've experienced a loud noise before... then you haven't. You will if you're at the MCG on Saturday evening. This will be jet-engine-at-30-metres type of noise
The Tiger army in action during Richmond's first final against the Cats. Picture: AFL Photos
If the Saints take picks seven and eight into the national draft... then we'd be very surprised. They're planning something big in trade period.
If we're framing the 2018 premiership market... then we've got the Swans as favourites. Provided they bring in another quality forward.
The Swans leave the MCG after a disappointing final against Geelong. Picture: AFL Photos
If we've been critical of this club all season... then we don't back away now. But, we do also add praise for hanging in there, having the courage to finish top eight, and then providing the competition with the only final of aesthetic note in the first three weeks.
If Luke Beveridge chose to publicly confirm he had problems with Stringer... then he also at that very moment shredded layers of Bulldogs currency in a Stringer trade. It is Stringer's choice where he now plays next, not yours
Luke Beveridge leads the Dogs off the field in round 23. Picture: AFL Photos
And by popular request...
If you don't stand for something on an issue that really matters... then you stand for nothing. Yes
Gillon McLachlan and friends outside AFL House on Wednesday. Picture: AFL Photos
Follow Damian Barrett on Twitter: @barrettdamianThe profile of today’s angry working-class voter is someone who has found that tickets to middle-class life have run out because manufacturing jobs they once could live on have given way to low-paying service jobs.
Now, even many of these service jobs are disappearing. A recent report in The Times documented the decline of suburban malls as online shopping advances. The e-commerce share of total retail sales has doubled roughly every six years since 2004, reaching 8.3 percent at the end of 2016. One result is that employment at retail outlets has fallen. Department stores and other general merchandise stores, like supercenters and warehouse clubs, have been hit especially hard, shedding 89,000 jobs from November through March.
These developments are troubling because they indicate dislocation and even hardship for some workers, at least in the near term. But contrary to popular perception, they do not validate the pervasive — though overblown — fear that technology will create a jobless future.
In the past year, about the same number of people who recently lost jobs in those large retail outlets got jobs in transportation and warehousing, an indication that online shopping created jobs even as the decline in suburban retailers eliminated them. In addition, as The Times report noted, upscale malls are thriving, and some online retailers are opening brick-and-mortar stores.Abusive partners could be listed on proposed NSW domestic violence register
Updated
New South Wales could become the first state in Australia to set up a domestic violence disclosure scheme under a Coalition proposal.
Premier Mike Baird has told an International Women's Day breakfast in Sydney that he wants to set up a register that would record the names of offenders with a violent past.
People would have the right to ask police if they have a concern that their partner may pose a risk to them, and agencies would be empowered to disclose any information they have.
The scheme would be modelled on one that runs in the United Kingdom and would initially be run as a pilot program.
"Offender lists must be made public," Mr Baird said.
"We can't have a position where there are secrets anymore.
"We must have transparency and we must give women the choice to respond on the basis and knowledge of that information."
The Minister for Women, Pru Goward, said the register would not just be for men as women convicted of domestic violence would also be included.
"This is a domestic violence disclosure scheme, and anyone with a history of domestic violence incidents will be included in the scheme," she said.
Call for a national register
However, Labor's deputy leader Linda Burney said the scheme would only work if it was rolled out nationally.
She has criticised the Baird Government for shutting women's refuges.
"The reality in New South Wales is that there have been countless refuges for victims of domestic violence closed under the Baird Government," she said.
"That is what needs to be asked to Mike Baird - why did you close down so many refuges?
"A register is all well and good [but] it will not work, unless it is a national scheme."
As well as the register, the Premier has also proposed adding extra responsibilities to the portfolio of the Minister for Women.
Mr Baird said the Minister would also be the Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.
"It's time as a government we elevated this to the level we should," he said.
"That Minister for Women, with that additional ministerial responsibility, will be a champion across government - every agency - and indeed a champion across the community to ensure that we start to make a difference."
Topics: domestic-violence, states-and-territories, elections, nsw
First postedThis is the concluding section of the Arctic Myth chapter of Julius Evola’s The Myth of Blood. Evola extracts two main points from Wirth:
The former Evola accepts, though not all of the latter. Nevertheless, today the Arctic Myth is more difficult to defend and a primordial monotheistic tradition seems plausible. For the Arctic myth, we can rely on Fabre d’Olivet, Bal Tilak, Hermann Wirth, Guenon and Evola. Has anyone lately tried to revive that idea? In particular, has anyone tried to harmonize it with the latest in anthropological, archeological, and historic research?
As for the second thesis, it answers the question why would the Nordics so readily adopt Christianity in the Medieval era? Perhaps they did recognize in it, or read into it, the echoes of a more ancient tradition. Gornahoor has supplied enough quotes to make that plausible. The competing answers, (1) the entire European continent was put under the spell of a global multi-generational Semitic plot, and (2) the “Christians” haulocausted the “pagans” or converted them by force. Option (1) is an insult to our ancestors while option (2) is logically flawed, since the Christians forcing the conversions were themselves Nordic. Evola wans to split the baby and extract the Ghibelline Middle ages from the Guelphs. But conceding so much to the non-Tradition seems unwise, when what is called for is another long march through the institutions. The full translation follows.
Wirth claimed he could reconstruct not only the history of the Nordic-Atlantic race, but also its religion. It would have been a higher, monotheistic religion, quite distinct from the animism and demonism of the black or Finish-Asiatic aborigines, without dogmas, of a great purity and potentially universal. At its base there would have been a type of natural revelation, that is, a perception of spiritual laws directly suggested by nature. When the Arctic freeze occurred, winter was prolonged for six months, so that the annual return of the sun had to be seen by those people almost as a liberation, as a resurrection of life. This is precisely the point of the winter solstice; the solar light appeared as a divine manifestation and the bearer of a new light; the year was the theatre of this manifestation and the winter solstice – being the lowest point of the ecliptic, in which the light seems to permanently die, sinking into the earth or the waters, but instead miraculously rising from there – was the decisive point of this cosmico-religious experience.
As we said, the sacred series for Wirth would have precisely fixed in the Nordic-Atlantic civilization the various phases of this symbolic annual event, summarized, in general, by the circle with a cross inscribed. The primordial religion of 15,000 BC would have therefore been solar and permeated by the sense of a universal law of eternal return, of death and rebirth. Like the light, so also the life of men has its “year”, its perennial dying and rebirthing. The Christmas of the Christians, the birth of the Saviour at a date that fell in the period in which all the people celebrated the winter solstice, for Wirth, would be a distant fragmentary echo of this prehistoric religion. In general, Christianity would have originated from the tradition preserved among an Atlantic group of Galilee, a country rich with traces of the megalithic solar tradition. The most salient events of the life of Jesus, up to his crucifixion, that recovered the theme of the god-year, giver of life, nailed to the cross of the year, would be pure symbols of the Nordic-Atlantic tradition. So, Wirth speaks of a primordial Nordic monotheism and of a “cosmic Nordic Christianity” that would therefore date back to thousands of years before Christ, anticipating thereby Protestantism (which for him would only contribute to a re-Nordicization of that tradition) and would have had naturally nothing to do with the Jews.
The connection with ideas already entertained by Chamberlain and Woltmann is obviously established here, and, in addition, it has an imaginary point between a resumed tradition of early prehistory and the themes of dying and rising again and of eternal renewal so dear to German romanticism and the modern Faustian religion of life. Nevertheless, as to this last consideration, a divergence of views between Wirth and other racialist such as, for example, Gunther is quite visible. The concept of “dying and rising again”, which for Wirth would make the keystone of the Nordic religion, Gunther would probably be able to carry a Semitic-Levantine spirit; and a divergence not less sensible remains in the fact, that while Wirth claimed that the symbol of a priestess or divine mother was at the first level among the Nordic-Atlantic people, who would even have called their land the “Land of the Mother”, mo-uru, Gunther and various others related more sensibly similar conceptions to the meridional races and, at most, to the Celts, who would be a race already far from that pure Nordic and more akin to the Mediterranean races.
Besides, it is necessary to clearly distinguish the value and the significance of the Arctic thesis (or, as we prefer to call it, the Hyperborean) in itself from Wirth’s arbitrary personal adaptations, because the plane to which it belongs is quite distinct and has a totally different dignity than these reconstruction of contemporary researchers, reconstructions, nevertheless, not lacking in interest as indications and obscure presentiments of a truth.
Von Leers writes that the preceding epoch of liberalism and scientism was characterized by three fundamental ideas.
The equality of the human race Nordic barbarity and the origin of every civilization from the East Finally, the Hebrew origin of monotheism
These three ideas in the cycle that leads up to Wirth are defeated and overturned:A company has caused outrage over its promotion of a Colombian cruise that offers guests a "sex island experience".
The Good Girls Company released a brazen video advertising the holiday set to take place on a private island in Colombia in November.
The ad begins with offers including airport transfers and meals before a young man boards a luxury boat with dozens of young women dressed in scant bikinis.
"Luxury yacht parties, "unlimited sex" and "free alcohol" are among the "benefits" offered to guests.
The trip also purports to be "drug-friendly", with a gold package coming in at $1499 per night.
The ‘sex island’ is located off the coast of Cartagena on the north coast of Colombia.
An itinerary for the holiday tells prospective guests a "sex session" will be offered on the first day in which any customer can participate, followed by client sessions on day two.
Although prostitution is not illegal in Colombia, pimping, or organising sexual tourism, is a crime.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019A team of Swedish scientists have used national register information in more than one million Swedish children to study the association of early life contact with dogs and subsequent development of asthma. This question has been studied extensively previously, but conclusive findings have been lacking. The new study showed that children who grew up with dogs had about 15 percent less asthma than children without dogs.
A total of more than one million children were included in the researchers' study linking together nine different national data sources, including two dog ownership registers not previously used for medical research. The results are being published in JAMA Pediatrics. The goal was to determine whether children exposed to animals early in life are at different risk of asthma.
"Earlier studies have shown that growing up on a farm reduces a child's risk of asthma to about half. We wanted to see if this relationship also was true also for children growing up with dogs in their homes. Our results confirmed the farming effect, and we also saw that children who grew up with dogs had about 15 percent less asthma than children without dogs. Because we had access to such a large and detailed data set, we could account for confounding factors such as asthma in parents, area of residence and socioeconomic status" says Tove Fall, Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, who coordinated the study together with researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
In Sweden, every person carries a unique personal number. Every visit to a specialist physician and every prescription made are recorded in national data bases, accessible for researchers after de-identification of data. Even dog ownership registration is mandatory in Sweden since 2001. These scientists studied whether having a parent registered as a dog-owner or animal farmer was associated with later diagnosis or medication for childhood asthma.
"These kind of epidemiological studies look for associations in large populations but do not provide answers on whether and how animals could protect children from developing asthma. We know that children with established allergy to cats or dogs should avoid them, but our results also indicate that children who grow up with dogs have reduced risks of asthma later in life. Thanks to the population-based design, our results are generalizable to the Swedish population, and probably also to other European populations with similar culture regarding pet ownership and farming" says Catarina Almqvist Malmros, senior author on the study, Paediatrician at Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital and Professor in Clinical epidemiology at Dept of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 21: U.S. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) speaks to the media December 21, 2011 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The House Democratic leaders responded to the accusations from the House Republicans of not forming a panel to negotiate the payroll tax cut extension bill, after the House rejected the version approved by the Senate. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) speaks to the media December 21, 2011 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that the politically potent National Rifle Association is keeping score, some Democrats may join House Republicans if there’s a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress in a dispute over documents related to a botched gun-tracking operation.
The chief Democratic House head counter, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, declined to tell reporters how many defections he expected, but acknowledged that some in his party would consider heeding the NRA’s call for a “yes” vote.
The gun owners association injected itself last week into the stalemate over Justice Department documents demanded by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The NRA said it supports the contempt resolution and will keep a record of how members vote.
An NRA letter to House members contended that the Obama administration “actively sought information” from Operation Fast and Furious to support its program to require dealers to report multiple rifle sales.
The program, which began last August, imposed the requirement for sales of specifically identified long guns in four border states: Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. A federal judge upheld the requirement.
Republicans want Eric Holder to become the first attorney general to be cited by the House for contempt, because he has refused to give the Oversight and Government Reform Committee all the documents it wants related to Operation Fast and Furious.
Unless a last-minute deal is worked out, always a possibility in Congress, the contempt vote is scheduled for Thursday — the same day the Supreme Court is to announce its ruling on the legality of the nation’s health care law.
A vote to hold Holder in contempt of Congress wouldn’t send any documents to the Oversight committee and its chairman, Republican Rep. Darrell of California. President Barack Obama has claimed executive privilege, a legal step that presidents have used to maintain secrecy of internal administration documents.
Obama invoked what is known as “deliberative process privilege,” a claim designed to broadly cover executive branch documents. However Issa, in a letter to the president, said Obama was misusing the narrower “presidential communications privilege,” which is reserved for documents to and from the president and his most senior advisers.
White House Spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday that Issa’s analysis “has as much merit as his absurd contention that Operation Fast and Furious was created in order to promote gun control. Our position is consistent with executive branch legal precedent for the past three decades spanning administrations of both parties.”
Ironically, the documents at the heart of the current argument are not directly related to the workings of Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed guns to “walk” from Arizona to Mexico in hopes they could be tracked. The department has given Issa 7,600 documents on the operation.
Rather, Issa wants internal communications from February 2011, when the administration denied knowledge of gun-walking, to the end of that year, when officials acknowledged the denial was erroneous. Those documents covered a period after Fast and Furious had been shut down.
In Fast and Furious, agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona abandoned the agency’s usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of gun-walking was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers who long had eluded prosecution and to dismantle their networks.
Gun-walking long has been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George W. Bush administration before Fast and Furious. These experiments came as the department was under widespread criticism that the old policy of arresting every suspected low-level “straw purchaser” was still allowing tens of thousands of guns to reach Mexico. A straw purchaser is an illicit buyer of guns for others.
The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in Operation Fast and Furious. The low point of the operation came in Arizona in 2010, when U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a firefight with a group of armed Mexican bandits and two guns traced to the operation were found at the scene.
Issa, in his letter to the president, wrote, “Courts have consistently held that the assertion of the constitutionally-based executive privilege … is only applicable … to documents and communications that implicate the confidentiality of the president’s decision-making process.”
The letter said that while the privilege covers only the president and his advisers, it is a qualified privilege that can be overcome by a showing of the committee’s need for the documents.
Issa quoted from a 1997 case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in which the court said the privilege should not extend to staff outside the White House in executive branch agencies.
Rather, the court said, it should apply only to “communications authored or solicited and received by those members of an immediate White House adviser’s staff” with responsibility for formulating advice for the president.
However, the case Issa repeatedly cited in his letter distinguishes carefully between the “presidential communications privilege” and the “deliberative process privilege,” which Obama invoked in the current dispute over Operation Fast and Furious. In the case Issa cited, the court dealt only with the presidential communication privilege but observed that both the communications privilege and the deliberative privilege are executive privileges designed to protect the confidentiality of executive branch decision-making.
(© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)(Washington Post illustration; iStock)
A few years ago, I found myself in the emergency room. I had hurt my ankle playing basketball, and the pain was unbearable. I remember sitting there, waiting for someone to see me, thinking to myself that it must be broken, or fractured, or something similarly severe.
"I'm going touch your ankle in a few places," the doctor said shortly after I was brought in. "I want you to describe the pain on a scale from 1 to 10."
He pressed down onto various parts of my foot, each one more painful than the last. And yet, the numbers I uttered barely nudged, moving up from 5 to 5.5, and then from 5.5 to 6. I never said anything higher than that.
When the X-rays were in, the doctor showed them to me and told me two things. The first was that I had fractured my ankle. The second was that there was no way the pain was less than an 8. He joked that if I had sought medical care somewhere else, somewhere less precautionary in its practices, I might have been sent away with a prescription for a mild painkiller and a bag of ice.
Machismo, the driver of so many questionable decisions made by men, is a fickle thing. Sometimes, a little bit of it — a tinge of toughness — doesn't seem to hurt. In sport, for instance. Or maybe negotiation. Other times, it turns out, it can do more harm than good. Like, say, when it comes to caring for one's health.
[One weird reason why doctors buy bigger homes than lawyers]
"Everyone has a story about how a male friend or family member has been reluctant to go to the doctor," said Diana Sanchez, who teaches psychology at Rutgers University. "But it's more than that — it's also what happens when they actually go see a doctor."
"There are all sorts of adverse consequences associated with masculinity," she added.
A downside to being too much of a dude
Sanchez first became interested in the subject both because of the discrepancy in the life expectancy for men and women (men tend to die about five years earlier than women) and because of a personal experience with a family member who waited too long to see a doctor. She wondered whether the two might somehow be related. And she figured that there must be a way to find out.
Eventually, she, along with Mary S. Himmelstein, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers, devised two studies to explore the extent to which masculinity affects decisions about health care. And together they suggest that the effect could be fairly significant.
In the first of the two studies, which was published in the Journal of Health Psychology in late 2014, they gathered two groups — one of them comprising university students, the other not. They measured the importance of manliness to the individuals in each group, using a scale called the Contingencies of Self-Worth (CSW for short), which was developed by researchers at Ohio State University. (The process involves questions that force the participants to rate the significance of bravery and self-reliance to their respective genders as well as to them personally). They also asked questions about health care, including ones that gauged the frequency with which the participants sought out preventive care and the regularity with which they delayed care.
What they found is that for both men and women, those who exhibited the most machismo (deriving self-worth from things such as bravery and self-reliance) were also the least likely to seek preventive care and the most likely to delay care.
"Masculine men, in particular, tend to avoid the doctor," Sanchez said. "Obviously, that's not a good thing."
[In a fight between nurses and doctors, the nurses are slowly winning]
In the second study, which was published in the journal Preventive Medicine in December, the researchers used three experiments to approximate what happens when people actually end up going to the doctor.
In the first two, the researchers tested the relationship between masculinity and male doctor preference, measuring each in the roughly 150 participants (all male) and finding that the two exhibited a strong correlation.
In the third, they explored what happens when men see male doctors. They had 246 individuals (all male) complete a prescreening, during which the researchers also measured masculinity, and then had them come in and discuss their ailments with either male or female medical students (all of whom were unaware of each patient's masculinity score).
The results were fairly straightforward. Per the study:
In accordance with predictions, men with higher scores in masculinity reported fewer symptoms in the lab compared to their prescreen reports when reporting to a male interviewer relative to a female interviewer.
This chart, plucked from the study, does a good job of showing the results, too:
Men, in short, are less likely to seek preventive care than women and more likely to put off seeing a doctor when in need of medical care. They also prefer to seek out male doctors, but they tend to underreport pain and injuries to male doctors, thereby compromising the chances of receiving optimal care. And all of this, it should be said, is particularly true among those men who prescribe to masculine ideologies.
"Masculine men tend to not go to the doctor, and when they do, they tend to pick male doctors whom they then underreport their ailments to," Sanchez said.
A dangerous game
There is some humor in Sanchez' research. It's because of their own foolishness, after all, that some men — those who swear by archaic, rigid, animalistic understandings of their own sex — could be compromising their health. The cycle the two successive studies suggest certainly paints such a picture.
But there is also, hopefully, some humility to be had. The consequences of delaying care when experiencing health issues is no joke. Nor are those that might arise from communicating poorly (or, really, inadequately) with your doctor.
"I think these findings will really resonate with a lot of people," Sanchez said. "But I also think people should take this seriously. This is something doctors should be aware of."
I spoke with three doctors, all of whom acknowledged that what Sanchez has found makes sense. They said that it's well known and problematic that men are less likely to seek preventive care than women. They agreed, based on their experience, that men, generally speaking, tended to approach visits to the doctor differently than women.
"All of this seems plausible," said Peter Hoenig, a doctor who has worked as a generalist in Massachusetts for more than 30 years.
But he also cautioned, as did others, against brandishing too wide a brushstroke. The complexities of individuals, they noted, seemed to far outweigh the quirks of gender ideology.
"Be careful of putting too much weight on machismo," Hoenig said. "It is pretty light clothing and sheds easily."
"For several years, I worked as an emergency physician in a worn-out industrial city," he added. "It was not uncommon for a 300-pound-heavy, tattooed motorcycle guy to faint at the sight of a needle and a little old lady with pink pajamas to endure minor surgery without anesthesia in order to get home quickly to be with her poodle."
More from Wonkblog:
Racial inequality even affects how long we wait for the doctor
Why we should give up trying to make people less sexist
Doctors respond to Indiana banning abortions because of Down syndromeFinally got the DRZ back up and running after a sitting around for a couple years. A quick disassembly of the carb, thorough jet cleaning, new spark plug and new Shorai Battery and she’s purring again.
I started watching Long Way Down again and getting inspired for some longer bike rides. Of course, fellow DRZ owners who like to really travel all know of the non-existent storage available for this bike. I decided to try out some new options, mainly a new billet rack along with a pelican case (1400). While not huge, this should get me able to carry some basic necessities on the bike instead of in my backpack. May not seem like a big change, but getting 15-20lbs off your back makes a massive difference on the longer rides 🙂
Rack: Pro Moto Billet DRZ400S/SM Cargo Rack (PMB-01-4201) Case: Pelican 1400The CEO of digital video on-demand and download service EzyFlix.tv has lauded the company's deal with DVD/Blu-ray digital copy system UltraViolet in helping to quickly grow EzyFlix's market share.
Craig White, the CEO of EzyFlix and co-founder of Access Digital Entertainment, the company that owns the digital download and streaming service, says that the company's tie-up with Hollywood owned UltraViolet has been a boon for the service in helping to attract new customers.
"I am ecstatic because we are very much the new kid on the block, but we are growing at the same annual rate of the more established players," he said.
UltaViolet is Hollywood's answer to the growing demand from movie lovers to "platform-shift" the movies they buy on Blu-ray and DVD. By purchasing a Blu-ray or DVD movie with the UltraViolet label, users will also get a digital copy that can be redeemed on one of the digital locker services supported by the platform, and then downloaded or streamed from that service. Depending on the digital service chosen, users will be able to watch the same movie instantly on their smartphone, tablets, smart TVs and even game consoles. Currently in Australia, UltraViolet enabled films can be redeemed on one of four services, including EzyFlix, JB Hi-Fi's NOW Video service, and on platforms owned by Sony (Sony Picture Store) and Warner Bros. (Flixster). Major Hollywood studios Sony, Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal have all signed up to and release movies on UltraViolet.
By partnering up with UltraViolet, the CEO of EzyFlix says that the company has been able to acquire many new customers at relatively low cost, which in this industry could cost "upwards of $40 per customer".
“We haven’t had to spend valuable marketing dollars to secure eyeballs, we've been able to concentrate on exciting the people who have been directed to us,” said Mr White, who also says that UltraViolet succeeds in helping studios "creating a pathway to digital ownership" as well as to "enhance the value" of Blu-ray and DVD purchases.
And White says that millennials have been by far the most eager to adopt services like EzyFlix.
“Millennials are the biggest shapers and consumers of popular culture, they spend the least amount of time watching free-to-air television and were the pioneers of social media and second-screening. They are aged between 18 and 34 and they’re smart and value-conscious. They’re far less likely to spend $10, $15 or $20 per month to gain access to a whole bunch of older movies typical of subscription services. They prefer to buy the films and TV shows they love from $2.99, or casually rent new release movies for $5.99 without any monthly obligations or subscription,” added White.
White also welcomes the rollout of the National Broadband Network, saying that the NBN will help the adoption of digital services like EzyFlix at the detriment of traditional distribution channels, such as pay TV and free-to-air broadcasts.
"Undoubtedly, the NBN together with the advent of new services such as EzyFlix.tv, devices like Chromecast and the replacement cycles of the big screen TV in the living room will all aid in the adoption of ‘over the top’ video-on-demand services at the expense of cable subscriptions and other traditional means for watching movies," White added.
EzyFlix just this week launched its Chrom |
way that only a Boxer can.
35. Costie / Beachcomber
Some places call them coasties, some call them beachcombers. We call them cute.
35. Lilly the Boxer dressed as a Lilly
Lilly the Boxer dog is dressed as Lilly the flower!
36, 37 Bumble Bee
Nothing is scarier to a Boxer dog than a bee, but they sure do make a cute Halloween costume!
38. Unicorn
Boxers could be mythical creatures, but they're real! Did you know the Unicorn is the official animal of Scotland?
39. Both teams and a Referee
Looking for a team costume for your pack of Boxers? How about a member of teach team and the referee?
40. Clown
Clowns are scary. Boxers aren't. This costume works a little too perfectly for this White Boxer though.
41. Dalmatian
A Dalmatian coat can be a great way to keep warm in late October and makes for an awesome costume.
42. Frankenboxer
A simple but cute costume for this Boxer.
42. Bunny Ballerina
She sure is cute in her bunny ears and tutu.
43. Piggy
She is awfully cute as a piggy.
44. Race horse with Jockey
Aaaaaaaaaaaan down they go!
45. Who's that behind you?
We don't know how to tell you this, but there is someone behind you!.
46. Baby Shark
How cute is this Boxer puppy dressed as a shark? I wouldn't be afraid to swim in those waters, would you?
47. Firefighter
Bonus: Minions!
So these may not be Boxers, but if you have a pack of Boxer dogs, how cute would a minion group costume be?
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Free agent center JaVale McGee and the Dallas Mavericks have "opened discussions" on a deal, according to Real GM's Shams Charania.
In theory, McGee would fill the Mavericks gaping hole at backup center with shot blocking and defense. In theory. In practicality, McGee has played 28 games in the last two seasons, is an on-court knucklehead and has had only one legitimate season of actually kind of possibly coming close to fulfilling his obvious potential.
McGee, a legit seven-footer with athleticism, has always been held back by poor basketball IQ and inconsistency. In 2012-13 with the Nuggets, McGee played 79 games with the Nuggets while averaging nine points and five rebounds in 18 minutes on 58 percent shooting. He has barely played since, even when going to the Philadelphia 76ers.
While the Mavericks have been successful with projects like Brandan Wright, it's a reach to say McGee is in a similar category. A huge one. Right now, it's only exploratory talks and not anything imminent, so maybe this doesn't happen. Then again, at this point, do you have any better ideas?News
World leader in cervical cancer research to examine whether vaccinating individuals helps block transmission of the human papillomavirus (HPV) to unvaccinated partners
The study – called TRAP-HPV, an acronym for Transmission Reduction And Prevention with HPV vaccination – is a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind trial involving 500 sexually active couples. The study aims to determine the efficacy of an HPV vaccine in reducing transmission of genital, anal, and oral HPV infection in unvaccinated sexual partners of vaccinated individuals.
HPV is the leading cause of cervical cancer, the second most common cancer in women globally. Prophylactic vaccines against certain high-risk HPV types have been shown to be effective in preventing infection. However, much remains to be understood on the effects of HPV vaccine on the blockage of transmission of target HPV types to sexual partners of vaccinated individuals.
“This is the first study to look at whether unvaccinated partners of vaccinated individuals have a benefit in terms of protection from HPV infection,” explained Eduardo Franco, Director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and leader of the study. “It will help us understand the important issue of herd immunity from HPV vaccination. If partner protection is sufficiently high we may be able to get adequate population level immunity from much less than 100% vaccination coverage and devote our scarce public health funds to other pressing needs.”
“Efficacy studies of the HPV vaccines generally look at genital HPV infections, but our study will also be looking at other anatomical sites that HPV infects, such as the anal and oral regions,” says Kristina Dahlstrom, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Oncology, Division of Cancer Epidemiology. “Increasing the knowledge about HPV transmission dynamics will benefit cost-effectiveness studies and have implications for decision-making when implementing population-level vaccination strategies”.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control considers HPV the most common sexually transmitted disease in the world. Another McGill study called HITCH (HPV Infection and Transmission in Couples through Heterosexual activity), also from Dr. Franco’s team, found more than half (56 per cent) of young adults in a new sexual relationship were infected with HPV. Of those, nearly half (44 per cent) were infected with an HPV type that causes cancer. HPV is transmitted through sexual contact and persistent infections by specific types of HPV can cause cancer. Researchers at the International Agency for Research on Cancer estimate that HPV was responsible for 610,000 cases of cancer worldwide in 2008, about 5% of the world’s cancer burden. Most of these are cervical cancer, but HPV is also an important cause of cancers of the head and neck, anus, penis, vulva, and vagina. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than a half million women are diagnosed with cervical cancer annually and that the majority die from the disease – making it the 2nd most frequent cancer among women worldwide. It is also estimated that 20-30 per cent of head/neck cancers are associated with HPV, with growing evidence linking these to the practice of oral sex. Since HPV-associated head and neck cancers are more likely to occur in men, protection of both genders through vaccination is important.
The TRAP-HPV study will recruit 500 sexually active couples in Montreal. The treatment will be vaccination with Gardasil (Merck), the HPV vaccine, and the placebo will be vaccination with Havrix (GSK), a vaccine against hepatitis A. Those vaccinated with Havrix will still be susceptible to HPV infection. A couple can be randomized to both receive Gardasil, one receives Gardasil and the other Havrix, or both receive Havrix (the control group). Couples will be followed for one year with clinic visits to collect genital, anal, and oral samples to determine their HPV infection status. They will also provide information about their demographics and sexual behaviors. Those who wish to participate in the study should contact Ms. Allita Rodrigues at traphpv [at] mcgill.ca for more information.
The study is funded primarily by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and has also been supported by Merck, which provided free HPV vaccines and an unconditional grant to McGill.
For more information on the study, please visit: https://mcgill.ca/traphpv/Want to get in to see the Catbus? Then the name on your passport better match the one on your ticket.
Whether you’re of a fan of anime specifically or animation in general, the Ghibli Museum, located in the Mitaka neighborhood of Tokyo, is definitely worth visiting. Not only does it house a theater that screens Studio Ghibli short films you can’t see anywhere else, the entire building and surrounding garden are filled to the brim with cameos by Ghibli characters and other design elements inspired by Japan’s premiere animation company.
However, there are a number of rules that have to be observed for a visit to the museum, which perhaps isn’t so surprising seeing as how it’s dedicated to the works of the company founded by strongly opinionated director Hayao Miyazaki. For instance, photography is strictly prohibited at the facility, in order to keep guests from spending all their time posing for pictures instead of looking at the exhibits. Also, to prevent overcrowding, only a limited number of tickets are made available for any one day, which are further divided into four entry times between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Moreover, the tickets must be prepurchased, meaning the Ghibli Museum essentially runs on a reservation system.
The tickets are routinely all snatched up soon after they become available, but some of the people buying them aren’t motivated by a love of Totoro or Ponyo, but simply a fondness for money. With demand for tickets always high, some speculators buy up as many tickets as they can, wait for that day’s to sell out, then sell them at a higher price through online auctions, pocketing the difference.
This doesn’t sit well with the museum’s management, and so from July the Ghibli Museum will be asking visitors to show some form of ID, such as a passport or driver’s license, at the gate. If the name on the ID doesn’t match the one the reservation was initially made under, the ticket holder won’t be allowed to enter.
In addition, the museum will be selling a portion of its tickets for July and August, the Japanese summer vacation period, through a prepurchase lottery system, which it also employed last year. For those wishing to visit in July, lottery applications ca be made between 10 a.m. on May 25 and 11:59 p.m. on May 31. Winners will be informed by email on June 9, one day before the general reservations are opened and given the option to purchase up to six tickets. For those wishing to visit in August, lottery applications will be accepted between June 25 and 30, with winners contacted on July 9.
The drawing can be entered online here, and if you are chosen, again, don’t forget to bring your ID. Not only will you need it to get in, it’ll come in handy should they card you when you order some Valley of the Wind Beer.
Related: Ghibli Museum website
Source: Gihlbi Museum (1, 2) via IT Media
Top image: Ghibli Museum
Insert images: Ghibli Museum, Valley of the Wind Beer image ©RocketNews24As the 2013-14 NHL season nears, players and fans alike are getting acquainted with some of the new rules and tweaks passed in the offseason. There are shallower nets and smaller goalie gear. But there’s also a rule that’ll affect how hockey fights begin … and how long a player remains in the penalty box after one.
The NHL’s general managers agreed to, and the Board of Governors approved, a new rule that levies a two-minute minor penalty on any player that removes his helmet before a fight. That’s seven minutes in the box, barring any additional penalties: two for unsportsmanlike conduct and five for fighting.
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We saw this already in the preseason, as Doug Clarkson of the Philadelphia Flyers and David Broll were given minor penalties after this fight:
It's something fighters are going to have to adapt to, as Shawn Thornton told CSNNE:
“I don’t even know all the new rules yet. Nobody has explained them to me,” admitted Thornton. “What if a guy’s helmet is taken off during a fight? Are they going to stop the fight? I know he’s not allowed to take off his own helmet. I’m not looking forward to punching [a visor] when I’m throwing at somebody’s face. If I’m in the middle of a fight with a guy with a visor on, I’m getting his helmet off. That’s the first thing I’d be doing. “Why don’t they invent a visor that can be pulled off [the helmet]? How hard would that be? There has to be something you can just clip in, and then when you get into a fight you can click it off and toss it. I should invent it.”
Darren Dreger of TSN believes the rule is toothless:
Story continues
A bit toothless, yes, because it makes sense that, if one player removes his helmet, then the other player, who is a willing combatant in this fight, takes his helmet off as well, each player gets a five-minute fighting major and a two-minute minor for removing the helmet and, effectively, it's a wash. There are some in the league who wanted it to be an automatic game misconduct or, perhaps, be cumulative, but the player's association wasn't onside with that because it becomes a bit too prohibitive and the players around the National Hockey League still want to protect the role of the fighter.
Back in June when the rule was first mentioned, there was backlash that it was a draconian attempt to severely cut back on fighting in the NHL. Derek Gagnon of Arctic Ice Hockey wrote:
The NHL just does not have the courage to come out and ban fighting, as they fear economic backlash in a league where multiple franchises are struggling. Yet, here they are effectively ending it through rule changes. Don Cherry will argue that without fighting in the game players will be free to target star players with dirty hits without fear of reprisal for their actions, as the Dave Semenko and Wayne Gretzky anaology gets bandied about saying nobody dared go after The Great One because they knew Semenko would stand up for him. The instigator penalties have eliminated the possibility of this happening, as discipline has fallen completely into the hand of the NHL, as Brendan Shanahan has to police the league, in an increasingly scrutinized role. Without a consistent and stern punishments, the fear is that things on the ice could get out of hand if their isn't the instant repercussions for dirty play.
Hockey Wilderness similarly recoiled.
I guess the motivation here is the continued effort by the NHL to give the impression that its proactive on protecting players from concussions. It’s a half-hearted attempt to mandate that players keep their lids on during a fight, but it’s a nice C.O.A. effort.
But it’s hard to accept this rule when it’s implemented at the same time when mandatory visors are grandfathered into the League, in the sense that it does seem like something meant to curb fighting.
This doesn’t mean it will, mind you. Fighters will adapt, with the mutual “removal” of helmets likely integrated into their dance before the punches fly. You’re still going to have fists on skulls in fights. There’s no getting around it.
And fights will still happen if players are wearing visors. As Craig MacTavish told USA Today: "It's not like hitting a car windshield. … There will be fighting."
It’s another battle of safety vs. tradition, of fighting vs. the slow elimination of it from the game. With that:
Pass or Fail: The two-minute minor for removing one’s helmet before a fight.SWAT officer fired his weapon inside Paddock's room
The mass shooting and the death of the gunman, Stephen Paddock, who reportedly committed suicide,The Force Investigation Team (FIT) falls under the direction of the department's Internal Oversight and Constitutional Policing Bureau that is commanded by Captain Kelly M. McMahill, who is the wife of Clark County Undersheriff Kevin C. McMahill.Capt. McMahill is a staple on local television as the spokesperson for officer involved shootings in Las Vegas.McMahill is listed as a speaker at the November 2017 Conference of the Society for Integrity in Force Investigation and Reporting. She is scheduled for a talk on Las Vegas Metro Police Officer Involved Shooting Investigations.The FIT investigates all officer involved shootings leading to injuries or death.When the Baltimore Post-Examiner contacted the LVMPD Homicide Division on Tuesday and inquired if they were handling the Mandalay Bay shooting investigation, we were told that it was being investigated by the Force Investigation Team.A press information officer was not available for comment when contacted by the Baltimore Post-Examiner.The FIT conducts a criminal investigation to determine whether the use of use deadly force was legally justified under criminal law., according the departments use of force policy. FIT also directs the investigation against a subject who either committed crimes which led to the use of deadly force or who has committed crimes against an officer.Why the investigation is not being handled by the seasoned homicide detectives of the LVMPD seems peculiar when juxtaposed with the fact that the police said that Paddock was already dead, apparently by his own hand, when they entered his room at the Mandalay Bay.Why a shooting investigation team that investigates if police officers were justified in using deadly force, would be investigating the mass Undershooting is unknown.The Baltimore Post-Examiner was the first to break the story and produce a police audio recording that a SWAT officer fired his weapon inside Paddock's room. According to the police radio traffic that night after the rooms were breached a SWAT officer told the dispatcher that one SWAT officer did fire and that there were no other injuries and one suspect was down at this point.During the Oct. 3 press briefing, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo was asked by a reporter, "Did police or security guards fire any shots at any time during the encounter." Lombardo replied, "Um, during when he was discharging his weapon?" Reporter, "Yes." Lombardo, "We are not aware of that, no security guard or police,Was it a case of an accidental discharge and if so why has there been no press release on that, almost three and half weeks since the massacre?. What's the big secret? Who was injured, as the SWAT officer told the dispatcher that there were no other injuries?When four of the LVMPD officers who had entered Paddock's room after the door was breached, Detectives Matthew Donaldson, Casey Clarkson, and K-9 officers Joshua Bitsko and Dave Newton appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes, the Sunday following the massacre,The LVMPD has robots that have been used in prior incidents involving barricaded suspects, which the Sheriff said this incident turned into because Paddock had stopped firing on the crowd.The police saw the cameras on the room service cart, yet SWAT officer, Levi Hancock still approached the gunman's door to fasten the explosive for the breach.Chapter Text
Korra
The shrill ringing of the alarm clock startled Korra out of a deep sleep. Without moving her face from where it lay buried in her pillow, she brought up an arm and slammed it down on the alarm clock, silencing it. “The morning… is… evil,” she groaned into her pillow. Reluctantly, she got up from her bed and stumbled into the bathroom.
Stupid Tenzin, making me go in so friggin’ early on a friggin’ Saturday. She undressed and stepped into the shower, still trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes. The water did wonders to wake her up though, and by the time she stepped out Korra was wide awake. She used a little waterbending to quickly dry herself off before wrapping a towel around herself and setting out into her room to find some clean clothes.
Korra searched through the piles of laundry that she totally meant to do a couple of days ago for something that was passable for a professional work environment. First, she pulled an underwear set from her rapidly depleting clean drawer. She then quickly found some pants and put them on. She was in the process of looking for a shirt that seemed acceptable when her roommate woke up. “What time is it?” she mumbled sleepily.
Korra glanced at her alarm clock. “About six thirty,” she replied. “Go back to sleep, Opal.”
“Why the hell are you up so early?”
Korra sighed. “I have to be at City Hall by eight. The mayor has this important meeting with some corporate bigwig and he wants me there.”
“That sucks,” Opal said. “Well, have a good day.” She rolled over and promptly fell asleep again. Korra finished dressing and with a last envious look at Opal’s peacefully sleeping form, made her way out of her dorm.
Korra made good time in getting to City Hall, arriving at half past seven. It was a near-miracle actually, considering the ungodly mess that was Republic City’s public transportation system. Korra thought, not for the first time, that she should really look into getting a car. And driving lessons for that matter. Still, arriving with half an hour to spare meant she had plenty of time to get some breakfast from the building’s cafeteria.
She made her way there and stood in front of the counter, her eyes skimming over the menu. There really wasn’t much to choose from, and she was feeling nostalgic for home, so she settled on some seaweed noodles.
Since it was so early in the morning, the cafeteria was nearly empty, except for another couple of interns who were engaged in a heated conversation. Korra decided to sit near them, to listen in on their talk.
“I’m telling you, there’s no way Tempest could take on the Avatar! She can bend at least three elements and all Tempest has is lightningbending. And she can barely extended past her hands!”
“Yeah, but Tempest has experience! She’s taken on ten guys at a time. Plus, she’s got back-up from what’s-their-face… Wildfire and Landslide.”
“You can’t bring other people into this, that’s not fair! We’re talking about a straight-up fight between the Avatar and Tempest, and I’m telling you, the Avatar would win!”
Korra sat back, grinning. Ever since her internet debut a few weeks ago it seemed the entire city was talking about her. Now they were actually sizing her up against Tempest! If Korra were in private (and if she didn’t have a rep to maintain) she’d be freaking the hell out. Tempest was one of her biggest heroes.
After a while, Korra noticed that the two guys had moved on to other topics, so she focused on choking back her noodles. They were cheap, rubbery, and tasted suspiciously like someone had taken regular wheat noodles and dyed them green. She reminded herself to look for somewhere in the city that had authentic Southern food.
Her disappointing breakfast over with, Korra made her way through City Hall to Tenzin’s office, where she was told by his secretary Tenzin was waiting for her in Conference Room 2. On the other side of the building. Twenty feet from the cafeteria. Great.
Groaning, Korra turned on her heel and went back the way she came. By the time she made it back to Conference Room 2, she burst in to find Tenzin sitting down in front what had to be the representative from Future Industries. She was… not what Korra expected.
When Tenzin told her they’d be meeting with a corporate executive, Korra had immediately pictured some fat, middle-aged man, not what was, frankly, a gorgeous woman close to Korra’s own age. Unless she has some really good anti-aging cream, she thought.
“Ah Korra, you’re here,” Tenzin said. “Ms. Sato, this is Korra Sikku, one of my brightest interns. She’ll be taking the minutes of this meeting, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” The woman smiled at Korra, and she felt her stomach do a backflip.
Jeez Korra, calm the fuck down. Keep it in your pants!
“Korra, this is Asami Sato, CEO of Future Industries,” Tenzin continued.
Korra needed a few moments to shake off this new information. This woman, who was at the absolute most a couple of years older than her, was already running her own multinational corporation. That was beyond impressive. Remembering how to interact with humans, Korra walked up to the CEO and held out her hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Sato.”
“Likewise,” she replied. “And please, call me Asami.”
Tenzin cleared his throat and signaled to a seat between him and Asami, at the head of the table, already prepared with paper and a pen. Korra sat down and cracked her knuckles, mentally preparing for the hand cramp that would inevitably result from this meeting.
“Well Ms. Sato,” Tenzin began, “I looked over your proposal and I have to say, from an economic standpoint it’s more than feasible. The only thing I’m worried about is the practicality of it all. Construction would force us to close down large areas of the city for extended periods of time. Does this city really need a subway system that badly?”
“All due respect, Mayor Gyatso, but when was the last time you used public transportation in the city?” Asami asked.
“Not for years,” Tenzin admitted.
“Well sir, if you had, you’d know how difficult it is to get around in this city when you don’t have a personal vehicle. My company provides Republic City with most of its buses and we own about half the tram lines. And every day we get reports of angry and unsatisfied customers who have trouble getting where they need to be on time.”
Korra sat there, quickly jotting everything down and trying to keep a big, dopey smile from her face. Asami Sato, the beautiful and brilliant CEO of Future Industries, was now trying to make her day-to-day life less of a living hell. Where have you been all my life?
Tenzin and Asami continued talking for a while, bouncing off numbers, figures and logistics that made absolutely no sense to Korra, when Tenzin’s secretary walked in.
“I’m sorry to interrupt sir, but you have a phone call in your office,” he said.
“Would you please tell whoever it is that I am in the middle of a meeting?”
“Normally I would but, ah… it’s the vice president, sir.”
Tenzin audibly sighed, not that Korra could blame him. From what little she knew of Vice President Tarrlok the one thing Korra was sure of is that he fit every cliche in the Slimy Politician Handbook. “Would you excuse me for a few minutes Ms. Sato?”
“Of course.” Tenzin rose and quickly left the room with his secretary, leaving the two women alone. They sat in silence for a few awkward seconds, until Asami attempted to break the ice. “So… you’re an intern, huh?”
“Yep,” Korra replied, a small smile on her face from Asami’s poor attempt at making conversation.
“Let me guess… political science major?”
Korra nodded. “Freshman year at RCU.”
“Really? I had you pegged a little older than that.”
Korra chuckled. She got that a lot. “I am, actually. I’m twenty-one.”
“So why’d you start college so late?” Asami asked. “Travelling the world?”
“What makes you think that?”
Asami shrugged. “You just strike me as the adventurous type, I guess.”
“Well, no traveling the world, but I definitely have had more adventure than is good for you. Although, for the last couple of years I’ve been… dealing with some trouble back home.” Korra tried to keep her admission as vague as possible, preferring to avoid the war talk with someone she barely knew, but realized she failed when Asami’s eyes went wide.
“Oh god, you’re from the Southern Water Tribe, aren’t you?”
Korra cringed “Listen, do you mind if we don’t talk about it? The war ended three years ago and I spent those three years basically helping my dad rebuild the Tribe from the ground up. That’s pretty much all there is to know.”
Asami nodded in understanding. “It’s alright, we don’t have to talk about it. I think it’s great that you’re here now. RCU is a very good school. I actually did my master’s there.”
“Um… how many degrees do you have exactly?”
“Three?” Asami said uncertainly. “I have a bachelor’s degree in both mechanical and structural engineering, plus my MBA. So yeah, three.”
“Okay, and you’re how old?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And you run your own multinational company.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well… that’s a bit discouraging.”
The corner of Asami’s mouth quirked in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… you’re a year older than me and you’ve already done all this stuff and I’m just a twenty one-year-old freshman. I just feel kind of… inadequate.” She averted her gaze from Asami, choosing instead to stare down at the table. “I know, it’s stupid.”
“Hey,” Asami said, placing her hand on Korra’s shoulder, “it’s alright. And for the record, I don’t think you’re inadequate. Sure, you got a late start to your career, but you were helping an entire country rebuild. I’ve certainly heard worse excuses.”
Korra looked up to see Asami smiling warmly at her, and offered one in return. “Thanks, Asami.”
“No problem.” They lapsed back into a more comfortable silence for a while before Asami spoke again. “Listen, I know we agreed not to talk about this but since you’re from the South, I have to ask. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the Avatar, would you?”
Korra tensed for a second before reacting. This was the first time anyone had asked directly about her nightly activities. Okay Korra, you rehearsed this. Just lie your ass off. “Not really. I honestly thought she wasn’t real until she popped up here. It just seemed too convenient that a mythical figure would appear and save us.”
“The Avatar’s a mythical figure?” Asami asked, quirking an eyebrow.
“Yeah, a really old one, nearly forgotten actually. The Water Tribes barely remember it and I’m pretty sure that’s where the religion started in the first place. Basically, the story goes that there’s this spirit of light and order would choose someone in times of great need, and this person would become her Avatar and help bring peace and stuff to the world. Oh, and that person could also bend the four elements like it’s nobody’s business.”
Asami let out a small laugh. “When you put it like that, it does sound a little ridiculous.”
“I know, right? Anyway, I’ve always been more of a fan of Tempest myself.”
“The lightningbender?”
“The very same. I actually own every single issue of her comic book.” Korra started as she realized what she just confessed. “And if you ever tell anyone about that, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Don’t worry,” Asami laughed. “Your nerdy secret’s safe with me.”
“Who’re you calling nerdy, Ms. I-have-two-engineering-degrees?” Korra asked in a mock-offended tone.
“I’m a different breed of nerdy, though,” Asami replied. “I’m more into cars, computers, the occasional videogame... I didn’t know Tempest even had a comic.”
“Technically, she doesn’t. In the comics she’s ‘Electrowoman’ but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who she’s really supposed to be. All the big-name supers have comic book counterparts.”
Any further talk of comic books and their merits was interrupted by Tenzin bursting into the conference room. Judging by the force with which he opened the door, his conversation with the vice president had not gone well. Still by the time Korra and Asami turned to face him he seemed to have collected himself, with his face in its default, serenely neutral expression. Guess all that meditation pays off, Korra thought.
“I apologize for taking so long Ms. Sato. Shall we continue?”
“Ready when you are, sir.”
The next hour (or two, or three… Korra couldn’t keep track) was a blur of dates and costs and building materials and hand cramps. After the meeting was over, Asami said her goodbyes to her and Tenzin and Korra returned to the mind-numbing skullduggery that was expected of her as an intern. Finally, mercifully, it was five PM and Korra could head home, take a nap, eat, take another nap, before getting ready for her other job.
After making sure Opal had left for the evening, Korra climbed on top of her desk and bent the concrete on the ceiling above her. She reached into the hole she created and dug around until she found what she was looking for: a large duffel bag with her suit. It was nothing fancy; she had pretty much thrown it together during her time fighting in the South. It consisted of a traditional Southern warrior’s outfit with most the heavy armor removed, although she kept the pelt that went around her waist. She had also added a mask to the helmet, which covered the area around her eyes.
Now suited up, Korra leapt out her dorm window, using airbendng to give herself a boost. She got to the city much faster than she had that morning, but still not fast enough for her tastes. Korra decided she’d try begging Tenzin (again) to let her use one of the ancient Air Nomad gliders he had.
Korra patrolled as she always did, never staying in one place for long, always looking for where the action was. After a few hours she had resigned herself to the fact that it was probably going to be another quiet night when she heard what sounded like a controlled but still fairly loud explosion. She turned to see smoke coming from a building about two blocks down.
The Avatar grinned. Showtime!Russell Simmons has announced that he will “step aside” from the companies he founded, Def Jam Records and his Phat Farm clothing line, after being accused of sexual assault by screenwriter Jenny Lumet. Lumet, who wrote Rachel Getting Married, detailed her experience with Simmons on a night circa 1991 in a letter to The Hollywood Reporter after Simmons previously denied another accusation from former model Keri Claussen Khalighi and claimed “I never committed any acts of aggression or violence in my life.”
In her letter, Lumet describes being picked up by Simmons, who offered her a ride home in his car with a driver. Simmons, Lumet claims, then gave his address, and refused to drive her home when she insisted. Once in Simmons’s building, Lumet said, “You used your size to maneuver me, quickly, into the elevator.” Then, she claims, he took her to his apartment, and had sex with her. “At one point you were only semi-erect and appeared frustrated. Angry?” Lumet writes. “I remember being afraid that you would deem that my fault and become violent. I did not know if you were angry, but I was afraid that you were.” Lumet says she did not tell her story to anyone until this year, after the Harvey Weinstein story was in the news. “I don’t recall ever meeting any of the women who have spoken out against you, Russell,” Lumet writes. “But I can’t leave those women twisting in the wind.”
In response to Lumet’s letter, Simmons wrote:Elm 0.17: Successful Upgrade of Real World App …and some soft of guide to all of this
Marek Fajkus Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 15, 2016
It has been few month since I’ve started to learn Elm programming language. I’ve been walking around elm for quite a while without ever touching it. After a while I decided to learn some statically typed functional language. This was a time when I finally decided to give elm a try. So I started to play with it. Learn a little bit of learning syntax, core functions, types, Signals, Effects, Mailboxes and Elm architecture. It was quite interesting journey. Soon I’ll become wonder if I’ll be able to write some smaller project from end to start just using elm. Some kind of real world application to challenge myself and also this world of typed purity. I wanted it to talk to some JSON API. Github’s API seems to be good think to start with so I start writing github repository browser in elm. This is demo of app I’m talking about.
Just few days ago to me unexpected thing happens. Elm 0.17 release was announced! Everyone who read that article was like “Omg, what’s going on?!”. From that moment Signals, Messages, Effects and Mailboxes are past of Elm. What should I think of it?
This was really huge change in how everybody (including me) things about building web apps in elm. We all know these kind of changes are really hard to bring in practice when you already have large codebase around your ecosystem. I that moment that app I wrote few month ago came to my mind. It looks like all packages it needs are ready for 0.17. Plan was made and yesterday I finally found some time to upgrade it to 0.17.
Upgrading is always painful. It really is. I’m working on pretty large Ember.js application in my company. Ember core team is pretty careful about their deprecation planing. Anyway upgrading that app was (and is) a huge pain. It’s always a huge pain when you have tens of thousands of code lines written with large test suites.
Such a big design change that elm 0.17 brings to its ecosystem is something that can be impossible to happen to Javascript framework. Remember Angular 1.x vs 2.x? Express.js vs Koa.js?
Luckily I have pretty small app written in elm which seems to be good candidate for going through this big upgrade process. I was not afraid of upgrading this since I was able to wrote whole app in one day or so. Even if I will need to rewrite it completely it will be still just a weekend project.
One thing I think is particularly hard when starting with any upgrade is to find some pattern and split work into few iterations where each has its own goal. You can’t rewrite whole app at once. This is no how you design it and it shouldn’t be the way how you refactor it as well.
To be honest I was quite chaotic when I started with this upgrade but soon I realised some (or way how you can split upgrade into smaller iterations if you want) and this is why I’m sharing this story with you. No matter how big your project is I think you can apply these steps in order to make whole upgrade process of your elm 0.16 to 0.17 sooth and fun.
Note: This article is just about upgrading web app based on elm-html. I also have one project written with canvas backend (it’s kind of game) and other one as a library backed up just by elm-test. Anyway I will not focus on nether of these projects.
Lets get started
You can check or clone whole 0.16 version code from Github under v0.16 tag. With our legacy code and Upgrading to 0.17 guide opened we are ready to try what new Elm is about.
New dependencies
This is pretty straight forward. We can almost copy/paste this part from upgrade guide so Lets open elm-package.json in your favorite Emacs and get it done.
Note: As you can see I’m a |
to sell body parts. I asked AHCA Secretary Liz Dudek to begin immediately dispatching staff from their licensure office to evaluate the 16 Planned Parenthood offices in Florida that perform abortion procedures to ensure they are in full compliance with the law. If a Planned Parenthood office is not following the law, we will move quickly to take legal and regulatory action against them,” Scott said in a press release. “We hold our healthcare organizations in Florida to the highest standards of safety and we expect them to fully comply with the law at all times.”
Scott asked the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) to immediately begin investigating the 16 Planned Parenthood offices in Florida that perform abortion procedures to ensure they are in full compliance with the law.
It turns out, they are not. As the Tampa Bay newspaper reports:
After inspecting all 16 Planned Parenthood clinics in Florida, the state Agency for Health Care Administration announced Wednesday that three have performed procedures outside the scope of their licenses and one has not kept proper records on disposing fetal remains. “We will take immediate actions against these three facilities for performing second trimester abortions without a proper license,” AHCA spokesperson Shelisha Coleman said in a written statement Wednesday. “These facilities have been notified to immediately cease performing second trimester abortions.” Clinics in St. Petersburg, Fort Myers and Naples were cited for performing abortions in the second trimester that they are not licensed to do. A Pembroke Pines clinic was cited for improper record-keeping.
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As LifeNews reported, the first video of undercover footage shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of Medical Services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, describing how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted unborn children and admitting she uses partial-birth abortions to supply intact body parts.
In the second video, Planned Parenthood doctor Maru Gatter discusses the pricing of aborted baby body parts — telling the biotech company officials that the prices for such things as a baby’s liver, head or heart are negotiable. She also tells the officials that she could talk with the Planned Parenthood abortion practitioners to potentially alter the abortion procedure to kill the baby in a way that would best preserve those body parts after the unborn child is killed in the abortion.
A total of 12 states have already launched an investigation including South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, Texas and Louisiana and members of Congress have launched an investigation as well.In the hands of a lesser writer, the story of how high-speed traders are skimming pennies off transactions on Wall Street could be mind-numbingly arcane. But Michael Lewis, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and best-selling author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, and The Blind Side, knows how to tell a story, even one that he freely admits is dauntingly impenetrable.
“If it wasn’t complicated, it wouldn’t be allowed to happen,” Lewis told Steve Kroft in a 60 Minutes segment that aired last night. “The complexity disguises what is happening.”
He added, “The stock market is rigged.”
In a nutshell, Lewis writes in his new book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (itself an outgrowth of this Vanity Fair article from 2013), what’s happening is that some savvy, if unscrupulous, traders are using their ability to operate faster than everyone else to make some free money. The easiest technique to explain involves spotting someone else’s intention to purchase some stocks, jumping ahead of them to make the buy, and then selling the shares to the intended buyer at a slightly inflated price. (In fact, Lewis explains in this excerpt, these high-speed traders make a lot more money on something called “slow-market arbitrage”: “This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges before those exchanges were able to react.”)
Related "Goldman's Geek Tragedy," by Michael Lewis, September 2013
All that complexity is offset in Lewis’s telling by a collection of Hollywood-ready characters. There’s Brad Katsuyama, a kind of anti-Jordan Belfort, who first notices that something weird is happening with his trades and sets out to discover the problem—and, in a very un-Wall Street move—help others protect themselves from it. There’s Ronan Ryan, “the world’s expert at helping the world’s fastest stock-market traders be faster” who also seemed to be “doing a fair impression of a Dublin handyman.” There’s Constantine Sokoloff, a Russian math whiz who led a team of “Puzzle Masters” dedicated to testing a new system for foiling the high-speed traders. (Hollywood blog editors, start your fantasy-casting engines now.)
You can tell that Lewis—whose 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, more or less defines our understanding of Wall Street in the 80s—has struck a nerve from the rhetoric being produced by those he’s targeting.
“Critics of technological advancements in the market do not ground their arguments in data,” a high-frequency-trading advocate named Peter Nabicht recently wrote on the site modernmarketsinitiative.com. “Instead they base their appeals on opinion, seeking to generate animosity and skepticism towards high frequency technology, automation and electronic platforms.”
Memo to Mr. Nabicht. Get your data together, if you have any, because until you can express yourself like Michael Lewis, your appeals to opinion are destined to fall flat.Amnesty International is bringing its Human Rights Concerts back this year. On February 5, the Bringing Human Rights Home concert at Brooklyn's Barclays Center will include Flaming Lips, Lauryn Hill, Tegan and Sara, Cold War Kids, and more. Amnesty International has now confirmed that two formerly imprisoned members of Pussy Riot will also appear. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were freed just last month under a new amnesty law in Russia and are currently focusing their work on prisoners' rights.
According to a press release, Tolokonnikova and Alekhina "will address attendees at the concert to raise awareness about prisoners of conscience." The two artists shared a statement in a press release:
We are happy to support Amnesty International’s work on behalf of human rights and political prisoners. We, more than anyone, understand how important Amnesty’s work is in connecting activists to prisoners... A month ago we were freed from Russian prison camps. We will never forget what it’s like to be in prison after a political conviction. We have vowed to continue helping those who remain behind bars and we hope to see you all at the Amnesty International concert on February 5th in Brooklyn!
Amnesty International held its first Human Rights Concerts in the 1980s and 90s with artists like Radiohead, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Peter Gabriel, and more. According to a press release, the February 5 concert "will use technology to connect the music and message in real time from the stage of the Barclays Center to activists across the globe."
Watch a clip from last year's HBO documentary on Pussy Riot:Lessons Learned
Scott Brown and Hermann Peterscheck share the moral of the Auto Assault story
Net Devil President Scott Brown and Producer Hermann Peterscheck were on hand at OGDC to deliver a powerful talk centered on what they’ve learned from developing their flagship MMORPG Auto Assault. The talk was less a critique or post-mortem than it was a mentoring session for aspiring developers of grand-scale computer games like MMORPGs, focusing on development best practices and how to foster a strong and trusting relationship with a publisher.
While considered by many to be highly innovative, Auto Assault was commercially unsuccessful. When the game launched in April 2006, rumors sprang up of a disappointing online population of less than a few thousand players, reportedly by players using the /who command to count server populations. Peterscheck pointed out that one big reason for Auto Assault’s poor reception was the lack of familiarity. For example, with the fantasy genre, the bread and butter of the MMORPG industry, it’s easy to know from experience that leather armor is less durable and lighter than plate mail. But in Auto Assault, is hardened nanoplasteel armor better or worse than xeno alloy armor? We all know that the ability “maul” probably causes a damaging melee attack or that “taunt” will probably draw an enemy’s ire, but what does “hazardous cleansing” mean? (With a smile, Peterscheck noted that even the dev team didn’t know what “hazardous cleansing” means.) These disconnects, while subtle, steepen the learning curve of a futuristic game.
Scott Brown (left) and Hermann Peterscheck
Much of the talk centered on NetDevil’s relationship with Auto Assault publisher NCSoft. Scott Brown was careful to note how supportive NCSoft was during the development and launch of Auto Assault; NetDevil set their own milestones, for example. Still, there were lessons to be learned on developer / publisher relations, even in the enviable relationship NetDevil enjoyed with NCSoft.
Brown mentioned the “dread of cancellation” numerous times, and how injurious this spectre was to the creative process of designing a game. “As a small developer, getting cancelled could mean closing your doors,” he noted. Brown surmised that while meeting milestones is no walk in the park, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and meet your deliverables at the expense of the primary goal: creating a great game that makes lots of money.
Cancellation is a publisher’s prerogative, however, and Brown mentioned a few strategies to counteract the seeming threat and facilitate the development of a great game:
A “constant streaming build” - NetDevil now has a pipeline by which a constant streaming build is delivered to the decision-makers at a click. Everyone is on the same page with regards to where the project is at, what still needs done, etc. and the development team is far more careful about “checking in” a deliverable when the project is live for all to see.
- NetDevil now has a pipeline by which a constant streaming build is delivered to the decision-makers at a click. Everyone is on the same page with regards to where the project is at, what still needs done, etc. and the development team is far more careful about “checking in” a deliverable when the project is live for all to see. The “thin slice” or “one great level” approach – Rather than iterating for map, lighting, objects, characters, animations, etc., NetDevil now tries to build one great character (instead of 12 mediocre ones) with one great skill tree (instead of 4 half-baked) ones in one great map - you get the idea – but the idea is to have a full-fledged play experience as soon as possible and build from it in small steps. This approach has its design advantages and hype disadvantages, but it insures a developer against cancellation in that a developer can always release a product if cancelled.
– Rather than iterating for map, lighting, objects, characters, animations, etc., NetDevil now tries to build one great character (instead of 12 mediocre ones) with one great skill tree (instead of 4 half-baked) ones in one great map - you get the idea – but the idea is to have a full-fledged play experience as soon as possible and build from it in small steps. This approach has its design advantages and hype disadvantages, but it insures a developer against cancellation in that a developer can always release a product if cancelled. Change control – This is something that NetDevil seeks to build into every contract; reason being that when a contract is signed, developers don’t know exactly what they’ll be doing in 2 months (let alone 2 years!) and that it’s a pity to have to get the lawyers involved to change the game for the better. Rather, a developer and publisher should seek middle ground between accountability and creative freedom. Brown noted that moving to a scrum approach to software development rather than the traditional waterfall method improved
Delay at the beginning, not at the end – While money has a way of growing expectations, in the long run it’s far cheaper to take your time building a solid concept than fix everything you created and push back launch 6 months (as with Auto Assault). Launch delays also pop the bubble of momentum and hype that builds up in a gaming community, making it harder to sell the game when it finally arrives.
Brown and Peterscheck also discussed some of the best practices they’ve put together for the design team:
Force your team to play the game – It sounds harsh, but Peterscheck pointed out that if your team isn’t playing, why should you expect the public to play? If your game isn’t fun, your team should be discovering and taking note of why it isn’t fun. People in general are far more likely to fix things that bug them personally rather than fix things others are complaining about.
– It sounds harsh, but Peterscheck pointed out that if your team isn’t playing, why should you expect the public to play? If your game isn’t fun, your team should be discovering and taking note of why it isn’t fun. People in general are far more likely to fix things that bug them personally rather than fix things others are complaining about. “There’s no such thing as a good game with a bad frame rate” and “No crashes, ever.” - Technical and programming considerations are paramount; nothing is more frustrating for MMO players than to play for 8 hours and watch it all disappear due to a rollback. Players may complain about design, but they won’t forgive instability.
and - Technical and programming considerations are paramount; nothing is more frustrating for MMO players than to play for 8 hours and watch it all disappear due to a rollback. Players may complain about design, but they won’t forgive instability. Tools are top-priority. – Brown got a chuckle out of the room when he suggested that you place your most cantankerous dev on design tools, since that programmer would fix problems quickly; he doesn’t like to be nagged, in other words. Both devs encouraged the use of third-party tools to decrease expensive design time, and put the best programmers in charge of designing and adapting tools for the team’s use.
– Brown got a chuckle out of the room when he suggested that you place your most cantankerous dev on design tools, since that programmer would fix problems quickly; he doesn’t like to be nagged, in other words. Both devs encouraged the use of third-party tools to decrease expensive design time, and put the best programmers in charge of designing and adapting tools for the team’s use. Polish as you go, don’t wait for the end. – Brown pointed out that “two hours of bad content equates to no hours of content.” This approach ties into the “thin slice” approach mentioned above.
– Brown pointed out that “two hours of bad content equates to no hours of content.” This approach ties into the “thin slice” approach mentioned above. Beta testing is marketing, not testing. – While certain things like stress testing can only be done during beta, a dev team shouldn’t rely on the beta test to point out non-technical flaws.
– While certain things like stress testing can only be done during beta, a dev team shouldn’t rely on the beta test to point out non-technical flaws. Manage expectations, “don’t drop bombs” on the community – It almost goes without saying: developers should only discuss what they’re 100% sure will be in the game. Indulging speculation and the over-promise / under-deliver approach only leads to disappointment.
While Scott Brown and Hermann Peterscheck’s talk was more didactic than deductive, it was exciting to see developers working across company lines to share their challenges and lessons learned. For more from NetDevil (including the latest on their most exciting project, the Lego MMO) please check out Cody Bye’s interview with Scott Brown and Hermann Peterscheck at OGDC 2007.
Return to the OGDC Portal PagePresident Trump on Wednesday said he is considering waiving U.S. shipping restrictions under the Jones Act to help disaster aid reach Puerto Rico.
The administration faced a backlash earlier this week for suggesting that an exemption from the shipping rules is not needed for Puerto Rico, where officials estimate parts of the island could be without power for up to six months in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
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Several lawmakers have been pushing for a yearlong waiver from the rule, which they say would help deliver gasoline and other supplies more quickly and cheaply to the battered island.
But the issue runs counter to Trump’s “America First” instincts.
The Jones Act, which was created in 1920 to strengthen the commercial U.S. shipping industry after World War I, requires that cargo shipments between U.S. ports only take place on American-made, -owned and -operated vessels.
The nearly century-old law enjoys strong support from the maritime and shipping industry.
“We have a lot of shippers, a lot of people that work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “And we have a lot of ships out there right now.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can waive the rule, which it has done in the past for natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
The Trump administration earlier this month issued a weeklong waiver, requested by the Department of Defense (DOD) and extended by another week, to allow fuel shipments to Texas and Florida after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
But the DOD has not yet issued a similar request for Puerto Rico, which is facing widespread medical, food and water shortages.
Several Democratic members of Congress, led by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), have requested a yearlong Jones Act exemption for Puerto Rico. Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) has also long called for a full repeal of the law.
The lawmakers argue that the outdated shipping restrictions are hindering recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.
Right now, a foreign ship that wants to take relief goods to the island would have to either pay hefty tariffs if it lands there or reload its cargo onto a U.S.-flagged ship on the mainland — two options that critics say jack up costs and slow down shipments.
Lawmakers say that the waiver would allow cheaper and more readily available foreign vessels to supply goods to the island.
“First aid and other goods need to get to the island as quickly as possible. This is strangling,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) told The Hill. “There are other countries that want to help and are currently unable to do so.”
DHS officials, however, have maintained that a waiver might not be necessary for Puerto Rico. They say there are enough U.S. ships available to assist with recovery efforts.
They also say the move would do little to help the U.S. territory, where damaged ports are preventing ships from docking and ripped-up roads are preventing goods from being transported around the island.
But following an outcry for not issuing an exemption, the DHS said Wednesday that it was considering granting a waiver, though the agency did not indicate when a decision would be made.
Under the shipping law, the DHS can only issue waivers if it’s in the interest of national security and if the Department of Transportation determines that there aren’t enough U.S. vessels to deliver cargo. The agency would not need to consider the latter standard, however, if the request came directly from the DOD.
“As based upon our current conversations, there is not a lack of vessels to move the goods that we need to support the humanitarian relief efforts,” a senior DHS official told reporters Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the shipping industry — a fierce supporter of the Jones Act — says that U.S. companies and workers should be at the forefront of the relief effort.
Domestic maritime companies have already delivered 9,500 containers of fuel, first aid supplies, building materials and other goods to the island, according to the American Maritime Partnership.
“A steady stream of additional supplies keeps arriving in Puerto Rico on American vessels and on international ships from around the world,” said Thomas Allegretti, chairman of the American Maritime Partnership. “The problem now is distributing supplies from Puerto Rico’s ports inland by surface transportation.”
There could also be more reluctance from the administration to grant the waiver to Puerto Rico because it’s a yearlong request, as opposed to a few weeks.
But if the White House decides not to grant the exemption, it could fuel criticism that Trump cares more about U.S. citizens on the mainland than those in Puerto Rico.
“Maybe Puerto Rico is not a priority to him, but it should be, because this has all the makings to be a modern-day Katrina,” Espaillat said.Cruz received an adoring reception from most in the conservative audience. Cruz: Hecklers are Obama operatives
Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday had a pithy retort for a handful of hecklers who interrupted his speech at the Values Voter Summit Friday.
“It seems Obama’s paid political operatives are out in force today,” he said as one member of the audience interrupted with a question. “The men and women in this room scare the living daylights out of them.”
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Cruz (R-Texas) received an adoring reception from most in the conservative audience as he slammed Obamacare, but his speech was interrupted at least seven times by protestors, causing him to pause his address as shouting broke out. Attendees sought to drown out the interrupters with a loud “USA!” chant.
( PHOTOS: Key quotes from Ted Cruz)
“In this brief speech we’ve heard more questions than President Obama has allowed in the past year,” he said after another protestor stood up.
Turning to the media sitting at the back of the ballroom at a Washington hotel, he made what appeared to be an impromptu offer to President Barack Obama.
( QUIZ: Do you know Ted Cruz?)
“If he wants to get 100 of his most rabid political operatives in a room I’ll answer their questions on television as long as he likes,” he said. “In exchange, all I’d ask, Mr. President, is you take not 100 but 10 of the men and women in this room” and spend half an hour answering their questions.
Cruz, speaking to the summit ahead of a meeting with Obama, said the House of Representatives needs to continue “standing strong” in the battle against the health care law as the government remains shut down.
Follow @politicoNew Orleans Saints rookie Nick Toon has been injured for the entire preseason thus far as he has been battling a foot injury. Toon is doubtful for the Saints’ next preseason game against the Houston Texans on Saturday, August 25th. With Toon not seeing any preseason action so far it’s among many NFL rumors sparking that Toon might not even make the Saints’ 53-man roster.
Toon sustained a foot injury during practice on August 2nd, and Toon described it as a “tweak” at the time. However, Toon’s injury seems more serious than a “tweak” since he has missed the past three weeks. The question is, without any preseason experience, will Toon make the roster?
I honestly think that despite his injury, Toon’s roster spot is safe. Toon was the Saints’ fourth round selection and they seem to be invested in him. Toon has drawn comparisons to teammate and fellow wide receiver Marques Colston. It is evident that the Saints drafted Toon to be the wide receiver of the future and the successor to Colston. Furthermore, Toon has a good pedigree as his father Al Toon played in the NFL.
The Saints claim that Toon will be back sometime this week but he will likely not play in the next preseason game. I would like to see Toon play at least one preseason game just to see what he can do. Toon has great size (6’4″ 218 pounds) and runs routes well but I still think he needs to earn his stripes with the Saints.
Before the foot injury, Toon was considered one of the favorites to claim the number four receiver position but his injury has been a big setback. However, the competition is still going on and with injuries to wide receiver Adrian Arrington and Andy Tanner the number four receiver is still up for grabs. If Toon can come back in the Saints’ final preseason game against the Tennessee Titans he could have a chance to claim the number four spot.
Toon would have to bring his A-game when he returns if he wants the number four spot as he will need to get up to speed with the other receivers on the Saints’ roster. The entire time Toon has been injured he has been on the sidelines taking “mental reps” as he prepares to come back from injury. I think we will see Toon this season and I hope his foot injury will not hinder him in his rookie season.
Toon is a promising player and I think the Saints got another late round steal. Toon just needs to stay healthy and I am sure he will be another great young star for the Saints.
Alejandro Aviles is the Featured Writer for the New Orleans Saints at Rant Sports.
You can follow him on Twitter @aaviles312Congress's massive appropriations bill will likely block a voter-approved marijuana legalization initiative in Washington, DC. The bill "prohibits both federal and local funds from being used to implement a referendum legalizing recreational marijuana use in the District," according to a summary from the House Appropriations Committee.
DC's legalization initiative obtained more than 69 percent of the vote in November. But ballot initiatives, like all DC laws, must get congressional approval to become law, and they can be blocked through congressional budgetary requirements.
The initiative would allow adults 21 and older to possess up to two ounces of marijuana, grow up to six plants, and give marijuana to other adults 21 and older. It wouldn't legalize, regulate, or tax sales, because voter initiatives in DC can't have a direct impact on the local budget. The White House could veto the appropriations bill, but that's widely considered unlikely since it would result in a government shutdown.
Congress can block any of DC's laws
DC Capitol More
The US Capitol, where Congress resides — and approves DC's laws. (MyLoupe / UIG via Getty Images)
Through the Home Rule Act of 1973, Washington, DC, can elect a sitting local government composed of a council, mayor, and other local agencies. But the Home Rule Act also made it so each law passed by the local government requires congressional approval. And Congress can block DC's laws through budgetary requirements, as they are doing with the legalization initiative.
(Read more: 6 questions about Washington, DC, statehood you were too disenfranchised to ask.)
Congress previously used this authority to block DC from implementing a medical marijuana law for nearly 12 years. Federal lawmakers have also prevented DC from using local tax dollars to fund abortion services and life-saving clean needle exchange programs.
The bill blocks funding to implement legalization
marijuana plant More
A marijuana plant. (Shutterstock)
The budget bill blocks DC from using local and federal funds to carry out its legalization measure.
At first glance, this might seem like a weird approach. DC's legalization initiative costs nothing; it actually saves the district money to not enforce laws against marijuana possession. The ballot measure actually couldn't cost money in the first place, since DC ballot initiatives, by law, can't have a direct impact on the local budget.
But the budget bill would prohibit DC Council from spending its time and resources to approve the legalization initiative and send it to Congress. Under federal law, that's a necessary step for legalization to take effect.
Decriminalization remains in place in DCCompany joins other manufacturers, including Vauxhall and BMW, in seeking to get dirtier vehicles off UK roads
Ford has announced a car and van scrappage scheme in a bid to get dirtier vehicles off the roads and boost its sales in the UK’s flagging car market.
While other manufacturers, including Vauxhall and BMW, have launched scrappage schemes this year, Ford’s is unusual in allowing customers to trade in and scrap any brand of older vehicle for at least £2,000.
Any vehicle registered before the end of 2009, with a pre-Euro V standard engine, is eligible for the scrappage incentive against a range of Ford vehicles, up to £7,000 for purchasing a Transit van.
UK car buyers turn to secondhand vehicles Read more
Ford makes the UK’s bestselling car, the Fiesta, and van, the Transit Custom. After years of consistent growth based on cheap financing deals, UK car sales have dropped, with a 9% downturn in July attributed to a squeeze on lending and fears around Brexit.
Air pollution concerns, heightened by the VW emissions scandal, have also led manufacturers in Germany to offer large incentives to trade in the most polluting older diesels.
Andy Barratt, chairman and managing director of Ford of Britain, said: “Ford shares society’s concerns over air quality. Removing generations of the most polluting vehicles will have the most immediate positive effect on air quality, and this Ford scrappage scheme aims to do just that.
“We don’t believe incentivising sales of new cars goes far enough and we will ensure that all trade-in vehicles are scrapped.”
Ford said scrappage schemes could take hundreds of thousands of the dirtiest vehicles off the roads, to replace them with models using the latest Euro VI standard engines emitting 80% to 90% less NOx (the generic term for polluting notrogen oxides) and particulates.
Signals that the government or local authorities may clamp down on diesel cars have also spooked buyers, according to David Bailey, professor of industrial strategy at Aston University. “People are worried about the residual values of their diesels; some analysts think the share of the diesel market could be as low as 15% by 2025,” he said. “There’s a sense that we’ve had peak diesel – it was a wrong turn. Car companies are going to have to take action.
“UK sales have been down in the last few months, partly as the market was overtrading before, with a lot of financial innovation around [car loans] – and now of course there is an effect from Brexit, both from currency depreciation and an impact on real incomes.”Jazz had no breakout star on the scale of Kamasi Washington in 2016. Of course, the burly LA-based saxophonist who dominated 2015’s press coverage, even getting mainstream outlets to write about him, was the kind of story that comes along once in a generation, so expecting there to be a “next” one would be absurd. So what were the big events of the year? Well, Henry Threadgill winning a Pulitzer Prize was one, for sure. While I’m personally hot and cold on the guy’s work, he’s been making extraordinarily high-level and yet viscerally charged music for four decades or so, with enough variety that there’s almost certainly something in his catalog you’ll like, especially if you’re a fan of guitars and tubas, two instruments he’s tended to favor in recent years.
Piano god Cecil Taylor was the subject of a two-week “artist in residence” show at the Whitney Museum in April. He played with three different ensembles during that time, ending a serious NYC performance drought. Other than a brief appearance at Ornette Coleman’s 2015 memorial service, he hadn’t played in the city since 2012. I spent two days hanging out with Taylor, writing a story for The Wire. He’s impossible to interview in the conventional sense — if you ask him a question, he’ll likely as not respond by telling you a story that may have something, or absolutely nothing, to do with the subject at hand. Still, it was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. The man is a national treasure. (If you’ve never heard his music, I recommend starting with solo piano albums: Air Above Mountains, the two volumes of Garden, and The Willisau Concert are my personal favorites.)
The big crossover story of the year came wrapped in tragedy, as David Bowie recruited saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s band (keyboardist Jason Lindner, bassist Tim Lefebvre, and drummer Mark Giuliana) for his brilliant final album, Blackstar. McCaslin released his own album, Beyond Now, in October; it included two Bowie compositions, and you’ll find it on the list below.
Traditional jazz players continued to quietly do awesome work, too, of course. One of the best shows I saw this year was 82-year-old tenor saxophonist Houston Person at the Village Vanguard, backed by Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Ben Street, and legendary drummer Billy Hart. Person played like he should have been wearing a ruffled tuxedo; he talked to the audience between songs (particularly the ladies up front); and every song, most of them standards, had a beginning, a middle, an end, and a melody you could hum. He’s made over 75 albums; I own and endorse The Art & Soul Of Houston Person, a three-CD compilation of lush, beautiful recent-ish work.
Stereogum’s never run a year-end jazz list before, so here’s some advice if you’re dipping into the genre for the first time: When you hear an album you like, make a list of the band members. Chances are some or all of them will have made albums under their own names, maybe with some of the folks you’ve already heard and probably with others. Check those albums out, and if you like what you hear, keep making connections. Jazz is like a globe-spanning spiderweb; everyone’s constantly trying to learn something new from their peers. Elder statesmen stock their bands with players half their age, young upstarts come out of nowhere and become in-demand sidemen, scenes that have been bubbling in one city (or one country) for years all of a sudden become subjects of national/global attention. Just follow the lines, and don’t limit yourself to records. Get out to shows. Jazz is a live music above all, and almost any night at a club, you can hear something you’ll never hear again.
That said, here are the 10 best jazz albums of 2016, and recommendations from the year that I encourage you to check out if it moves you.
10 Vijay Iyer & Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith – A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (ECM)
Trumpeter Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith’s relationship with pianist Vijay Iyer goes back several years, to the albums Tabligh and Spiritual Dimensions. And while Smith has composed for large ensembles, recorded solo albums, and done everything in between, the stark and atmospheric duos here are unique in both men’s catalogs. Most of the album consists of a seven-movement, 52-minute title suite. Smith shifts between muted and open horn, wandering to and fro and letting his long, wavering notes smear slightly (though always maintaining strict control). Iyer adds electronic hums and rumbles behind and beneath his piano; one piece, “A Divine Courage,” features a slow, rumbling bass line like something from a John Carpenter movie soundtrack. His actual piano playing is frequently dark and melancholy, almost recalling Matthew Shipp’s thunderous, liturgical sound. At other times, the music is so delicate it’s nearly silent. It’s always beautiful, though, and unmistakably heartfelt and human.
STREAM IT: Apple Music
If you like this, check out: Nate Wooley Quintet – (Dance To) The Early Music (Clean Feed)
9 Battle Trance – Blade Of Love (New Amsterdam)
Battle Trance is a unique quartet made up of four tenor saxophonists: leader Travis Laplante, and Patrick Breiner, Matthew Nelson, and Jeremy Viner. They make incredibly intense, abstract but rigorously disciplined music, all composed by Laplante and rehearsed to an insane degree. Every note and sonic gesture here is composed and memorized, so when they sing through their horns, gasp into them, harmonize, explode in shrieking storms, or hiss with almost imperceptible softness, it’s all part of a larger, carefully organized whole. This isn’t really “jazz” in the traditional sense — with no rhythm instruments, it doesn’t really swing, and the horns’ high-tension harmonies can be unsettling. Solos are rare, and when one does appear, the other horns surround the leader, maniacally repeating a single phrase. But there are passages of incredible, transporting beauty that will make your spirit soar, and when the album’s over, you’ll feel like you’re awakening from a week-long nap.
STREAM IT: Apple Music
If you like this, check out: Borbetomagus – The Eastcote Studios Session (Dancing Wayang)
8 Tyshawn Sorey – The Inner Spectrum Of Variables (Pi)
Drummer Tyshawn Sorey is a first-call sideman and collaborator for mainstream hard bop players and avant-gardists alike; he can swing hard, or delve deep into abstract exploration. When he leads his own ensembles, the resulting music frequently has a meditative quality that owes as much to modern classical as jazz. He really considers each component of the kit, using them to create unexpected combinations of sounds that draw the listener in, demanding and rewarding focus. This two-CD set, composed for piano trio and string trio (violin, viola and cello), is a perfect example of his blending of classical and jazz, and it’s both ambitious as hell and breathtakingly beautiful. The first disc begins with solo piano from Cory Smythe, moves through solo cello, piano-and-strings, and ends with an ominous, mournful soundscape. The second disc is just as dark and harsh, but light breaks through sometimes; this is a genuine masterwork, something entirely new.
STREAM IT: Apple Music
If you like this, check out: Le Boeuf Brothers + JACK Quartet’s Imaginist (New Focus Recordings)
7 Jeremy Pelt – #jiveculture (HighNote)
Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt makes an album a year, each one different from its predecessor. For a few years, he’d been allowing electric instruments into his bands, but no more. Here, he’s backed by pianist Danny Grissett, legendary bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Billy Drummond, for a hard-swinging set of melodic hard bop tunes (five of which Pelt wrote). Since he’s the only horn, Pelt solos a lot on this album; his tone is full, somewhere in the middle of the trumpet’s range most of the time, and the notes fall out like drops of melted butter. Carter takes a booming solo on his composition “Einbahnstrasse,” and Drummond opens “The Haunting” with a 90-second drum fanfare more like a statement of purpose than a solo. “Dream Dancing” is a highlight, a swinging Cole Porter ballad that would be fantastic to dance to at a wedding, if you’re into that kind of thing.
STREAM IT: Apple Music
If you like this, check out: DE3 – Live |
SPEED GIVING SCIENCE A FINITE VALUE FOR BASIC FACTOR IN MOTION UNIVERSE STOP SPEED OF RADIANT ENERGY BEING DIRECTIONAL OUTWARD ALL DIRECTIONS EXPANDING WAVE SURFACE DIAMETRIC POLAR SPEED AWAY FROM SELF IS TWICE SPEED IN ONE DIRECTION AND SPEED OF VOLUME INCREASE IS SQUARE OF SPEED IN ONE DIRECTION APPROXIMATELY THIRTY FIVE BILLION VOLUMETRIC MILES PER SECOND STOP FORMULA IS WRITTEN QUOTE LETTER E FOLLOWED CLOSELY BY EQUATION MARK FOLLOWED BY LETTER M FOLLOWED BY LETTER C FOLLOWED CLOSELY BY ELEVATED SMALL FIGURE TWO SYMBOL OF SQUARING UNQUOTE ONLY VARIABLE IN FORMULA IS SPECIFIC MASS SPEED IS A UNIT OF RATE WHICH IS AN INTEGRATED RATIO OF BOTH TIME AND SPACE AND NO GREATER RATE OF SPEED THAN THAT PROVIDED BY ITS CAUSE WHICH IS PURE ENERGY LATENT OR RADIANT IS ATTAINABLE STOP THE FORMULA THEREFORE PROVIDES A UNIT AND A RATE OF PERFECTION TO WHICH THE RELATIVE IMPERFECTION OF INEFFICIENCY OF ENERGY RELEASE IN RADIANT OR CONFINED DIRECTION OF ALL TEMPORAL SPACE PHENOMENA MAY BE COMPARED BY ACTUAL CALCULATION STOP SIGNIFICANCE STOP SPECIFIC QUALITY OF ANIMATES IS CONTROL WILLFUL OR OTHERWISE OF RATE AND DIRECTION ENERGY RELEASE AND APPLICATION NOT ONLY OF SELF MECHANISM BUT OF FROM SELF MACHINE DIVIDED MECHANISMS AND RELATIVITY OF ALL ANIMATES AND INANIMATES IS POTENTIAL OF ESTABLISHMENT THROUGH EINSTEIN FORMULA
The artist Isamu Noguchi was working on a commemorative sculpture in Mexico and had forgotten the precise formula E=mc2. Fuller not only described the formula but explained it — in 264 words.Tom Boonen has weighed in on the debate surrounding race vehicles, arguing that the peloton would be safer with more – rather than fewer – vehicles around. Related Articles Belgium Tour stage 3 abandoned after motorbikes cause big crash
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The issue has intensified once again following a terrible crash on stage 3 of the Belgium Tour last weekend, where two motorbikes collided and veered into the bunch of riders. A total of 11 riders were taken to hospital, the most severely affected being Lotto Soudal's Stig Broeckx, who suffered head injuries and remains in a coma.
A string of similar incidents in the last couple of years has triggered urgent calls for measures to improve rider safety, with one line of argument being that there are simply too many in-race vehicles nowadays. Boonen, however, a veteran of the peloton, sought to flip that logic.
"If there are more vehicles, they don't have to punch past the peloton so often," reasoned the Etixx-QuickStep rider, speaking to Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.
"The problem now is that they are very agitated. The traffic must be regulated ahead of the peloton. If not, then this can not go on any longer."
Vehicles, from TV and photography motorbikes to medical and commissaire cars, constantly move through races in accordance with the changing situation on the road.
"Having more vehicles would take away the time pressure," argued Boonen. "Passing the peloton itself is not dangerous – not if done at the right moment. The problem is that it is often forced to happen at a time when it is not appropriate for the riders.
"Having more vehicles is a measure that is easy to find, which does little to change the race, and which makes it much less stressful for the drivers."Xender, the popular file-sharing service, has just released an app for Windows 10 Mobile and Windows Phone 8. The app is readily available on the store for download, which comes with the ability to transfer files up to 10GB in size.
Using Wi-Fi, the cross-platform service allows you to transfer documents, music, videos or any other form of content easily between other devices. Transfers can be sent to up to four recipients simultaneously. Be sure to read up more on Xender on the official website.
THIS IS THE DAY! Now you can get Xender on your Windows Phones! Check the Windows Store to download our app now! pic.twitter.com/kShSTwqdwk
Xender supports not only Windows 10 Mobile, but Android, iOS, PC and Mac too. We noticed the app hit the store yesterday, but were patient for confirmation from Xender due to some inconsistencies with regards to the store listing.
Download Xender for Windows Phone/10 Mobile
Thanks to everyone who tipped us!The federal government’s spending on health care consumes 4.8 percent of the nation’s economic production and is expected to eat up 9.2 percent in 25 years, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. A vast majority of economists agree that restoring a sustainable budget will mean either cuts in Medicare and Medicaid or a tax increase on the middle class.
Decisions will have to be made about what services are not worth the cost. Yet so far, our political leaders have failed to acknowledge this to voters, offering instead an illusion that we can resolve the matter without any pain.
Recall the political firestorm in 2009 when the Preventive Services Task Force recommended that women start regular screening for breast cancer at age 50 rather than 40. “This is how rationing begins,” said Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican. “This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.”
The task force is an independent panel of experts financed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Doctors and private insurers usually follow its recommendations. Still, in 2010 — after Mr. Obama’s health reform legislation passed Congress — the department said that insurers should ignore its latest findings and instead go back to its recommendation from 2002: that women start screening at 40.
Does it make sense that older adults in their last year of life consume more than a quarter of Medicare’s expenditures, costing more than six times as much as other beneficiaries? Are there limits to what Medicare should spend on a therapy prolonging someone’s life by a month or two?
It’s a tough political call. In light of the difficulties, our political leaders have preferred to punt on the issue, hoping it doesn’t have to be decided on their watch. Instead, when they talk about health care, they call rationing by some other name.
Rationing is inevitable in a world with finite resources. We do it in this country, too, and it is still one of the least fair and most inefficient rationing systems in the world. You get care if you have the money to pay for it; if not, you probably won’t.
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The 30 percent of the population who are the heaviest users of health care account for nearly 89 percent of health care expenditures, according to a government study. But high-income Americans are more likely to see a doctor when they are sick, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And the disparity between rich and poor is much higher than in other developed countries.
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Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans — those whose employers don’t provide health insurance, who are too poor to pay for it themselves and yet are too rich to use Medicaid — get the least health care of all.
A study of hospital emergency rooms in Wisconsin found that victims of severe traffic accidents without health insurance got 20 percent less care. Hospitals spent $3,300 more on average for each victim who was insured. They kept the insured 9.2 days, on average, and the uninsured just 6.4 days. Unsurprisingly, the uninsured were 40 percent more likely to die from their injuries.
Every health care proposal from the right and the left includes some form of implicit rationing device. Mr. Ryan’s plan, on the Republican side, would keep spending on Medicare under 4.75 percent of the nation’s output until 2050 by giving older adults born after 1958 a dollop of money to buy their own insurance, forcing many to choose cheaper plans or fewer procedures.
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The president’s health care reform encourages rationing, too, by levying a tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans, and in turn pushing employers to seek cheaper options and lower costs. It creates an advisory board to cut costs from Medicare if spending rises above a set rate. And it finances an institute to evaluate which therapies are most clinically effective. Careful to avoid political blowback, the president’s plan forbids Medicare to base its reimbursement decisions on the institute’s findings.
But neither initiative seems likely to solve our health care financing squeeze over the long term. The cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan — shifting the risk of health care inflation onto the shoulders of older adults — are certainly drastic. They also seem politically unfeasible. Under Mr. Ryan’s most recent proposals, in 2030 Medicare would spend $2,200 less in today’s money on each new enrollee than under the most likely outcome envisioned by the Congressional Budget Office based on current policies. By 2050, it would pay $8,000 less. Voters seem to think that might be too drastic a cut.
The president’s plan was more about offering health insurance to all, to end our Dickensian system of rationing by income, than long-term cost control. Savings mandated by the Affordable Care Act over the next 10 years will be difficult to maintain beyond that.
It puts a lot of faith on eliminating waste, with potentially large savings. David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard, argues that a third of our health care dollars go to therapies that do not improve our health. A lot of that waste could be slashed simply by no longer paying providers a fee for each service, whether we need it or not, and paying them instead to keep us healthy.
Going after waste seems sensible in a health care system that costs more than almost any other in the developed world, yet delivers lower-quality care. But savings from waste tend to be hard to achieve. Even with the Affordable Care Act in place, federal health spending will eat up almost twice as much of this nation’s economic product in 2037 as it does today, according to the budget office.
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While it is reasonable for politicians to shy away from rationing — especially when voters believe no expense should be spared to save a human life — if the experience of other countries serves as precedent, they will probably get there sooner or later. In Britain, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence determines what therapies will be covered by the National Health Service. It generally recommends against paying for a therapy that costs more than $31,000 to $47,000 for each year of life gained, adjusted for quality.
Putting a value on life, as it were, is controversial. The National Institute in Britain has denied or limited coverage of expensive drugs for ailments like pancreatic cancer, macular degeneration and Alzheimer’s. But in a world of limited budgets, such decisions must be made.
Similar systems exist in many countries, including Australia and New Zealand, where the government decided not to pay for a universal vaccine against pneumococcal disease until its price fell to 25,000 New Zealand dollars (about $20,000) per quality-adjusted life year.
Though this concept may sound foreign, Washington has been putting a price on life since the administration of Ronald Reagan — who determined that regulations should pass through a strict cost-benefit analysis, with values placed on factors like life and health. The Environmental Protection Agency values a life at about $9 million today. In 2009, the Transportation Department used a price tag of about $6 million. If safety improvements on a road were projected to cost more than the value of the lives expected to be saved by the improvement, the project would be deemed too expensive.
This approach has been contentious. And it has had an impact on Americans’ health. In 1991 an appeals court reversed the E.P.A.’s decision to ban asbestos on the ground that it was too costly. The E.P.A., it argued, “would have this court believe that Congress, when it enacted its requirement that the E.P.A. consider the economic impacts of its regulations, thought that spending $200 million to $300 million to save approximately seven lives (approximately $30 million to $40 million per life) over 13 years is reasonable.” The court disagreed.
Medicare could well be forced, one day, to make similar evaluations.Just about everyone’s got their own wireless LAN in their home, but coverage can still be a problem—and wireless extenders aren’t always a solution, since you can typically only use one extender per WLAN. San Francisco startup Eero thinks they have the answer: a mesh of wireless access points that can have as many or as few nodes as needed to cover your whole home.
Taking its name from Finnish industrial designer Eero Saarinen, Eero is a Bay Area startup that has just emerged from stealth mode. Their launch product will be their mesh networking product, the eponymous Eero, a small white box which contains a pair of dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless 2x2 MIMO radios with conformal antennas. The Eero boxes run what Eero’s Nick Weaver calls a "fully custom" firmware stack, which uses DD-WRT as a starting point.
The boxes have a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, and 1GB of storage. The Eero custom software allows users to set one up as an all-in-one soho NAT WLAN router with DHCP and then add additional Eero mesh devices through Eero’s cloud-based portal. The cloud component also allows Eero users to receive notifications on their smartphones whenever devices join or leave the wireless network and to issue single-click WLAN invites to friends—which means no more setting up a whiteboard with the WLAN password when people come over for poker night (at least, that’s how it works at my house).
Weaver explained in a Skype call with Ars that the mesh functionality is tied directly to their custom firmware, and they’ve spent a lot of time making sure that it works properly. From a high level, the Eero devices use one of their two radios to talk to WLAN clients and the other of the two radios to talk to other Eero devices. In practice, which radio is doing which bit of communication might change from moment to moment, with the functionality being algorithmically controlled by the Eero firmware. Users who would rather put their own software onto the Eero hardware can install vanilla DD-WRT—although doing so will come at the cost of the mesh networking at Eero’s core.
The Eero team currently consists of 15 people in San Francisco, and Weaver stated more than once during our call that design and aesthetics are extremely important to the company. To that end, Weaver and his team collaborated with Fred Bould on the industrial design of the Eero (Bould is most famously responsible for the design of the Nest thermostat), and the resulting smooth box looks a lot friendlier—and has a lot fewer pokey bits and ugly external antennas—than a Netgear or Linksys WAP.
However, whether it actually functions better is something we can’t yet speak to. The device is available to preorder today at Eero’s site, and individual Eero units cost $125 (or you can pick up a three-pack for $299). We’ve been told that we’ll have to wait for the spring of 2015 before we get some units in-hand to test with, so it’ll be at least a month or two before we can put the mesh technology to the test.Last April, the senior missionary couple of Fritzner A. Joseph and his wife, Gina, were watching the Sunday morning session of general conference with fellow Latter-day Saints in Haiti when LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson announced a temple would be built in Port-au-Prince.
Some shouted for joy, while others wept happy tears. In that emotional moment, Joseph, an early Haitian convert, flashed back 32 years to the day when President Monson, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, dedicated Haiti for the preaching of the gospel.
“To relive that moment was special for me and my wife. I had the same sweet feeling when he announced the temple as I had that day (in 1983),” Joseph said. “We’ve had some dark days and challenges in our country. But after that, the light will come. That’s what happened when he announced the temple. Oh, what a blessing.”
At the same time in Boston, Antoine Joseph, another early Haitian convert, was absorbing the news with his wife, Marielle, a former Haitian missionary. For them, the temple announcement was equally sublime.
“It was so marvelous,” said Antoine Joseph, who works in the Boston Massachusetts Temple. “We were so excited."
Fritzner Joseph, 58, and Antoine Joseph, 67, related only in gospel brotherhood, were both baptized on the same day in 1979. Since then, both men and their families have labored diligently to help The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grow in Haiti, despite difficult economic times, political turmoil and the devastating earthquake of 2010.
In commemoration of the temple announcement, Fritzner and Antoine reflected on their conversions, the growth of the church in Haiti and other special memories.
Conversion
Alexandre Mourra, a prominent Haitian businessman, was the first member of the LDS Church in Haiti, according to the 2013 LDS Church Almanac. Mourra learned about the church through a family member who had met missionaries in Miami, and he wrote a letter to Richard L. Millett, president of the Florida Fort Lauderdale Mission, requesting a copy of the Book of Mormon.
Millett, now an 81-year-old Provo resident, sent Mourra copies in French and English.
Mourra came to Miami and was baptized on June 30, 1977. He returned to Haiti and began sharing the gospel with his family, friends and neighbors.
President Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation that extended the priesthood to every worthy male ignited missionary work in Haiti. That year, Mourra helped to teach and prepare 22 souls for baptism.
Mourra received unexpected help in spreading the gospel that September when J. Frederic Templeman came to work at the Canadian consulate in Port-au-Prince. Templeman was a returned Mormon missionary who spoke French. He met Antoine Joseph and Fritzner Joseph through mutual friends and invited them all to his home for dinner. Among many topics, Templeman discussed his faith, which led to weekly gospel discussions for the next six months.
“It was the first time I heard about Mormonism,” Antoine Joseph said. “He taught us and I felt it was true. I knew this was what I was looking for.”
A memorable service
Antoine and Fritzner accepted the invitation to be baptized, and President Millett traveled to Haiti for the service on May 25, 1979.
Antoine Joseph came on time and was baptized. Fritzner Joseph was tied up in school and arrived as everyone was preparing to leave. President Millett said they would have to plan another service for another day. With tears in his eyes, Fritzner Joseph begged them to stay and baptize him. President Millett consented, and a second service started around 11 p.m., Fritzner said.
The first baptism had taken place in a neighbor’s pool. Because it was late, their only option for another service was Bro. Templeman's pool, which had a broken filter and was only half full of water. It also contained a small crocodile about two feet long that had been caught by the Templeman children. Millett said a few men tried to “corral the crocodile in the corner” as Mourra took Fritzner into the pool, but it got loose just as the ordinance was about to take place.
“I have never seen anyone come out of a swimming pool so fast as these two did,” Millett recorded in his journal.
When the miniature crocodile swam back across the pool, the men re-entered the water and Fritzner Joseph was swiftly baptized.
Even with the crocodile, Fritzner Joseph felt the Holy Spirit during his baptism and was fully committed to the gospel. In the years that followed, he became the first native Haitian to serve a full-time mission. He later served as president of the Haitian Mission (1991-1996), and he has worked for the Church Educational System.
Antoine Joseph also served in many leadership positions, including district president and stake patriarch.
Historic visit
The first full-time missionaries came to Haiti in 1980, and a branch was soon organized.
In April 1983, Elder Monson became the first apostle to visit Haiti and Jamaica. While in Haiti, he dedicated the island nation for the preaching of the gospel. He also dedicated the site for the first meetinghouse.
Fritzner Joseph and Antoine Joseph were both invited to join Elder Monson and a group of Latter-day Saints on Mount Boutillier, a scenic mountain site above Port-au-Prince.
Fritzner Joseph had just gotten back from his mission in Puerto Rico. "It was a beautiful day," he said. They could see the city for a few minutes before dark clouds shrouded the landscape. Elder Monson then started the dedicatory prayer.
With heads bowed in reverence, the future president of the church testified that the Lord had preserved Haiti through challenging economic and political times “for this day that Thy work might expand,” according to a 2013 LDS Church News article. He petitioned blessings for the missionaries and all who would share the gospel. He asked the Lord to bless Haitian families.
“Bless our members in their homes that happiness may there prevail, that thy gospel may be taught in family home evenings, and that thy children may walk in light and truth,” Elder Monson prayed. “Bless them with health and with strength. Let thy Spirit shine upon (Haiti) and bless the membership of the church particularly.”
When the prayer was over, Fritzner Joseph said, the dark clouds were gone.
“When we opened our eyes, we could see the city,” he said. “It was bright again. It was a very special experience that day.”
Someone pulled out a camera and took photos. One photo captured Elder Monson with a group of Primary children. Antoine Joseph is next to the apostle with his son Eli in his arms. Years later, Eli Joseph would serve a mission in Haiti.
“It was a great day, to have an apostle come dedicate the land,” Antoine Joseph said. “Now, 32 years later, we have four stakes and two districts with more than 20,000 members all over this country.”
Adversity and blessings
A military coup forced foreign missionaries out of Haiti in 1991. For the next five years, local and member missionaries kept the work going. Their efforts were rewarded when the first Haitian stake was organized in September 1997. Nationwide uprisings and violence forced the missionaries to be relocated in 2004, according to the LDS Church News.
In January 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed more than 300,000 people, including many Latter-day Saints. Although many buildings collapsed, most if not all LDS chapels remained standing with little damage. These meetinghouses became a place of refuge for survivors, Antoine Joseph said.
“The earthquake was tragic, but since then so many people have learned about the church,” Antoine Joseph said. “The church saved a lot of lives. They understand better what kind of church we are. Before, they didn’t know.”
‘Grow and strengthen’
In 2013, Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and other church leaders visited Haiti, commemorating the dedication of the country by President Monson 30 years earlier. According to the LDS Church News, a large group went with church leaders to the site of the dedication, where a commemorative plaque was unveiled. The members also watched a special prerecorded televised message from President Monson.
Elder Andersen spoke of the event and celebrated the temple announcement last April in his general conference message, “Thy Kingdom Come.”
“With faithful members and a courageous band of missionaries made up almost exclusively of Haitians, the church in this island nation has continued to grow and strengthen,” Elder Andersen said. “It lifts my faith to visualize these righteous Saints of God, clothed in white, having the power of the holy priesthood to direct and perform the sacred ordinances in the Lord’s house.”
Fritzner Joseph agreed.
“With the challenge to get ready for a temple, I am so grateful to be part of this work. I’m so grateful to be here right now as a missionary with my wife. We are here to work hard and give the best we can,” he said. “The gospel can change people. It can change a country, too.”Reading the section on the deaths of the philosophers in Candida Moss’ the Myth of Persecution led me to think about the notion of the good death.
As Plato recounted in the Apology and the Crito, Socrates makes it clear that he prefers to keep to his moral principles and die sooner rather than violate these principles and die somewhat later. The account of his death presents Socrates as courageously accepting death—he freely drinks the hemlock and philosophizes as the hemlock kills him. He also expresses a principle defiance against his accusers and a respectful defiance towards the state. In regards to the state, he claims that he will obey the state, unless he is ordered to cease engaging in philosophy—he cannot accept that order.
While Socrates death is often considered to be the model of how a philosopher should face death, other philosophers have even more dramatic ends. Diogenes of Sinope, it is claimed, held his breath until he perished. Zeno, of the famous paradoxes, allegedly bit of his tongue and spat it towards the tyrant who was questioning him. Perhaps the most extreme case involves Anaxarchus—not only did he spit his own tongue at the tyrant Nicocreon, he also responded to being beaten with pestles (while, appropriately enough, being in a mortar) with the remark, “just pound the bag of Anaxarchus. You do not pound himself.” This remark mirrors one made by Socrates when Crito inquires about how he is to be buried. In reply he says, “However you want to, if you can actually catch me and I don’t escape you.”
At least according to the legends, these philosophers regarded a good death as one which involved some or all of the following: choosing death over violating one’s principles, expressing courage and self-control before and during the death, and expressing defiance towards the wicked. Such principled deaths were praised in the ancient world and held up as a model of how a person should conduct himself when faced with death.
This is not to say that people in the ancient world wanted to die—presumably they wanted to live as much as people do today. However, the moral of these death tales is that a person should die a good death in preference to living a bad life. In any case, these heroic deaths were presented as a model as how a worthy person should die.
As might be imagined, as Moss notes in her book, most people in the modern Western world seem to regard dying well in a rather different way. To be specific, most seem to hold the view that the good death is dying in comfort and peace of old age. If Socrates is the model of how to die for the ancient world, Winston Smith of 1984 is the model for the death to avoid for the contemporary world. Smith, unlike Socrates, is broken and the lesson of this story is rather different from that of Socrates’ story.
While it might be tempting to regard this view as a sign of the decline of Western civilization, there are two things well worth noting. The first is that while the ancients presented the heroic philosophical death as an ideal, most of the ancients did not seek out such heroic deaths. Socrates himself notes that he knew of the apparent common practice of people engaging in shameful behavior in the court in the hopes of postponing their death. The second is that we still value the heroic philosophical death today. For example, Dr. King is lauded for his heroism in facing death threats and it seems reasonable to think that he believed that he, like Moses, would not live to see the promised-land. Like Socrates, he faced the threat of death with courage and he essentially elected to die rather than abandon his principles. There are, of course, numerous other examples of people who are praised for dying in a way that the ancients would certainly regard as good deaths.
I will close with a question well worth discussing, namely what is a good death? That is, what should we hold as the highest value when it comes to dying? For Socrates and other ancients, a good death involved meeting death with courage and control. For much of the Western world today, it is meeting a peaceful and painless death.
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99 Books 99 Cents KickstarterToday, the Star Wars films found a way into your local liberal arts college's experimental film class.
First, setup. In 1978, avant-garde director Stan Brakhage penned an essay retaliating against traditional "filmmaking." Too often, he says in more elaborate prose, reality is the modern artist's goal. We're so driven to replicate our surroundings that, in the future, computers will simply bypass human interference and produce photographs based on pre-existing data. The opening paragraph to "Memories on Vision" dismantles what Brakhage saw as a rigid understanding of what is and isn't art, while also providing a base understanding of his style, which involved painting 8mm film, scratching the celluloid, and superimposing images into a cacophony of the senses:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word."
Keep this all in mind while soaking up YouTube user maurcs' remixed version of the two Star Wars trilogies. By superimposing George Lucas' six films, maurcs creates a synesthetic odyssey that looks like a cross between Brakhage's own Dog Star Man and The Garden of Earthy Delights. It is pop art of the extreme, abrasive and engrossing all at once. Knowledge of the actual films adds another layer of whiplash to the film—time, space, and critical opinion stretch like taffy. If a sci-fi nerd fell into a black hole, passing the event horizon would look something like maurcs' creation.
Over the years, several Star Wars devotees have attempted to edit the six films down to a singular story, or at the least, a coherent trilogy. Their mission is plot driven, to filet Star Wars' barrage of images into a lean meal. Star Wars Wars: All 6 Films At Once sees the movies for what they really are: sound, picture, and iconography. This is closer to Lucas' original vision than any fan edit. The mash-up acknowledges that the Star Wars dialogue is, frankly, awful. Instead, it prioritizes sensation, a world before the beginning was the word.Steve and Nicole O'Brien, the owners of BRGRBelly and BeefBelly View Full Caption Steve O'Brien
CHICAGO — BRGRBelly owners Steve and Nicole O'Brien have come a long way since setting up shop in Portage Park four years ago.
They weathered a name change, a store closure and a nasty Yelp review to grow their business from a one-off burger stand into a national restaurant chain.
The husband-and-wife duo detailed every victory and setback in a 2,000-word "love letter" they posted on the restaurant's Facebook page last week, ending with an announcement that both the restaurant's Northwest Side locations would pour their more than 40 craft beers for just $2 each through June 30.
Opening LeadBelly at 5739 W. Irving Park Road in Portage Park in 2013, the O'Briens were later forced to change their restaurant's name amid a legal challenge from the blues singer they'd been trying to honor.
In 2015 they opened an offshoot Italian beef restaurant, called BeefBelly, in Jefferson Park at 4800 N. Central Ave., adding Molly and Myles Ice Cream next door. A second BRGRBelly location, opened in 2014 on Milwaukee Avenue in Gladstone Park, was closed late last year.
Now, the O'Briens are developing "four BRGRBelly concepts in downtown Chicago," a new location in suburban Rosemant and "our first foray out of state into the South Carolina marketplace," the letter read.
The restaurateurs filled their note with a laundry list of personal thank yous, including hat-tips to everyone from former 38th ward Ald. Tim Cullerton to the Yelp reviewer "Spaceman Joe," whose early one-star review "made us realize that we always have to strive to be better," they wrote.
"This is our love story to Chicago, to the mighty Northwest Side, to our community and extended family," it concluded. "We only ask that you continue to hold us to a high standard, let us know when we’ve met your expectations, and when we’ve let you down.No human can live for 2 years without feeding but you can find a truly amazing insect which can easily survive without eating for 2 years. You all must be curious about it. It’s the 4 inch long spider named as TARANTULA.
Tarantula spider is widely known for this unique attribute of living without being feed for more than 2 years. Normally female tarantulas are famously long-lived. Even in duress, they have been recognize to live for over 20 years.On contrary, male tarantula don’t survive as much more but they have a life-span of just 5-10 years.
Scientists have tested for long that for how long a tarantula spider can live without eating. For that they conduct a research to have an accurate period of longevity of tarantula without being fed. They kept tarantula on water only.
Guess what they find? These beefy and hairy spiders that can tangle arachnophobias in to great fear lived for the longest period of 2 years, 9 months and 19days.
Isn’t this amazing? It is surly amazing for those people who love keeping spiders as pet.Flipkart owned fashion retailer Myntra is now relaunching its mobile website, after shutting it down on May 15th this year. Parts of the mobile website have gone live: using their mobile browser, users are currently able to view, for example, the catalog for sarees (click here) and shirts (click here). The homepage on the website still links to the app, so it looks like the catalog is still being populated online.
It’s worth nothing that while Myntra is, at present, only making its catalog available on the mobile web, the purchase still has to be done via the app. Flipkart recently relaunched its mobile website, and enabled purchase of goods on mobile, so it’s probably only a matter of time before Myntra allows purchases as well.
Perhaps the company realized that the issue that we had pointed out earlier this year still persists: phones in India often have limited space, and shopping isn’t a priority activity. Hopefully, they’ll also soon realize that sending hundreds of notifications a day (caveat: I’m exaggerating, but…), without giving users a option to shut off notifications from within the app, is the easiest route to being uninstalled.
MediaNama’s take
Myntra shutting down its mobile website had seeded the “apps versus web” debate earlier this year. While the data might have pointed towards a 100% shift in the future, strategically, it was a poor decision: All eggs in one basket is a bet you can take as an upstart, not as an incumbent, and the business should not have closed out all other modes of reaching customers.
Flipkart is making the right decision now by making its business web-compatible again, but we also think that choosing a Google-Chrome-only model (like it has done for Flipkart’s mobile site) is also a myopic business decision, especially when UC Browser is more than four times Chrome’s mobile usage in India. While Flipkart’s mobile version works only on Chrome, Myntra’s relaunched version appears to be compatible with multiple browsers.
Distribution (whether via telecom operators, social networks or browsers) is the lifeblood of web businesses, and has the propensity to dictate terms when it becomes too powerful. The only way to address this is to ensure that you, as a content or service business, don’t give a competitive advantage to any particular platform. The browser wars ended many years ago, and the definition of web standards helped ensure that websites don’t determine which browsers people can use, and browsers don’t determine which websites users can visit. It needs to remain that way.On "Mystery Show," the latest podcast from Gimlet Media, host Starlee Kine tackles a new case every week. Her only rule for the mysteries she takes on is that they can't be solved with Google. If MTV's Catfish — which can uncover the truth about virtual boyfriends and girlfriends in seconds with a reverse image search — is McDonald's, "Mystery Show" is straight out of the slow food movement.
The podcast made its debut on May 22, and two episodes have been released so far. The first mystery: a woman named Laura rents a video (Must Love Dogs, if you're wondering), then returns to the store the very next day to find that it's been cleaned out and shuttered overnight. The second mystery: novelist Andrea Seigel spots her little-known book in a paparazzi photo, held by none other than Britney Spears.
Could the store really have disappeared so quickly? If they knew they were closing |
on the issue), predicts will occur – mass human suffering and die-off.
Hartwich also employs the increasingly popular tycoon’s mantra of saving the poor, and that we the ‘disciples of Gaia’ii, are ‘completely oblivious to the needs of the people in poorer places”.
Another complete fabrication. We tackled this little morsel of nonsense in our Open Letter about Alan Oxley. If Hartwich had any real understanding of human ecology, he would know that two of Australia’s greatest scientists (Herbert Andrewartha and Charles Birch) showed over a half-century ago [6] that as populations increase, more and more individuals are forced to occupy marginal areas of lower food availability and higher environmental volatility. As environmental catastrophes occur (and they always do), it is exactly the most marginalised, poorest and most vulnerable individuals that cop it worst.
As our climate spirals out of control, our lands become more degraded and less productive, and as more and more people occupy the less-stable and least-productive regions of our planet, it is exactly the poor who will (and are currently) suffering the most from our run-away population growth. Hartley’s position is tantamount to condemning more and more people to misery, suffering and short lives.
Conservative big-corporation interests perpetually attack me (Ehrlich) about our idea that wealthy countries should give up some of their development to help poor people [7]; unfortunately, this has never happened. Instead of repeatedly babbling the lie that they are somehow working in the interests of the poor, perhaps big business should put its money where its mouth is.
Many Australians naïvely think (thanks to people like Hartwich and Oxley) that we live in a sheltered box away from the mounting problems of the world. At the time The Population Bomb was printed, the Earth contained about 3.5 billion people, approximately 500,000 million of whom were malnourished and hungry. Now our nearly 7 billion-strong world population has about one billion hungry people (remember too that from the perspective of a country’s carrying capacity, absolute numbers, not proportions, matter). What, dear reader, do you think will happen as the world’s ever-increasing poor and hungry attempt to flee their misery for the greener pastures of countries like Australia? If you believe we have ethically thorny immigration and refugee issues now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Yes, indeed – nature is much more than the cute and cuddly; it includes us in all our glory and faults. Misguided and unbridled development and consumption driven by a burgeoning human population and big business hurts us as much as the “cute polar bears, cuddly koalas and clumsy penguins” (it’s hard to believe, but yes, Hartwich actually wrote that).
Hartwich, the Centre for Independent Studies and other right-wing thoughtless-tanks are working hard to guarantee your children and grandchildren will suffer. We cannot let these (insanely wealthy) people dictate our future. We should all be extremely worried too that one of our major newspapers promulgates such dangerous rubbish without even giving us the courtesy of response: The Australian – this country’s own little ridiculous slice of Faux News.
Corey J.A. Bradshaw and Paul R. Ehrlich
—
Footnotes
i I (Bradshaw) have always been stunned of this newspaper’s audacity to call itself ‘THE Australian’, as if it somehow represented Australia and Australians. Rupert Murdoch does not represent me, or anyone I know, for that matter.
ii We love this one in particular. We’ve both written about the Gaia theory [8,9] independently, and we know that Hartwich would not have done his research about our respective positions on the scientific underpinnings of Lovelock’s work.
—
References
1. Lovelock JE (1965) A physical basis for life detection experiments. Nature 20: 568-570.
2. Lovelock JE (1972) Gaia as seen through the atmosphere. Atmospheric Environment 6: 579-580.
3. Lovelock JE, Margulis L (1974) Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere – the Gaia hypothesis. Tellus 26: 2-10.
4. Lovelock J (2006) The Revenge of Gaia. London: Penguin Books.
5. Lovelock J (2009) The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. New York, NY: Basic Books.
6. Andrewartha HG, Birch LC (1954) The Distribution and Abundance of Animals. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
7. Ehrlich PR, Ehrlich AH, Holdren JP (1977) Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
8. Ehrlich P (1991) Coevolution and its applicability to the Gaia hypothesis. In: Schneider SH, Boston PE, eds. Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 19-22
9. Bradshaw CJA, Brook BW (2009) The Cronus hypothesis – extinction as a necessary and dynamic balance to evolutionary diversification. Journal of Cosmology 2: 221-229Opponent
Anaheim Ducks vs CGY
Result
THE. STREAK. IS. OVER. After over 13 long years the Flames have finally won a game in Anaheim. While wild fires raged around Anaheim, the game remained a go finishing in a 2-0 final for the good guys. The Flames only took 30 attempts to finally break the curse at the Honda Center, and boy was it pretty. Sean Monahan and Mikael Backlund netted the two goals, Monahan on the PP and Backlund at even strength. This win of course would not have been possible without …..
Flames Player of the Game
Mike Smith. Through three games Smith has obtained the player of the game twice. While there were many other admirable performances (here’s looking at you Jobu), without Smith’s 43 save shutout, the game most definitely would have looked a lot different. Smith has been excellent so far this season, and Flames fans can’t wipe the smile off their faces. For him this was just another game, but to break the curse this early in the season (after last year’s playoff debacle) means a ton for the confidence of the team moving forward.
Three Thoughts
Bill: I’m so high on this win right now. We can talk about breaking the curse for the next year and it’d still be alright by me. The Flames played a solid game and rolled all four lines. Despite giving up a lot of shots, they limited the high danger chances for the Ducks, and were able to control play at 5v5. If the Flames could have stayed out of penalty trouble in the third, I think it would have been even more obvious that the Flames controlled the pace. At 5v5, Matt Stajan and Johnny Gaudreau dominated, the both of them having CF% of 68% and 67% respectively. Ryan Getzlaf was at 38%. Of course it was his first game after being sidelined with a lower body injury, but it was still nice seeing the player that has often twisted the dagger in the Flames fighting spirit at the Honda Center was effectively shut down. All in all, there are not many bad things can be said about the way the Flames played. They fought a solid battle with the Ducks and they walked away with a win. Smith gave us a few heart attacks with his puck handling and near miss injury, but after three games I’ve learned it’s a good idea to keep a dose of Flames branded epinephrine handy when Smith plays.
John: Yesterday was my parents 41st wedding anniversary. I don’t wanna say that this was the main contributing factor for the win, but lets just say the Flames have never played in Anaheim on this date before. Thanks for falling in love with each-other Mom and Dad. Oh and of course thanks for falling in love with the Flames. While the pure euphoria that washed over me after seeing the final score was unmeasurable, I want to instead talk about our opponent, the Ducks. I would say over the past few seasons these guys have been the true Pacific Division rival that no one mentions first. Sure the Oilers and Canucks have been the main culprits, but boy do I think the Ducks come first on that list. I can’t think of a game in the past four seasons that hasn’t left me infuriated towards at least one player on their team. Ryan Kesler being Ryan Kesler. Corey Perry being Corey Perry. It never changes. Last night though, I found myself questioning what in the world these guys were doing. Corey Perry was baited into a cross check by Mark Giordano, only to receive the extra minor. Ryan Getzlaf was baited into roughing Matthew Tkachuk, well because, he’s Matthew Tkachuk. Finally, Kevin Bieksa stealing the puck from Mike Smith’s first shutout was the cherry on top. For the first time in a while, it seemed as if the Flames were actually the ones who got under the Ducks skin. Yes Ryan Kesler wasn’t in the game, but have you seen both Perry and Getzlaf be coerced so easily into penalties? Does Bieksa really hate the Flames that much? And if so, you lost, do you really think taking the puck is going to phase the team after the game is over? If the Flames can continue that type of grit all season, look for other star players to fall under the same trick. The curse is over for us, but a spell may have fallen over the wounded Ducks.
Karim: I said “Mike Smith is going to get a shutout” so many times during the game I honestly thought it wouldn’t happen. But there he was again, standing on his head and destroying that pointless “streak” at the Honda Center. At least for me, this game proved that Smith is a bonafide number one tender and is going to give the Flames a legitimate chance to contend this year. He’s faced way too many shots in his first three games, but I’m confident that as the defense settles in, the shot volume will go down; he actually set the Flames franchise record for total saves in a shutout last night. Sam Bennett again looked dangerous all over the ice, despite his awkwardly terrible possession number. My favourite moment of the night was unsurprisingly when Getzlaf took a shot at Tkachuk because it feels fantastic to finally get under the skin of some Ducks for a change.
The guy who really stood out for me, though, was Hamonic. Last night’s iteration of the Hammer was the one that I’m expecting to see going forward. He was an absolute force on the back end, and really anchored that line to give Brodie the time and space he needed to jump into the rush and use his offensive abilities to make plays. Watch out for that pairing as the season goes on. Hallelujah for a win against the Ducks, here’s hoping for more of the same against the Kings tomorrow night. In Jobu we trust!
Previously
October 7th: Winnipeg Jets @ CGY
Next Up
Wednesday: LA Kings vs CGYHASCON—Hasbro's first-ever convention—is coming September 8–10 to Providence, Rhode Island, and Magic has a few special events planned that you won't want to miss.
As Magic celebrates its 25th Anniversary, we'll be kicking off a year-long celebration full of exciting products and experiences at HASCON, including an old-school Prerelease of Iconic Masters—a set you are just hearing about for the first time right now.
Iconic Masters offers players a tour through some of the most iconic cards in Magic history. Featuring new artwork on many cards, the set brings an array of Angels, Sphinxes, Demons, Dragons, and Hydras alongside some of our favorite and most memorable spells over the game's entire history. Iconic Masters is truly a celebration of Magic's 25 years. Every box contains 24 booster packs of 15 cards each, including one premium card in every pack—perfect for drafting with your friends.
Iconic Masters, which is being released as part of Magic's 25th Anniversary celebration, does not actually release until November 17, but that's what makes the event at HASCON so special. Back when Magic was still young, Prereleases used to be experiences that players entered into without knowing a single card in the set. Previews didn't exist, and Prerelease participants were experiencing the cards for the first time.
So the first people to play with Iconic Masters will also be the first people to see the cards in public!
In addition to kicking off our 25th Anniversary, HASCON will also prominently feature Ixalan, Magic's next large set, next new world, and the block that will take us into 2018. Look for more details on Ixalan in our June product announcement that will focus on all the big news that will take us through our 25th Anniversary.
We'll also have events, panels, play experiences, and more coming at HASCON, but we're keeping those secret for now. To find out, you'll just have to join in!
To learn more about HASCON or to sign up for insider access and first notice on ticket sales, visit HASCON.hasbro.com.Not only did the broad index of the Shanghai exchange fall 64.89 points on Monday, but the index also opened that morning at 2346.98, a figure that, to some, looked like the date of the crackdown written backward, followed by the 23rd anniversary.
The Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index is calculated by adding up the market capitalizations of hundreds of stocks and then converting the sum into an index based on a value of 100 on Dec. 19, 1990. Richard W. Kershaw, the managing director for Asia forensic technology at FTI Consulting, a global financial investigations company, said that it would be almost impossible for anyone to coordinate the buying and selling of so many stocks to produce a specific result.
But hackers have targeted the computer systems at other stock exchanges in the past, and Mr. Kershaw said it was at least possible that this might have occurred in China. He predicted that the government would investigate, adding, “You can bet we’ll never hear the results.”
Chinese culture puts a very strong, sometimes superstitious, emphasis on numbers and dates. The Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, a time and date chosen for the many eights, considered an auspicious number.
The candlelight vigil in Hong Kong drew a crowd that organizers estimated at “over 180,000,” which would make it the biggest of the annual events since 1989. Organizers have estimated the crowds in 1990, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at 150,000.
The police here were more cautious, putting the turnout at 85,000; they had estimated the annual turnout from 2009 through 2011 at 62,800, 113,000 and 77,000, and the 1990 vigil at 80,000.
Photo
The turnout on Monday, on a humid evening under a luminous full moon, was particularly hard to calculate.
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Six soccer fields in front of a large stage, the core of the park, filled up with densely packed crowds earlier than in previous years. That prompted people to spill over to a series of other fields in the park. Some fields had outdoor screens that were put up to display the proceedings; others had no such provisions, having not filled with crowds in past years.
There was also an unusually large turnout of people who appeared to be in their teens or 20s. Until the last several years, the vigils had been mostly attended by people in their 40s and older — those who had experienced soaring hopes for democratization in 1989, followed by crushing disappointment.
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Andy Lo, 20, a university student, said that social media like Facebook had been filled this year with calls to attend the vigil. But he and others there were unable to explain why this had happened.
“I used to think it was just a ritual,” he said. “We want something to change, the voice for change is much stronger now, but I can’t account for it.”
Even 23 years later, the use of tanks and gunfire to disperse unarmed students and other Tiananmen Square protesters remains a point of bitter dispute in China and around the world.
Increased attendance at the Hong Kong vigils has coincided with public concern here and in mainland China about issues including corruption and the inequity of wealth. And retired Chinese officials who were in office in the months leading up to the Tiananmen Square crackdown have begun publishing their memoirs.
The memoir of Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the two years before the protest, was published shortly before the 2009 vigil. He was ousted from power immediately after the Tiananmen crackdown by Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader at the time.
A series of conversations with Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing in 1989 and a reputed hard-liner, were published last week. He expressed regret that a military assault had taken place, denied reports that he had played a role in organizing the attack and said that “several hundred people died that day.”
Estimates of the civilian death toll in the crackdown have ranged from the hundreds to thousands.
China tightens security measures for the anniversary each year. In the last few days, the government has detained or placed under house arrest an unknown number of dissidents, part of an annual procedure before the anniversary.
The local government of Tongzhou, an eastern district of Beijing, took the unusual step of publishing on its Web site a description of its precautions for the anniversary: “From May 31 to June 4, wartime systems and protective measures should be in effect, and security volunteers, wearing red armbands and organized by the collective action of neighborhoods, should be on duty and patrolling.”
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The post was deleted by early Monday afternoon.Thanks to impeccable hardware Apple’s iPhone can give many high-end pocket cameras run for their money. Taking images with Camera+ gives pretty interesting results with your iPhone and the improvements have been dramatic following iPhone 3. Below we have compiled a list of unique ways to enhance your photography skills with iPhone.
1. Instant crop photos
Pinch to zoom to get the desired crop and then press Home button along with Lock button. This takes a screenshot of the image moving the cropped image to the camera roll.
2. Lock the exposure and focus
If you want to set the focus and exposure of a section of your image you better tap on that part of the image. Though if you move your phone around immediately your phone readjusts the setting. The trick is to tap and hold, which displays a pulsating blue box with the bottom of the phone displaying AE/AF Lock. Now the exposure and focus is locked and moving your phone around wouldn’t change the settings.
3. Utilize the rule of thirds
Place the object along the nine grids, which become visible by going to options and turning on the Grid function. This tends to improve the composition of the snapshot.
4. Photoshop Mobile
It offers you the in-camera editing facilities missing in the iPhone. Do anything from crop, rotate, to apply FX to your images. It has four icons Basics, Color, Filters and Effects. You get multiple options under these settings to modify your images accordingly to get best results. It is the best photo editor app available for free.
5. ProCamera
In case you’re still not satisfied with the zoom capabilities of your iPhone, you must give Procamera a try. It can zoom around 5x and has a steady mode to counter the shake while holding the phone. You can use timer, composition grids, Big button to allow use of screen as shutter and shake your phone to take videos.
6. Camera Genius
In addition to the features of ProCamera, Camera Genius offers a Burst mode that takes three snapshots in quick succession.
7. Use your headphones to take pictures
You have seen in the past that the volume rocker can also be used as a button to take snapshots. The one on iPhone serves the same purpose. The surprising part is not only the volume control on your phone but also on your headphones that can serve the same function. Surprisingly, this gives more clear pictures in case you place your iPhone on a tripod or something. This also means you can easily take a family picture without you missing the same.The Boston Marathon bombings offer lessons for future U.S. counterterrorism efforts, says CFR’s Richard Falkenrath, former NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. He says the case raises new questions about the suitability of intelligence operations because of the fact that one of the suspect bombers was interviewed by the FBI but was able to carry through with an attack. Falkenrath says that while more permissive foreign intelligence-gathering techniques used by U.S. authorities are focused abroad, "we’re instead reliant on more restricted domestic intelligence techniques to identify you before you attack."
A police officer monitors video feeds in a security facility. (Photo: Lucas Jackson/Courtesy Reuters)
Some policymakers in Washington are already prepared to label these bombings an intelligence failure. What’s your take?
Of course it is an intelligence failure. It is every investigator’s worst nightmare--to have your eyes on a person, allow them to drop from your attention, and then they carry out a terrorist attack. But what we do not yet know is the cause of this failure. Was it incompetence or did it arise from the restricted authorities and resources of our federal law enforcement and domestic counterterrorism apparatus?
Many of the facts of the case are still unknown. It is reported that the Russian government informed both the FBI and CIA of their suspicions of Tamerlan Tsaraev. Two FBI agents interviewed him and have to live with the consequences of his subsequently carrying out an attack. It’s not the first time this has happened. There was David Coleman Headley (aka Daood Sayed Gilani), a Pakistani American, who conducted surveillance on behalf of the [Lashkar-e-Taiba] terrorists that attacked Mumbai in 2008--his ex-wife had called in saying he was a terrorist, and he was cursorily investigated and then went off to participate in this major attack.
The problem is inherent in our system of government, which does not have a domestic intelligence service. We have domestic law enforcement that performs certain intelligence and national functions, but so long as you want to have a system in which the activities of your domestic law enforcement agencies are tightly circumscribed by law and jurisprudence, you will have these sorts of mistakes and tensions.
There is no open mandate in the U.S. system for any security agency at the federal level to conduct unfettered surveillance of people it thinks to be a threat. In part, that comes from the basic structure of our government. I learned a long time ago that the [constitutional] Founders did not design our system of government to maximize the efficiency of the security agencies. And it also comes from abuses and scandals that we’ve had in our past, during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.
Would you advocate for a domestic intelligence service?
Not in isolation. If you created a domestic intelligence service, but left all the underlying legal policy and jurisprudential constraints in place, then it would be a wasted bureaucratic reform. My focus has always been not on creating organizations but on rethinking or revising, where appropriate, the constraints that exist for domestic law enforcement at the federal level.
There have been some improvements to this underlying legal framework--the Patriot Act of 2001, for instance, or FISA Modernization Act of 2007--but the reform to our domestic counterterrorism program has not been as comprehensive or aggressive as people think. Looking ahead, an effort to simplify and liberalize the Attorney General Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations or the FBI’s own Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide--two documents that currently run at the hundreds of pages--would have a far greater beneficial impact, far sooner, than creating a new agency.
FBI and other intelligence officials are responding to questions about how they handled this inquiry from Russia in 2011 regarding one of the suspects. Can you briefly describe how these types of inquiries from foreign governments are handled by federal authorities?
If it’s pertaining to a U.S. person, it will be handled by the FBI. And depending on the information that comes in, from whom it comes in, how specific it is, how credible it is deemed, the FBI will open what is called a preliminary investigation. And in the preliminary investigation, the types of investigative steps the bureau is permitted to use are rather limited and typically include an interview--which happened in this case--and an open source records check of the person and a check against law enforcement records to see if there is any other derogatory information on him or any other existing cases.
If he has no background in the system, then the Bureau will need to uncover some additional derogatory information to proceed to higher levels of investigation. And those higher levels are a field investigation and a full field investigation. And as additional information suggesting the person may pose a threat or be engaged in criminal activity or committed a crime comes in, the Bureau is permitted to escalate its investigative response to more intrusive techniques.
Do you think these guidelines need to be relaxed or amended?
First of all, they’ve always got some discretion within these guidelines. And it’s a complex but well-exercised process by which the supervisors in the FBI evaluate the information coming in on all the different cases they have--which number in the tens of thousands--and decide, based on the allegation and the credibility and specificity of the information, which to proceed on. So there’s a large element of judgment there; and with the benefit of hindsight, of course, that judgment is going to be questioned.
What surprised you about this case?
I was surprised [the bombing suspects] didn’t leave the country--that was my main one. They had sufficient time to get out, and they underestimated the speed with which they would be identified and dealt with. We were lucky, in the sense that we were still able to get them here in the country and relatively quickly. After forty-eight hours without an arrest, I began to get very nervous that we were going to lose them entirely.
What are some of the lessons that we can take away at this point?
First, the emergency response struck me as quite good, and we were lucky to have emergency medical personnel on the scene in numbers, and then to have proximity to some of the best hospitals in the world. So that was a success.
The processing of the crime scene was, as far as we can tell, fairly rapid given the complexity of the scene. And, although the after-action [review] for that is going to come out and we’ll find out more, it seems to me it was well done and the speed with which the government acquired imagery of the perpetrators was pretty good.
The manhunt is hard to second-guess, based on what we know. There were a lot of hard decisions that had to be made, but it’s useful to remember some of the precedents here, one of which is London, July 2005, where an innocent man was shot to death by police acting on the suspicion that he was one of the assailants in a failed bombing. And what that shows is there is reason to be wary of the threat to public safety from thousands of law enforcement officers on high alert trained to shoot to kill. So I don’t second-guess the request on the part of the government for people to remain inside, which was certainly made out of an abundance of caution.
Obviously, electronic surveillance played a central role in tracking and identifying these assailants--you were a big proponent of this technology when you were at NYPD, correct?
It’s just basic good practice now. And this technology has come a long way. My guess is that the police officers in Boston had a very laborious time-consuming video canvas, where they were going to each individual establishment and pulling either the tape or the DVR and going through it frame by frame. The system in New York has fairly high-quality coverage in lots of areas, but most importantly an automated ability to perform video canvases and video analyses, which would substantially speed up the video canvassing process.
On the prevention side, do we need more outreach with some of these Muslim minority communities? What types of greater prevention would you like to see?
If anything, you could argue that an incident like Boston reaffirms the case for preventive law enforcement activity, which aims to find potential perpetrators and remove them from the scene. The key for most of these cases is good old-fashioned police work, meaning the development of sources in communities of concern, and the aggressive use of electronic surveillance to generate leads.
Community outreach as a way of finding the bad guys has only seen a few success stories, so I’m not convinced it’s the best way to do things, particularly for uncovering those interested in concealing their tracks. What [community outreach] does, however, is generate a lot of score-settling--people carrying out grudges against someone they have a beef with by ratting them out to law enforcement. So while I have no problem with better relations between law enforcement and all communities, I wouldn’t do it just for counterterrorism purposes.
One of the basic problems is: Our best techniques for generating the first lead in major terrorism cases come from abroad, either in the form of liaison reports such as the Russian report--many different countries will periodically tell us about people they’re worried about and they believe to be in-country--or from the exploitation of foreign intelligence, the collection of which is largely unfettered.
We have a lacuna at home, which is: if you are an individual at home without any foreign connections--no foreign travel, no foreign communications, never had an encounter with a foreign government--our more permissive [foreign] intelligence gathering techniques have no chance of coming across you, and we’re instead reliant on more restricted domestic intelligence techniques to identify you before you attack. That’s not a problem that can be solved in our system of government; it’s a tension that needs to be managed and addressed by professionals on the inside of the community.
How well do U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies cooperate with foreign governments?
It’s incredibly varied, and it’s rarely insulated from the broader bilateral relationship that we have. So in the case of Russia, it’s particularly acute, since we’ve had a long difference of opinion with them--maybe twenty years--over whether the secessionist movements in the Caucasus should be deemed terrorists (which of course the Russian government would like us to, and the U.S. government has frankly been reluctant to do). That’s illustrating a tension. Furthermore, U.S.-Russian relations are at the moment very bad, so this would color how the government interprets the information they provide us.Leaked emails seem to suggest that the Democratic National Committee maintains cozy relationships with mainstream media outlets but takes a more caustic approach with publications it believes to be conservative.
According to these emails, party officials stonewalled and blacklisted the Washington Examiner when editors approached the party in May to gather the names of delegates to the Democratic National Convention for publication in a souvenir edition of its magazine.
“I can send an alert to the state parties not to respond to this inquiry,” DNC Deputy Communications Director Eric Walker wrote in an email of May 10. “Examiner is a right wing rag.”
The episode came on the eve of Democrats’ convention this week in Philadelphia. The organization WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 hacked emails from seven party officials, revealing the inner workings of the national committee’s communications team.
Washington Examiner Editorial Director Hugo Gurdon told The Daily Signal, “It doesn’t surprise me; they’re a partisan organization explicitly working to elect Democrats. On the other hand, it does seem fairly close-minded—to the point of paranoia—that they’d assume the worst.”
The DNC did not respond to numerous phone calls and emails from The Daily Signal.
Reporter Fred Lucas, while on assignment with Fox News in May, didn’t receive a response when he approached the party committee for comment about claims Donald Trump made about President Bill Clinton’s having extra-marital affairs in the past.
Instead, DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda emailed his team May 13to ask, “Is there a f*** you emoji?”
When Lucas followed up, asking again for a quote, Mark Paustenbach, the national committee’s press secretary, cracked another joke at the journalist’s expense.
“The asshole from Fox emailed us again,” Paustenbach wrote. “I did some research and there’s still no f*** you emoji, unfortunately.”
Lucas joined The Daily Signal in June as a White House correspondent.
While the DNC was ignoring Lucas and the Washington Examiner, leaked emails show Democrat officials worked to feed quotes and coordinate news coverage with several more liberal outlets.
A senior Politico reporter, Ken Vogel, sent an unflattering article about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to DNC officials on April 30 for review before publication.
“Per agreement … any thoughts appreciated,” Vogel wrote in the subject line.
After the emails were leaked, Vogel admitted that coordinating with the DNC on his May 2 article was “a mistake.”
DNC officials also seemed to coordinate with CNN producer Jason Sheher in another email exchange about what questions to ask communications chief Miranda when he appeared on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”
“Window closing on this. Need to know ASAP if we want to offer Jake Tapper questions to ask us,” then-DNC media booker Pablo Manriquez wrote to Miranda on April 28.
Tapper defended his staff in a Tumblr post Saturday, writing that it’s “fairly standard” to ask sources what they’d like to discuss during the interview.
“Producers and reporters ask it all the time of Democrats, Republicans, everyone, to make sure we don’t miss out on news-making opportunities,” the anchor wrote.
The DNC also cultivated a close relationship with the viral news site BuzzFeed.
In an April 26 email with the subject line “BuzzFeed and DNC Connection,” BuzzFeed’s communications director, Weesie Vieira, approached Miranda about “putting together some plans around the convention and some other cool stuff.”
The leaked emails led to resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents a Florida district in the House of Representatives. The FBI announced plans Monday to launch a probe into the source of the leak.Retro-style isometric RPGs are experiencing a resurgence right now. You only have to look to the Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin series, which are both enjoying a staggering amount of success today, for concrete proof of this. The previously more popular style of RPG, seen in triple-A titles like Mass Effect: Andromeda, on the other hand, aren’t doing so great. Why is this?
What are the best RPGs you can play on PC? We have all the answers.
The renewed interest in this older style of RPG is not the result of the rise in nostalgia that has birthed all those HD remasters we have had recently. This isn’t about looks. Instead, a big part of the appeal of these classic-style RPGs is in how they present information to you – as prose, rather than expensive visual effects and mo-capped animations. Not only does this fall more in line with the RPG genre’s roots in Dungeons and Dragons, it also allows many encounters to play out with the variety of a text adventure or visual novel, and with the same number of branching outcomes.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in Torment: Tides of Numenera, one of this year’s best RPGs and one that fully embraces its text-heavy roots and shows why the current crop of RPGs are thriving in this text-heavy future.
Numenera in particular is a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, one of the best RPGs of all time – thanks, in large part, to its excellent writing. But Numenera goes even further by moving the vast bulk of things you do into text boxes – the game features fewer combat encounters (I ran into under ten of them throughout the entire game) – which puts the focus much more on the story and characters.
Instead of battles, the encounters in Numenera revolve around a single person or object, which gives you a series of ways to react to them. What you end up doing is feeling the subject out, poking and prodding the different options until you can figure out a way to solve the problems of the people and places you find. Many of the options you are provided with will give you some background on the subject, while others offer some kind of resolution to the problem. But you are often going to have to dig to find it, which means trying different combinations of options until you unlock a satisfactory solution. For instance, you come across an unknown mechanism, and as you examine it, there are multiple ways to interact with it. You try different things until you start to get a sense of how it works – or you completely misread the situation and short out the thing, preventing you from using it further. Many different outcomes just like this come baked into every encounter.
If this sounds familiar, that is because Numenera follows in the footsteps of text adventures. In fact, aside from the connective tissue that is the overhead view of the world around you, these encounters can be entirely experienced in text form. The written introduction of an encounter will painstakingly describe everything you can discern about the situation. Every object, action, and relevant sensation that results from your choices will be described, often without any graphical accompaniment. The advantages to this approach are fairly obvious on the development side of things: less need for graphical assets, fewer animations, and less voice acting. But for players, eschewing audiovisual elements in favour of description can allow the developers to be more ambitious in their encounter designs. Something that would be difficult to depict on screen – the impossible shapes which appear in Numenera, for example – is suddenly very possible with text.
Of course, text adventures give you a word parser to play around with, whereas here you are offered pre-determined options like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The closest comparison, then, would be to modern-day Twine games. When you think about it, the way text-heavy RPGs are structured has a lot in common with these text-rich branching narrative browser games.
Torment: Tides of Numenera underscores this similarity through objects called merecasters, which let your character take temporary control of another character’s memory. These segments are entirely text-based, with only a black screen, glowing border, and a still image accompanying the text. While these encounters are not especially different |
travelling through the gates of heaven,” he told the audience.
He showed a trailer for the game, in which his mother ascends to heaven astride a winged horse. Sales of the Call of Duty franchise are unlikely to be affected.Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I got to thinking that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo should provide a good test case for my theory that changes in albedo help regulate the temperature and keep it within a narrow range. When a big volcano erupts, it throws both black and reflective particles and aerosols high into the stratosphere. As a result, the albedo (reflectivity) and the shortwave absorption of the stratosphere both increase, available solar energy decreases, and the planet cools. By that theory, available solar energy (after albedo) should show a dip after the eruption followed by a recovery to pre-eruption values.
I have demonstrated in the post cited above and elsewhere that cloud albedo varies with temperature in order to prevent excessive heating or cooling. As a result, if my hypothesis is correct, we should see a more complex and different reaction to the eruption. We should see a planetary albedo response to Pinatubo that restores the temperature. If there is a temperature governing mechanism in play, we would expect the change in albedo to provide extra energy to counteract the cooling effect of the eruption. So we’d expect the available energy to overshoot, providing more energy than normal, until the balance is restored.
So I plotted up the change in available solar energy, which I calculated as total solar irradiance TSI * (1 – albedo), for the period 1984-1998. I also plotted the global average temperature for the period, converted to a blackbody equivalent temperature in watts per square metre. The results are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Anomaly in solar energy available after albedo reflection (yellow), and global equivalent blackbody surface temperature anomaly (dark red). Date of the Pinatubo eruption is shown in green.
How do these observations support the idea that there is an albedo-based temperature regulating mechanism?
Look at what actually occurred after the eruption. The amount of solar energy began rising, and continued to rise in opposition to the falling temperatures. It remained high, significantly higher than most of the record, until the temperatures started to rise in 1994. Only after temperatures had returned to pre-eruption levels did the amount of solar energy drop back down.
This is precisely the response that would be expected from a governing mechanism involving the albedo. It would let more energy into the system to counteract the volcanic cooling, and would continue doing so until the temperature was restored.
So I hold that this provides clear visual evidence that an albedo-based temperature compensating mechanism does exist. I also say that this mechanism explains the poor performance of the GISS climate model, whose predictions of Pinatubo I discussed here and here. Because it does not include any albedo-based compensatory mechanism, the GISS model predicted a much larger temperature drop than actually occurred.
w.
DATA NOTES:
The albedo data is from Long-term global distribution of Earth’s shortwave radiation budget at the top of atmosphere (PDF), N. Hatzianastassiou et al., Figure 8(c). Temperature data is from the HadCRUT3 anomaly dataset and the HadCRUT absolute temperature dataset. Absolute temperatures plus anomalies were first converted to the equivalent blackbody temperature in watts per square metre using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Both datasets then had their monthly averages removed before graphing.
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RedditCNN's global series i-List takes you to a different country each month. In January, we visit Ukraine and look at changes shaping the country's economy, culture and social fabric.
(CNN) -- The abandoned ruins of the town of Pripyat near the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, have been crumbling away for almost a quarter of a century.
The absence of humans has seen nature seemingly flourish in the town's deserted streets, squares and buildings, apparently defying the radiation that leaked out when reactor number four exploded on April 26 1986.
But how true is this picture?
New research is showing that some plant species appear to be able to adapt, despite high levels of toxicity.
Scientists studying the seeds harvested from soybean and flax plants grown inside (five kilometers from the power plant) the exclusion zone found them to be relatively unaffected by radiation.
Martin Hajduch from the Institute of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences said: "We detected very low radioactivity in the seeds. In the stem or leaves there is radioactivity, but it is somehow blocked and doesn't come to the seeds."
Hajduch and his colleagues in Ukraine conducted a proteomic study (examining the structure and function of proteins) of the plants and found that the seeds harvested inside the exclusion zone compared favorably with ones grown in non-contaminated soil outside.
"I cannot recommend eating something from Chernobyl, but I think it will be possible at some stage," Hajduch said.
He's encouraged by the recovery plants are making at Chernobyl -- an area he describes as "full of life."
The Chernobyl Forum -- a collection of eight U.N. agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency -- published a report in 2005 examining, among other things, the environmental legacy of the disaster.
Plant and animal populations had grown since the disaster, they said, and the exclusion zone had "paradoxically become a unique sanctuary for biodiversity."
But some scientists disagree with the U.N.'s assessment.
Biologist Anders Moller from the University of Paris Sud in France has been examining the effects of radiation on animals around Chernobyl for two decades.
"Areas with higher radiation have fewer animals, survival and reproduction is reduced, sperm are abnormal and have reduced swimming ability. Abnormalities are commonplace and mutations rates are much elevated," Moller said.
Recent studies of bird life in the area by Moller and Tim Mousseau from the University of South Carolina revealed abnormality rates running as high as one in 10. A rate Moller says is "astonishing."
Last year, Moller and Mousseau published the results of the largest census of animal life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It revealed, contrary to the Chernobyl Forum's 2005 report, that biodiversity in insects, birds and mammals is declining.
Not all species are affected by radiation in the same way according to Moller. Some birds -- including migrant species and long distance dispersers -- are more vulnerable to radiation than others, he said.
Hajduch said animal numbers in the exclusion zone are probably higher now than before the accident. But that's because there are no humans there hunting or fishing.
"But if you look at how many species of animals are in the area, I think it would be less," Hajduch said.
According to Chernobyl.Info, run by the U.N.'s Development Program, over 40 different types of radioactivity were released after the accident.
Cesium remains the most widely dispersed isotope while concerns remain over long-term contamination from strontium and plutonium.
Cesium and strontium have a half-life of around 30 years. Plutonium, however, has a half-life of 29,000 years.
The recent decision by Ukraine's government to sanction official tours to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, coupled with the upcoming landmark anniversary, will mean that more tourists will probably visit than ever before.
Chernobyl tourist Ruben Solaz, who took the stunning gallery images above on a summer trip to the site in 2008, described his visit as a "very touching, hair-raising" experience.
Few who enter Chernobyl's "zone of alienation" would disagree.CLOSE A quick recap of notable stats in Calvin Johnson's Lions career. By Brian Manzullo, DFP. Videolicious
Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson warms up before a game against the San Francisco 49ers at Ford Field in Detroit on Dec. 27, 2015. (Photo: Associated Press)
There was no fax machine this time, no surprise announcement on the eve of training camp.
But just like Barry Sanders did nearly two decades ago, Calvin Johnson is walking away from the NFL and the Detroit Lions on his own terms.
Johnson announced that he is retiring from football in a statement released by the Lions today. He filed his retirement papers with the NFL in advance of the new league year, which begins at 4 p.m. Wednesday. The Lions announced that his contract "matters were settled to the satisfaction of the parties."
The 30-year-old played nine Hall of Fame-caliber seasons, all in Detroit, and goes down as the best receiver in franchise history.
"Let me assure you that this was not an easy or hasty decision," Johnson said in a released statement. "As I stated, I, along with those closest to me, have put a lot of time, deliberation and prayer into this decision and I truly am at peace with it.
“I also want you to know that I have the utmost respect and admiration for the game of football. It has provided so much for me and my family and I will be forever grateful to the game."
More Calvin Johnson retirement news:
Johnson led the Lions and finished 10th in the NFL with 1,214 yards receiving this season, but a recent spate of injuries started to wear down his body.
Johnson underwent off-season knee and finger surgeries in January 2014 and spent most of the last two seasons on the injury report with nagging pain in his ankle.
He confided in current and former teammates late in the season and in the days after the 7-9 campaign ended that he was considering retirement, and when word leaked of those discussions in early January, he acknowledged the decision he was weighing in a statement released by the Lions.
By announcing his decision now, Johnson gives the Lions and new general manager Bob Quinn plenty of time to prepare for his departure.
The Lions will gain about $11.1 million in salary cap space from Johnson’s retirement and can target a replacement in free agency or spend a high pick on a receiver in this year’s NFL draft.The Lions pick 16th in the first round of the draft.
“That’s a tremendous loss, tremendous void to fill,” Sanders said at the 2016 NFL Honors show in California. “But at the same time you certainly have to take it upon yourself to do that. That’s what they’re going to have to live with, and I’m sure they’re trying to map that out as we speak. And I haven’t really even gotten to that point in my thought process, but we all know it’s dang near impossible to replace a guy like that.”
Johnson’s retirement is reminiscent, in many ways, of Sanders’ decision to walk away from the game a generation ago, albeit with different timing.
Sanders, the Lions’ iconic running back, retired after 10 NFL seasons by faxing an announcement to his hometown newspaper the day before training camp in 1999, when he was just 1,457 yards shy of Walter Payton’s rushing record. He had just turned 31.
Johnson, who turns 31 in September, ranks among the game’s most prolific receivers, with career totals of 11,619 receiving yards and 83 touchdowns.
Sanders won one playoff game and reached the postseason five times in his career. Johnson has been to the postseason twice without a victory.
In his statement, Johnson said: "My biggest regret is that I wasn’t able to help give our fans a championship. But I do believe the future of the Lions is bright and with the leadership from people like Rod Wood and Bob Quinn, who I have gotten to know over the past few months, I am confident that our fans will soon be rewarded with the championship you deserve."
“Bravo to Calvin,” New York Jets receiver Brandon Marshall said in the buildup to Super Bowl 50. “He’s going with his heart. It’s sad because, from a football fan’s perspective, we want to see Calvin, we want to see him shatter the rest of the records. He’s great, he’s awesome, he’s Megatron, and we’re not going to be able to see that anymore. But it’s a tough sport, and he’s been blessed. He’s going to leave an amazing imprint on the game and he should be proud of that.”
Johnson broke into the NFL with a solid, if unspectacular, rookie season. He had 48 catches for 756 yards in 2007 but earned the nickname Megatron for his huge frame and otherworldly abilities.
In 2008, Johnson had his first of seven 1,000-yard receiving seasons as the Lions suffered the NFL’s first 0-16 season. After taking a statistical step back in 2009 and finishing second in the NFL with 12 touchdown catches the following season, Johnson had one of the best three-year stretches of any receiver in NFL history beginning in 2011.
He led the league with 1,681 yards receiving and caught a career-best 16 touchdowns to lead the Lions to the playoffs that year, set an NFL record with 1,964 yards receiving in 2012, and finished third in the league with 1,492 yards receiving in 2013, despite missing two games.
Johnson hasn’t been as dominant the last two seasons and was used primarily as a possession receiver this year. But he had 10 catches for 137 yards in the Lions’ season-ending win over the Chicago Bears and gave few hints at the time that he was considering retirement.
Now that he is done, Johnson joins his draft classmate Patrick Willis and former San Francisco 49ers teammates Chris Borland and Anthony Davis as players who’ve retired early in recent years because of health concerns.
Willis, who went nine picks after Johnson in the 2007 draft, retired last March, at age 30, because of foot problems. Borland left the game after one season over concerns about brain injuries. And Davis sat out 2015 to give his “brain and body” a chance to heal, though he suggested that he could return to football.
Johnson has given no indication that he’ll reconsider his decision, and for now, the Lions, who went 54-92 in Johnson’s nine NFL seasons including the playoffs, will head into 2016 with Golden Tate and TJ Jones as their top two receivers.
Johnson, meanwhile, is Canton-bound and will join Charles Woodson and Peyton Manning as first-time eligible candidates in the 2021 Hall of Fame class.
“The G.O.A.T.,” Denver Broncos receiver Emmanuel Sanders said. “One of the greatest of all time. He decided to retire, and it’s an awesome deal. Everybody’s not going to play a long time in this game. I think that he’s proven that he’s definitely in the Hall of Fame.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.Got a tear? Get it repaired! Volunteers will be mending clothes for free, Sunday, Nov. 5 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Wychwood Barns as part of Ecofair at the Barns.
Find our table and bring your ripped jeans, holey sweaters and shirts in need of buttons to have them repaired just in time for winter. Does your coat need a new zipper? Please bring one as we don’t always have the right size. Please bring a maximum of two items per person. And keep in mind, that we don’t do alterations, just repairs. Hope to see you there!
As a volunteer-driven group we’re always looking for sewers of all skill levels. We’re a friendly and fun group who loves sharing our skills and giving back to the community. Love to help out? Please sign up at app.repairathon.com to hear about upcoming events all year long.Perhaps because of their own deskbound lives, many novelists have been able to find the outlandish stories filed away in the drabbest corners of modern life
There’s nothing wrong with being a bureaucrat. So you’re a tiny cog in a machine made of abstract rules, paperwork, and the broken dreams of those who do not understand either. So what? You’re just misunderstood. Without you, nobody would know where to file their TPS reports. Nobody would even know what a TPS report is.
But writers understand. As species of personality go, the writer and the bureaucrat are closely related: they’re deskbound creatures who enjoy the comfortable certainties of Microsoft Office and dazzling us with wordcraft, be it small-print legalese or the impenetrable prose of literary fiction. Of course, Kafka understood the true power of the bureaucrat because he was one – and thus portrayed bureaucracy as a looming, all-powerful presence. The wonderful Douglas Adams imagined an entire planet faking the apocalypse just to get all its middle managers to evacuate in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, while in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, hell itself is one endless system of bureaucratic red tape, where doomed souls are made to sit through every last codicil and sub-paragraph of the rules pertaining to Health and Safety – all 40,000 volumes of them.
Today’s fantasy authors are more empathetic to their managerial cousins. Paul Tsabo, the hero of Flex by Ferrett Steinmetz, is a “Bureaucramancer”: able to wield the mystical skills of office administration and harness the powers of human resources magic. In all of his books, Steinmetz imagines a world where all our geeky obsessions can lead to magic: a world filled with Videogamemancers, Origamimancers and Culinomancers. Steinmetz twists our traditional view of magic from something, the thing which surely stands apart from all things mundane, to a thing that stems instead from all that is most mundane.
What is Rule 34, you ask. Let Charles Stross explain Read more
Charles Stross’s Laundry Files novels have been blending the occult and the bureaucratic for more than a decade now, with the seventh and most recent volume The Nightmare Stacks published this summer. Bob Howard works for the Laundry: a top-secret section of the British security service dedicated to dealing with occult threats to the nation. Unlike James Bond, Bob spends as much time fighting the terrors of public-sector rules and regulations as he does the horrors of Stross’s beautifully imagined Lovecraftian universe.
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley charts the humble life of Thaniel Steepleton in the vast bureaucracies of Victorian London. But Thaniel has the one thing that even the most lowly clerk secretly dreams of … power! His insignificant job as a telegraphist at the Home Office gives Thaniel information that can save the nation. Pulley perfectly captures the essence of the “portal fantasy”, where a most ordinary person is swept into a fabulous world. Show me a bureaucrat who does not secretly lust for that.
Why does the fantasy genre find inspiration in all things mundane? Perhaps, as Charles Stross argues, it’s because magic provides the perfect metaphor for modern technological life, in which we “might not have starships, but there’s a Palantír in every pocket” – an argument I certainly have a lot of time for. Or perhaps it’s because we’re all trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of our own making, and we’re desperate to escape it …Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Riley Zickel, 21, has been missing in the Jefferson Wilderness since July 27, 2016.
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Riley Zickel, 21, has been missing in the Jefferson Wilderness since July 27, 2016.
KOIN 6 News Staff - MARION COUNTY, Ore. (KOIN) -- After a week of searching, crews have suspended the search for Riley Zickel, who went missing in the Mt. Jefferson wilderness area.
He was last seen on the Pacific Crest Trail north of Jefferson Park when he spoke to another hiker last Wednesday, July 27.
More than 340 searchers spent 5,000 hours over the past 7 days looking for Zickel. Teams searched hundreds of miles around the Willamette National Forest.
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Things Riley Zickel may have worn and used. (Marion County Sheriff's Office)
Copyright by KOIN - All rights reserved Things Riley Zickel may have worn and used. (Marion County Sheriff's Office)
They decided to suspect the active search after exhausting all leads. Areas with snow and difficult terrain also contributed to the decision.
Marion County Sheriff Jason Myers said in a press release, "It is a very difficult decision to withdraw resources from this search. Our SAR teams and staff worked tirelessly to find Mr. Zickel. We're very grateful for the assistance provided by our public safety partners, and our thoughts and prayers are with Mr. Zickel's family."
Search and Rescue crews from more than 10 agencies across the state have assisted in the search, using helicopters and contacting hundreds of other hikers.
The Marion County Sheriff's Office says the search is still open until he is found.
Anyone who may have seen Zickel is asked to call 503.584.SRCH.A famed China expert said Tuesday that China is seeking to reform the current US-defined international order, rather than revolutionize it.Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asia Institute of National University of Singapore, said in a column on the local Lianhe Zaobao newspaper that what China has sought is the improvement of the existing international framework instead of radical revolution of the system.China has implemented the reform and opening up policy to blend into the US-defined international order, Zheng said, adding that the East Asian nation has played an increasingly important role in it.However, the vested interests of the current system, especially the United States, have seemed not ready to provide enough room for the world's second-largest economy, as can be seen by the US-proposed limits on China's role in the International Monetary Fund, Zheng argued.More regrettably, Washington, convicting that China is to challenge and ultimately overturn the current world system, has kept a vigilant eye on Beijing's bids to initiate and establish the regional order, such as the Belt and Road initiative and the Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank ( AIIB ) and the BRICS Development Bank, all of which are aimed to safeguard China's interests and carry out more international duties.In this context, the Singaporean scholar said, time has ripe for China to mull a more effective way of interaction with other countries, including the apprehensive United States, to replace its past passive response to Washington's misgivings.Zheng suggested that China continue to play its due role in the international system and make it clearer to the outside world, especially the United States, that the China-proposed regional order is to supplement rather than substitute the current world system, and what it has sought is to realize sustainable development, and to commit more regional responsibilities for common development.Facts have proved that China has walked its talk, as the regional arrangements it initiated have served as a more open and inclusive supplement to the current mechanisms, Zheng argued, saying the projects like the AIIB, ever since its founding, have assumed the duties that are impossible for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to take considering their mandate limits.He also suggested that to lessen the pressures from Washington, China, during the founding of the new order, should promote its relations with some of US traditional allies that have no direct geopolitical interest conflicts and wish to deepen economic relations with China's inviting market."The establishment of the new model of major-country relations is of key importance, as it decides whether the world is heading to peace or war," Zheng said."To make Washington change its mindset, China could start with countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. Like in the case of the AIIB, the institute was originally met with strong resistance from the US and Japan. But after the joining of its Western allies like the UK, Washington has downgraded its opposing tone, and even turned to cooperating with China in such international agencies as the World Bank," Zheng added.In his article, Zheng also criticized the United States for having suppressed countries that have deviated from its interpretation of the international order, and repelled those who dared not to follow its steps.In terms of international responsibilities, the same situation also occurs, he said, as "the US does not recognize the efforts by countries like China to shoulder their responsibilities. Instead, nations with their own understandings of the international responsibilities have been pressured by the US for holding dissent perspectives.""The notion of sovereign state stems from the West. Technically, sovereignty means that countries should stand on equal foot and their domestic affairs should not be interfered by others," said Zheng.Zheng also accused the United States for "inducing color revolutions in other countries for years with the goal of replacing their governments with ones that are more favorable to Washington, under the disguises of human rights and freedom."To support his arguments, Zheng quoted sentences from World Order, a book written by US veteran diplomat Henry Kissinger, as saying that instead of only one international order, there are multiple orders existing in the world and applying to different civilizations.Android: Getting up and running on the iMX6
Posted on 27/04/2017 by Robert Foss
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Getting Android up and running on the iMX6 platform using an open source graphics stack has been impossible up until recently, but now you can. Here's a guide through the steps.
Since the hardware very much matters this is going to be divided into a few parts, the common steps and the hardware specific ones.
This post is a bit of a living document and will be changed over time, and if you have any questions about it, please reach out through email (robert.foss at collabora.com) or irc (tomeu or robertfoss on #dri-devel on freenode).
mkdir /opt/android repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-7.1.1_r28 cd /opt/android/.repo git clone https://git.collabora.com/git/user/robertfoss/android_manifest.git local_manifests -b android-etnaviv repo sync -j10 mkdir /opt/imx6_android cp /opt/imx6_android git clone https://git.collabora.com/git/user/robertfoss/linux.git -b imx_rdu2_v4.11-rc3 # The mkimage tool is used even if you're not # using u-boot it as a bootloader sudo apt install u-boot-tools # Fetch Kconfig, bootloaders and some scripts git clone https://git.collabora.com/git/user/robertfoss/rdu2.git. # This will destroy all data on /dev/mmcblk0 and # create boot/system/cache/data ext4 partitions./setup_sdcard.sh /dev/mmcblk0 # Build android, the kernel, and flash it onto an SD-card./build_android.sh
Hardware: iMX6 Sabre
Select correct dtb file for u-boot
nano uboot_android_boot.scr # Uncomment the correct dtb file for your platform setenv fdt_file imx6q-sabresd.dtb #setenv fdt_file imx6qp-sabresd.dtb # Run build script again, to make sure boot.scr # is created and moved to the SD-card./build_android.sh
Start Android
The SD-card can now be put into the middlemost slot and the device can be restarted.
Hardware: RDU2
Install the bootloader
# Depending if you have a >=13" version of the RDU2 # use the imx6qp, if <13" then use the imx6q IMX6_TYPE=imx6q IMX6_TYPE=imx6qp BAREBOX="zodiac/barebox-zii-${IMX6_TYPE}-rdu2.img" # Flash bootloader to SD-card dd if=${BAREBOX} of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1k sync # Put SD-card in the middle-most slot on the RDU2 # Install lrzsz, since it is used for a ymodem upload sudo apt install lrzsz # Connect to serial device /dev/ttyUSB2 and # /dev/ttyUSB3 with minicom # The numbering assumes the RDU2 is the only serial # serial device connected sudo minicom -s +------------------------------------------+ | A - Serial Device : /dev/ttyUSB3 | B - Lockfile Location : /var/lock | C - Callin Program : | D - Callout Program : | E - Bps/Par/Bits : 115200 8N1 | F - Hardware Flow Control : No | G - Software Flow Control : No | | Change which setting? +------------------------------------------+ # Connect to Quark console on /dev/ttyUSB3 # Set boot SD-card as boot source #HostBoot s 0 reset # Restart device, connect to barebox loaded just loaded # from the SD-card on /dev/ttyUSB2 pic_setwdt 0 60 loady # Using the minicom quickly initiate a ymodem file # of the same barebox image you wrote to the SD-card # Be quick, the upload will timeout after a few seconds # Write the bootloader to SPI NOR erase /dev/m25p0.barebox # Depending on your RDU2 type flash one of the following cp barebox-zii-imx6q-rdu2.img /dev/m25p0.barebox # Or cp barebox-zii-imx6qp-rdu2.img /dev/m25p0.barebox # Connect to the Quark console on /dev/ttyUSB3 again # Set SPI NOR as the boot source #HostBoot s 2 reset # Connect to the barebox console on /dev/ttyUSB2 again # Edit configuration to automatically boot from mmc: sedit /env/config export global.boot.default=/env/boot/mmc export global.bootm.image=/mnt/mmc1.0/android_zImage export global.bootm.initrd=/mnt/mmc1.0/android_ramdisk.img.gz export global.bootm.oftree=/mnt/mmc1.0/imx6qp-zii-rdu2.dtb export global.linux.bootargs.base="console=ttymxc0,115200 console=tty0 rw rootwait ip=dhcp buildvariant=userdebug debug ignore_loglevel root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait init=/init printk.devkmsg=on verbose enforcing=0 androidboot.selinux=permissive drm.debug=0x00" sedit /env/boot/mmc #!/bin/sh detect mmc1 mkdir -p /mnt/mmc1.0 automount -d /mnt/mmc1.0'mount /dev/mmc1.0 /mnt/mmc1.0' bootm pic_setwdt 0 60 # Disable watchdog exit
Start Android
The SD-card created in the common steps can now be put into the middlemost slot and the device can be restarted.
Thanks!
This work is built on efforts by a lot people:
Pengutronix who's been doing i.MX6 platform work.
Christian Gmeiner, Wladimir Van Der Laan, and the other etnviv developers.
Rob Herring at Linaro for getting the ball rolling with AOSP for Zii.
Andrey Smirnov for driver support for the RDU2 such as i.MX6 PCI, ARM PL310 L2 Cache controller, RTC, and other i.MX6qp driver fixups.
This post has been a part of work undertaken by my employer Collabora.
Original postHe had been tweeting hints that he has left the station, confirming he will no longer be on the radio Monday morning.
The broadcaster had been presenting the breakfast show on BBC Three Counties for the last three years.
A BBC spokesperson told Premier that: "Iain Lee will no longer be presenting his shows on the station but we want to take this opportunity to thank him and wish him well for the future."
Premier has asked the BBC the nature of Mr Lee's departure and is awaiting a response.
A tweet from Iain read: "Thanks everyone. I've enjoyed every second of it. See you sometime in the future."
Iain apologised most recently for the way he conducted an interview with a Christian Concern campaigner.
The BBC also apologised for his interview about the Bible's teaching on homosexuality in which a Christian woman was labelled a bigot.
Libby Powell, from campaign group Christian Concern, appeared on BBC Three Counties Radio earlier this month
She was discussing the case of Revd Barry Trayhorn, a prison worker taking his employer to a tribunal amid claims he was forced to resign for reading a Bible verse about homosexuality.
Mr Lee asked if Revd Trayhorn would embrace gay people and when told by Ms Powell that he would, he replied "bit gay".
The BBC admitted the language the presenter used, and the tone in which he conducted the interview, was "at several points inappropriate".
I'm blocking so many people. I'll make it easy. If you think gays and lesbians are sinners, please unfollow me. — Iain Lee (@iainlee) November 13, 2015
A statement from senior editorial staff said: "The BBC - and Iain Lee himself - wish to apologise for any offence that may have been caused."
Iain Lee also apologised on air and said: "Last week I interviewed the Revd Barry Trayhorn and solicitor Libby Powell about their understanding of biblical teaching on homosexuality.
"I want to make it clear that I apologise for any offence that may have been caused over the way I conducted the interviews."
Sorry for any offensive my interview may have caused. I think this article says all that needs to be said. https://t.co/lT1L1RZQMF — Iain Lee (@iainlee) November 12, 2015
Christian Concern had labelled the interview "intolerant" and asked its supporters to complain.In the last post about the new features in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015, we talked about document reporting and report layouts. Another new and powerful feature introduced with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 is report scheduling.
Benefits of report scheduling in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015
The report scheduling can be accessed by running a report and clicking Print>Schedule on the Request Page. The report run can then be delayed to a certain date and time as shown below. This new feature of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 is running on Job Queue, so has to be pre-configured and NAS has to be set up.
The generated reports end up in a new page Report Inbox, which can be accessed in the role center.
How to use new methods of report scheduling
Diving deeper into this functionality we find a few new standard methods:
• Report.RunRequestPage
• Report.Execute
The first one can run the report without actually running it, but only showing the request page and capturing its parameters.
The latter can in turn run the report with a provided set of captured parameters. It is passed as a variable in both functions and stored in Xml format.
This can be reused in automated report scheduling on your own solution and is also a very nice out-of-the-box feature for slow-running, nightly run reports, which now can be initiated by the end-users also.Dogged determination! Lovable pugs raising abandoned TIGER cubs as if they were their own after the cats' mother abandoned them
These abandoned tiger cubs have found a new home with the unlikeliest of wet nurses - a pair of pugs.
Born at the Oktyabrsky Health Resort in Sochi, on western Russia's Black Sea coast, the cubs have been taken in by the pint-sized dogs after their mother abandoned them.
While they will soon grow to dwarf their adopted mothers, they seem perfectly content to suckle from them for the time being.
Maternal instinct: Two abandoned tiger cubs are nursed by a pug at the Oktyabrsky Health Resort in Sochi, Russia
Proud: The pug seems completely unconcerned at the litter of tigers relying on her milk for survival
Cute: Dogs have been known to nurse cubs and even kittens, however the baby felines cannot generally rely solely on dogs' milk for nutrition as cats' milk is quite different in composition
For their part, the little pugs, whose idiosyncratic physical characteristics are something of an acquired taste even among dog lovers, seem proud of their role in rescuing the tiny infant felines.
It's not the first time that little big cats have been taken in by dogs - which popular culture pits as the avowed enemy of their smaller domestic cousins.
Bitches that are lactating - and of a friendly temperament - have even been known to take in kittens.Did Donald Trump Use Artificial Intelligence to Win the Election?
The answer might surprise you.
Trent Lapinski Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 16, 2017
Original image edited with MAGA hats by me.
According to Scout.ai, a publication of journalists, professors, and science fiction authors, the answer is a resounding YES.
It is even possible that Donald Trump used data analytics to determine which cities, and states to visit, as well as commanded his own personal botnet army that outnumbered Hillary Clinton’s 5 to 1.
Naturally, I was skeptical of everything this article claims, I even slept on this story before hitting publish. I’ve since looked into their claims and they appear to be telling the truth about the technology and people involved. What is unknown is the extent and success of what Trump and his team accomplished, but given the fact Trump won the election it is entirely possible these technologies could have been a deciding factor. Which means artificial intelligence, machine learning, echo chambers, and weaponized propaganda just influenced the election—not the Russians.
Let me explain.
Steve Bannon is on the board of directors of a privately held company out of London called Cambridge Analytica. They’re a data mining, analytics, and strategic communications company funded by Robert Mercer, a friend and supporter of now President Donald Trump. This company has developed strategic processes and products for automating the ability to track and analyze everyone’s social media presence, and then target and optimize advertising specifically to millions of people using machine learning to show them “news” that matches their political identity. They are then able to use the engagement data to geographically see where Trump could potentially persuade people to vote for him, especially in swing states. Or just poison the well, and persuade people not to vote for Hillary Clinton.
In other words, Steve Bannon and company figured out that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook put everyone into echo chambers, which I wrote about the night of the election, and realized they could use that to their advantage to persuade the masses into voting for Donald Trump. By using machine learning, which enables computers to learn without being programmed, they were able to develop software to analyze everyone’s personalities based on purchased data and Facebook. They then used that analysis to display specifically tailored ads or “news” on Facebook and other websites (sometimes following users across the Internet), showing these users dark posts that only that person saw. By doing this, |
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[1] This name is spelled "McDougall" in every other one of his publications that I (CDG) can find, but it is spelled "MacDougall" in the published version of this work.Written by Morgan Nankivell
This is what I was here for, this indescribable euphoric feeling of peace. The feeling that we had accomplished something significant. We were almost home, and I planned to ride this buzz the remaining 10 miles of the Pemi Loop back to the car. I hoped it would keep my aching feet marching and my spirits high. There had been many moments throughout the Pemi Loop that had me wondering why I was out here – some of the trails proved to be a form of self-inflicted torture of backpacking – but these moments like this one – this was the reason.
I never imagined I would find myself in the Pemigewasset Wilderness, setting out on a 30 mile backpacking trip. It was only several years before that, during a somewhat unprepared trip up Mt. Washington, I had dreamed of doing an overnight somewhere in the White Mountains. I was a rather sluggish hiker, though, and didn’t know much about backpacking. Fast forward to June of this year, I had fixed my lack of knowledge, experience and at least improved my sluggish style. My boyfriend & I were doing well on the trips we had undertaken thus far, and were waiting for an opportunity to take on a new challenge.
It wasn’t until I sat contemplating my four day weekend for the Fourth of July holiday that it hit me…the Pemi Loop! I scrambled for my phone and texted my boyfriend, suggesting the Pemi for a backpacking trip. He agreed with gusto, and we began to plan our coming adventure. We researched the trails, the amount of time it may take, and the summits we would be reaching. The more we planned, the larger the pit of excitement grew in my stomach. The Pemi Loop would be bigger than anything I had done before, the prospect of really getting out there and doing some serious miles thrilled me. I was keen and I had no idea what I was in for.
The Pemi Loop traverses parts of the Twin and Franconia ranges as well as through the Pemigewasset Wilderness in New Hampshire. It is 30 miles of rugged and relentless ups & downs, being recognized as one of the most difficult day hikes in the country.
Its namesake comes from the Pemigewasset Wilderness, a sprawling 45,000 acre section of the White Mountain National Forest. This area was heavily logged in the past, if you find yourself hiking in this region you’re sure to see remnants of this activity. These old logging and railroad grade roads and paths provide some rather easy going on the east portion of the loop. On the western side, outside of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, lies the Franconia range. It is the second highest range in the White Mountains after the Presidential range offering some spectacular alpine hiking.
We decided to do the Pemi Loop clockwise. This meant we would head up towards the Franconia ridge first. This would have us hiking the less steep and in some places completely flat portions of the loop on our last day. As hikers, we are certainly more tortoise than hare. We decided to take our entire four day weekend and devote it to the trail. This is longer than most take but we didn’t want to rush. We planned out which mountains we would summit each day and where we would sleep each night. I felt ready. We packed our bags and hit the road.
Day one began on Saturday morning hitting the trail around 8:00 a.m from the Lincoln Woods trail head. Our packs were strapped down and adjusted to our liking with four days’ worth of supplies. We knew the extra 25-30 pounds would mean big changes in our pace and comfort. The biggest advantage to doing the Pemi Loop in less time is the obvious decrease in supplies you need to bring with you. It wasn’t until the real fatigue started to kick in a few days later that we would really begin to pay the price for the extra weight we were carrying.
The weather for our first day was questionable at best, spots of rain and thunder were in the forecast. We prepared as much as we could with waterproof gear and cautiously carried on. The first 1.4 miles from the Lincoln Woods Visitor Center is entirely flat, with lovely views of the Pemigewasset River and lush forest. It wasn’t until we reached the Osseo Trail that we remembered we were about gain 9,000 feet of elevation over the next several days. The trail began tranquil, smooth and gradually increased in grade as we climbed higher. After several miles the trail began to change. Sure-footed steps were slowed by the prolific rocks on the trail – a trend one can expect when hiking in throughout the White Mountains.
We were just warming up. Our minds and bodies had not yet settled into the hike. A beautiful overlook on the Osseo Trail before you reach the summit of Mt. Flume was a welcome respite. The cloud cover hadn’t moved in on us yet, and the gap in the trees was just enough to look east toward the southern edge of Bondcliff.
We quickly got back to the grind and continued to the top of Mt. Flume. By the time we had reached the narrow-pathed summit, clouds had completely moved in and the rain was threatening to do more than just drizzle. To our left lay a gut-wrenching void of fog. A rock slide on Flume left a large gash in the rocks at the peak. This huge divot looked eerie as we became consumed in clouds. With no view and empty tummies, we carefully made our way across the trail looking for a place to shelter ourselves from the increasing rain for a lunch break.
The next 1.2 miles to the summit of Liberty were damp, but relatively easy going. We arrived at the summit in high spirits with the clouds blowing by giving us some peek-a-boo views of Mt. Lincoln and the valley below. My heart skipped a beat as the sweeping green valley opened up in front of us, and the western slope of Lincoln came into view for just a few seconds. We may not have been able to see much through the thick and quickly shifting cloud cover, but we felt like we were on top of the world. We were looking down upon a mysterious and hypnotizing landscape.
Snapped out of our trance, a fellow hiker warned us of heavy rain in the coming hours. Continuing on we moved from the glorious and peaceful peak of Liberty. The next stop was the Liberty Spring tent site a breezy 0.6 miles away. The Franconia Ridge Trail meets the the Liberty Spring Trail just 0.3 miles from the summit of Liberty. The remaining 0.3 mile hike down to the Liberty Spring Trail to the tent site felt like it took an eternity. With the threat of rain, it made us more impatient than usual. Once we finally arrived, we hastily set up our tent. We knew the thunderstorms were expected to last all night. We began to string up a small lightweight tent footprint creating a makeshift extended vestibule. It was at precisely this moment that the rain started.
This is the moment the biblical flood began, endless torrents of water suddenly began to fall from the sky. Within moments we had become drenched. As I felt the water pour down my legs and into my boots I knew it was going to be a tough weekend ahead. Within minutes I had gone from walking with shoes on to walking around with full buckets strapped to my feet.
We finished setting up our camp and it continued to pour. The task now was cooking dinner and getting into our tent without completely soaking everything we owned. Luckily our eating area had a large tarp for shelter. We sat shivering, half clothed and shoveling down a warm meal. As we ate lightning lit up the sky so brightly it seemed supernatural with the accompanying thunder resonating in my chest. We sloshed back to our platform, literally walking through shin-deep streams where none had been only 20 minutes prior. With an amount of patience I didn’t know I possessed, we managed to change and get into our tent without getting anything inside wet. I was thrilled with this feat, and happily cozied up in my bag.
The next morning was rain-free, although I was feeling that we should be quick with our break-down – just in case. All of our attempts to dry our socks, shoes and various clothing items were completely useless. Nothing had dried even the tiniest bit. I didn’t know then but the following days would be drastically altered by my soaked boots.
Despite our damp clothes dangling from our pack, we remained excited and positive. My feet felt dry after putting on a pair of socks that had been saved from the torrent, and I was sure a day of hiking would at least dry my socks. With a full day ahead of us, we would be reaching 4 summits and find ourselves at the Garfield tent site that night.
We made good time up the hill from the tent site and back onto the Franconia Ridge Trail. From here we set off on the 1.8 miles to the summit of Little Haystack, This portion of the trail is scattered with tiny angelic pastures of ferns and small conifers dripping with old man’s beard lichen.
The skies were almost totally clear, and once we reached the summit of Little Haystack we were rewarded with an the incredible views that had been mostly hidden from us the previous day. Lincoln stood towering ahead of us, a welcoming sight that looked so easily within reach. The Franconia Ridge Trail continues above the tree-line across the ridge for the next 2 miles, providing wide open views on all sides. After a short lunch on Little Haystack, we eagerly continued the 0.9 miles up to Lincoln’s summit. We reached the peak and were hungry for our third, Mt. Lafayette, the highest peak on the Pemi Loop.
I had been itching to get to this summit all summer and was thrilled it was our present focus. A steady 0.8 miles along the ridge led us to the peak. I could see everything; Cannon mountain across the valley, the rest of the Pemi loop to the east, and the Presidentials off in the distance. If it had not been so crowded at the top we may have stayed longer. The throngs of people out enjoying the mountain felt overwhelming. We also were discouraged by the distance it looked like we had to cover to reach our destination – Garfield Tent site. Mount Garfield is 3.7 miles from the summit of Lafayette. It looked like a distant peak for another day, not something we would be summiting later that afternoon.
Not yet too tired, we moved out happily marching along the inviting portion of the trail toward the north peak of Lafayette. Large cairns marked our route with easy going trail allowing me to look west as we walked. How we would navigate through the mountains and valleys to the other ridge line the Pemi Loop is on? I supposed I would just have to find out.
Descending back into the forest from the alpine zone would prove to be tough for me. Going down is always the tough part in my eyes. With added weight from our packs, the steep, rocky and very uneven trail leading down from Lafayette was much slower going than either of us had anticipated. With Tree cover in sight, we continued to plod along.
Just before we reached the trees, I made a crucial error looking back. While taking a step on a rock slab my feet vanished from underneath me. I rolled down the rock slab, bouncing off of a small boulder on my way. Luckily I didn’t roll far, and my boyfriend hastily scooted down the slab to meet me. Tears streaming down my face, looking at him and looking at my arm. I had thwacked it pretty hard, and it showed. A gigantic bump had popped up and thoroughly freaked us both out. After some inspection and a minute to shake off the adrenaline, I decided I was fine. I have no doubt it was quite a sight for the fellow hiker who passed us moments after my tumble.
The next 24 hours of our journey on the Pemi Loop would get worse before it would get better. After my fall we began to feel tired. We were pushing our bodies harder than we had done before and had to get our minds in a place to deal with the physicality. After descending further into the trees, we looked forward to our next few miles being relatively easy going. The topo map, as it turns out, was incredibly misleading on this portion of the trail. What we thought would be easy going ended up being some of the slowest hiking of the entire trip. The ground beneath us was muddy, slick and threatening to suction your boot right off if you stepped wrong. The rocks were glassy from the rain. Every roots & wood planks went from being helpful ways to avoid bogs, to slippery balance beams.
We were passed many times on this stretch to Garfield. I looked at the trail runners breezing by us in disbelief. The path was covered in jagged rocks of all sizes. Each time we stopped to let someone pass, hordes of mosquitoes descended upon us. The combination of slow & tedious hiking, being passed by so many people, and being eaten alive by bugs was pushing me to the edge. My feet had also become increasingly wet. Those dry socks I had on were now dampened from the inside of my boots. Slowly I could feel my feet beginning to hurt. It felt like blisters were forming on the bottoms of my feet. I knew that’s not what was happening, it was the beginning stages of trench foot. The fire on my soles would build and the tingling would intensify every time we stopped to rest or let someone pass.
It seemed like an eternity, but when we reached the lake that sat just below the summit push to Garfield, my mood was instantly lifted. Beyond tired at this point, I was actually ecstatic to see the trail going up. We were starting to get somewhere. The Garfield Ridge Trail begins right before this lake. This trail would lead us 0.4 miles to the summit and then bring us back down the other side of the mountain before we would find the Garfield Tentsite. Those 0.4 miles felt like nothing after the tedium since Lafayette, and the summit provided an incredible view of where we had just come from on the Pemi Loop.
The sky was clear with the warm sun beginning to hint that evening was approaching. Much more tired than I had expected, my wet feet felt like they were on fire. I was proud that we had pushed this far though. Reaching another summit was incredibly empowering. Eager to rest, we headed down the other side toward the tent site.
The trail was steep the entire way, my fatigue and foot pain went from bad to worse. Luckily the descent was short-lived, and I was overcome with joy when I saw the sign for the tent site. We managed to procure a couple of spots in the shelter, saving some precious energy and time. Crawling into the shelter and beaten down by the day, I took an hour to even contemplate making dinner. Choking back tears of exhaustion on my sleeping pad, I wondered how everyone else in the shelter seemed to be just fine. I reminded myself that this was not easy, and that everyone has their own journey.
I removed my boots, socks and hung up all of our wet clothes. Absolutely nothing had dried while we were hiking. This meant wet socks tomorrow unless some kind of sock-drying fairy visited us during the night. My feet were tingling, burning, and swollen. Every time I stood I had to hobble until the blood began to flow normally through my feet again. We hoped for restful sleep and hit the hay after dinner. Half the trip and hopefully the hardest part was behind us but only tomorrow would tell.
Part #2 of Morgan’s journey across the Pemi Loop!
Follow Time to Climb on Facebook, Instagram or Twitterhowefashion:
A crisp, white tailored jacket and string pearls combo worn over an expensive-looking sweater that says ‘elegant business’. It’s crisp, it’s white, it’s inoffensive and even quite classy. Let’s celebrate the crisp white jacket for a moment…
…because halfway through this episode, the Bacofoil hairband makes an unwelcome return, and this time it doesn’t even have on its side the flimsy excuse that it matches any other part of the outfit. I guess this is 1988 Rebecca’s Boho Evening Look - a faintly Arabic-style red and gold chiffon number offset with sparkly drop earrings and this…thing on her head. I’m not a particular fan of the chiffon number as it stands, and definitely not with the Bacofoil head thing as an accessory.
The end of the episode features a neat black straight knee-length skirt and the biggest shoulder pads yet seen on this show, or indeed any show that didn’t feature Joan Collins as a regular. Expansive.
Original airdate: January 14, 1988A 40-year-old man, said to have been evading circumcision since finishing primary school, was frogmarched to a clinic for the procedure in Othaya town on Saturday.
The lorry driver, who reportedly relocated to different towns to avoid being confronted by his agemates, was stopped from travelling to Nairobi from Nyeri county.
He tried fleeing but his friends cornered him at about 10am, took him to the clinic and waited at least 40 minutes for the procedure to be carried out.
Boda boda operators and other residents joined the man's friends in the wait but his family members reportedly sneaked him out through the back door.
Residents lauded the move saying the man had to be circumcised; they claimed several of his relationships ended after the women realised he was not circumcised.BFG has officially begun sending out RMA denial letters to their warranty holders. Claim to be “running down business”.
It looks like BFG has finally received the final nail within its coffin and is officially “….winding down and liquidating its business” in their own words. Some of their customers who have recently sent in BFG video cards for RMA have begun receiving the following letter from BFG:
BFG Technologies Inc. is in the process of winding down and liquidating its business. Unfortunately, our major supplier would not support our business. As a result, we are returning your graphics card without being able to repair it. We apologize for the inconvenience.
It seems short and to the point but this will surely yank the short-hairs of people expecting a “lifetime warranty”. It goes to show you though that nothing ever lasts forever.
Ever since their original statement that they were moving out the the GPU business, customers have been experiencing extensive delays when RMAing cards to BFG but in many cases RMA requests were still being honored. Now it looks like cards are being actively RETURNED to customers UNREPAIRED as BFG just doesn’t have access to replacements or the components necessary to repair the cards.
We will have more about this in the coming days. The letter below comes from a power supply that was recently returned to a customer.I was recently asked which of the two rites of freemasonry common to the American experience I preferred. I gave my response to which the questioner suggested I convert it into a blog post.
I don’t see value in contrasting the two common rites of American masonry for the following reasons:
because the York Rite is anything but;
it undermines the currents of masonry giving rise to these rites;
it sets up an unnecessary antagonism between the two.
I prefer to look at currents or schools of Masonry of which I see two dominate currents in the US: the Craft current and the Haut-Grade current (which includes a sub current of Chivalric Masonry).
In an overly generalized way I see degrees breaking down into the currents as such:
Craft: Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, Master Mason, Mark Master, Royal Ark Mariner, Installation of the Master/Board of Installed Masters, and the Royal Arch. To a lesser extent I include the Past Master (virtual) and the Most Excellent Master as I see them as solutions to the problems solved in the Installation of the Master and other legalistic problems. Additionally Noachide Masonry more properly belongs in this school, although many Noachide degrees are more greatly developed in the Haut-Grade environment. Such degrees must be weighed and vetted individual before assignment.
Haut-Grade: All degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Royal and Select Master, Super Excellent Master, all orders of the Commandery. While many of the ineffable degrees of the AASR contain elements of the Craft current, how we received these degrees is indubitably within the ecossais frame, which according to Mackey distinguishing hallmark of ecossais masonry is the preservation of the Master’s Word, where English craft masonry did not. For practical application, anything deriving of the Scots Master Degree, and/or Ramsay, or largely promulgated from either of the two are of the Haut Grade School.
Direct Answer
So which is a better current of Masonry? It depends on what you are looking for. If you want Craft Masonry, the Lodge and the Chapter will be most satisfying. If you want Haut-Grade Masonry, then, the Scottish Rite, the Council and the Commandery are ideal.
The York Rite has a heavier Craft experience, but contains both Craft and Haut-Grade. The Scottish Rite contains very little of the Craft current, and is fundamentally a Haut-Grade system. Interestingly, while many join the York Rite looking for chivalric masonry, i.e. Templary, and while I maintain the Order of the Temple is still to most beautiful and most intense and most real degree experience I’ve had in Masonry, chivalric masonry is without equivocation |
][6] Pholcids may be beneficial to humans living in regions with dense hobo spider populations as predation on Tegenaria may keep populations in check.[7]
Close-up of a cellar spider's head, showing two groups of three closely clustered eyes
Gait [ edit ]
Pholcus phalangioides often uses an alternating tetrapod gait (first right leg, then second left leg, then third right leg, etc.), which is commonly found in many spider species. However, frequent variations from this pattern have been documented during observations of the spiders’ movements.
Systematics [ edit ]
Crossopriza lyoni. The bottom one is male. The female is clutching her egg bundle (magnified). Two. The bottom one is male. The female is clutching her egg bundle (magnified).
Smeringopus pallidus female with egg sac. female with egg sac.
A cellar spider stays close to her young in Tulare, California
As of November 2015, the World Spider Catalog accepts the following genera:[1]
Aetana Huber, 2005
Anansus Huber, 2007
Anopsicus Chamberlin & Ivie, 1938
Artema Walckenaer, 1837
Aucana Huber, 2000
Aymaria Huber, 2000
Belisana Thorell, 1898
Blancoa Huber, 2000
Buitinga Huber, 2003
Calapnita Simon, 1892
Canaima Huber, 2000
Carapoia González-Sponga, 1998
Cenemus Saaristo, 2001
Chibchea Huber, 2000
Chichiriviche González-Sponga, 2011b
Chisosa Huber, 2000
Ciboneya Pérez, 2001
Codazziella González-Sponga, 2005
Coryssocnemis Simon, 1893
Crossopriza Simon, 1893
Enetea Huber, 2000
Galapa Huber, 2000
Gertschiola Brignoli, 1981
Guaranita Huber, 2000
Holocneminus Berland, 1942
Holocnemus Simon, 1873
Hoplopholcus Kulczy?ski, 1908
Ibotyporanga Mello-Leitão, 1944
Ixchela Huber, 2000
Kambiwa Huber, 2000
Khorata Huber, 2005
Leptopholcus Simon, 1893
Litoporus Simon, 1893
Mecolaesthus Simon, 1893
Mesabolivar González-Sponga, 1998
Metagonia Simon, 1893
Micromerys Bradley, 1877
Micropholcus Deeleman-Reinhold & Prinsen, 1987
Modisimus Simon, 1893
Nerudia Huber, 2000
Ninetis Simon, 1890
Nita Huber & El-Hennawy, 2007
Nyikoa Huber, 2007
Ossinissa Dimitrov & Ribera, 2005
Otavaloa Huber, 2000
Panjange Deeleman-Reinhold & Deeleman, 1983
Papiamenta Huber, 2000
Paramicromerys Millot, 1946
Pehrforsskalia Deeleman-Reinhold & van Harten, 2001
Pholcophora Banks, 1896
Pholcus Walckenaer, 1805
Physocyclus Simon, 1893
Pisaboa Huber, 2000
Platnicknia Özdikmen & Demir, 2009
Pomboa Huber, 2000
Priscula Simon, 1893
Psilochorus Simon, 1893
Quamtana Huber, 2003
Queliceria González-Sponga, 2003
Savarna Huber, 2005
Sihala Huber, 2011
Smeringopina Kraus, 1957
Smeringopus Simon, 1890
Spermophora Hentz, 1841
Spermophorides Wunderlich, 1992
Stenosfemuraia González-Sponga, 1998
Stygopholcus Absolon & Kratochvíl, 1932
Systenita Simon, 1893
Tainonia Huber, 2000
Teuia Huber, 2000
Tibetia Zhang, Zhu & Song, 2006
Tolteca Huber, 2000
Trichocyclus Simon, 1908
Tupigea Huber, 2000
Uthina Simon, 1893
Wanniyala Huber & Benjamin, 2005
Waunana Huber, 2000
Wugigarra Huber, 2001
Zatavua Huber, 2003
Misconceptions [ edit ]
There is a legend that daddy long-legs spiders have the most potent venom of any spider, but that their fangs are either too small or too weak to puncture human skin; the same legend is also repeated of the harvestman and crane fly, also known as "daddy long-legs" in some regions. Indeed, pholcid spiders do have a short fang structure (called uncate due to its "hooked" shape). Brown recluse spiders also have uncate fang structure, but are able to deliver medically significant bites.
Possible explanations include: pholcid venom is not toxic to humans; pholcid uncate are smaller than those of brown recluse; or there is a musculature difference between the two arachnids, with recluses, being hunting spiders, possessing stronger muscles for fang penetration.[8] According to Rick Vetter of the University of California at Riverside, the daddy long-legs spider has never harmed a human and there is no evidence that they are dangerous to humans.[9]
The legend may result from the fact that the daddy long-legs spider preys upon deadly venomous spiders, such as the redback, a member of the black widow genus Latrodectus.[10] To the extent that such entomological information was known to the general public, it was perhaps thought that if the daddy long-legs spider could kill a spider capable of delivering fatal bites to humans, then it must be more venomous, and the uncate fangs were regarded as prohibiting it from killing people. In reality, it is able to cast lengths of silk onto its prey, incapacitating them from a safe distance.[11]
Mythbusters experiment [ edit ]
During 2004, the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters tested the daddy long-legs venom myth in episode 13 - "Buried in concrete". Hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage first established that the spider's venom was not as toxic as other venoms, after being told about an experiment whereby mice were injected with venom from both a daddy long-legs and a black widow, with the black widow venom producing a much stronger reaction.
After measuring the spider's fangs at approximately 0.25 mm, Adam Savage inserted his hand into a container with several daddy-long-legs, and reported that he felt a bite which produced a mild, short-lived burning sensation. The bite did in fact penetrate his skin, but did not cause any notable harm.[12] Additionally, recent research has shown that pholcid venom is relatively weak in its effects on insects.[13]
References [ edit ]
Notes
Bibliographyby Clay Barham
It is a project long overdue. We know how America runs best, when it worked best and what levels of government are most appropriate. We just need to back up and pare down. I do not know anyone who thinks the Post Office mentality operates any organization better than free people do.
We know our Declaration of Independence qualifies the role of free people and their government, and we know our Federal Constitution, as originally put forth, helped shape the way America functioned organizationally. If that is so, then we need only move back to a time when everything was best. America proved best for all people when compared to all other styles and forms of civil organization.
We know, from our history, government closest to the people works best. When a majority decides how things must run and those elected to do it, people do best. The Cities and Counties are the basic seats of government. Beyond those levels, responsible for the tasks involving everyone in all the cities, counties and even the states, are the State and Federal Governments.
The people-to-people relationships once defined in local charters, state constitutions, and the Federal Constitution and its first ten amendments, suited our needs. Most everything beyond these early charters has been to confuse, disrupt, meddle and dislocate, and to assign to free people a view of their inability to care for themselves.
The growth of Federal Departments, with Cabinet Secretaries, has served to confuse and disrupt duties, which are, for the most part, 10th Amendment functions for the local and state governments, and the people.
We need a State Department to deal with our foreign relations. We need a Defense Department to be responsible for defending our nation. We need a Treasury Department to make certain our monetary relationships are stable. We can even say we need an Interior Department to coordinate relationships between homeland governments. We need a Justice Department to handle federal laws, courts and the FBI.
How can we justify all the other Departments, such as Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Veteran’s Affairs? Most of their functions ordinarily belong, if at all, to the local governments and the people.
Get rid of the excess Departments and pare the Fed down. All those departments do is duplicate functions of local and state governments, and interfere with them. They contribute nothing to the efficiency or operation of local agencies involved in their responsibilities. Things worked well before they got involved.
The 10th Amendment to the Constitution was right and proper and should be observed.
Ridding the Fed of these Departments removes much of the money-magnets attracting lobbyists and corrupting Representatives, Senators and bureaucrats. A Constitutional Convention called to do this job would invite irreparable harm by special interests and social tinkering. Too many altruistically bent do-gooders out there see themselves as needed elite to manage the affairs of Americans.
Give them a hand in the process and we are back to communalism, socialism and communism, where the representatives of the unwilling and incapable crush the efforts of the doers and builders of a free society. Allow the contents of the Treasury to shape the process, and greed sets the tone. Avoid revocation of Constitutional Amendments, as it would slow the process in getting enough people to accept changes. I speak here of the 16th Amendment, allowing direct taxation, and the 17th Amendment allowing direct election of United States Senators.
To simplify it all, just revoke laws establishing departments and bureaus that have no real value to liberty. It would be an easier task. Only those who now profit from one or another agency will fight when their purses are deprived.
A Party Convention should find and nominate candidates who will pledge to reduce the size and scope of the Federal Government. They would provide voters with a plan and approach to stop all new hiring at the Federal Level, drastically cut the budgets for each Department to be phased out, sending whatever essential functions they have back to the states. They would campaign on returning the Republic back to its best times, keeping whatever changes do not conflict.
It would be a tall order. It would require each candidate to step out and sing the praises of the Republic in its hey-day, not the rewritten historical views of Hollywood and the left.
This would be the approach least encumbered by legal roadblocks, but it would be the program demanding the most courage and commitment on the part of candidates. It would also require control of both Houses of Congress as well as the White House.Many of Houston's largest energy companies are courting new college graduates, even as the oil and gas industry sheds workers by the thousands.
Rice University expects that its career fair in mid-September will draw almost 150 energy companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp., Enterprise Products, Halliburton and Schlumberger. Demand is so intense, organizers say, that about 20 booths will have to be set up in a hallway.
Several energy companies keep coming back to campus despite oil's downturn because they need to maintain a talent pipeline, especially for hard-to-fill positions. Further, they want to nurture their collegiate ties so they will have first dibs on the best and brightest once the economy improves.
"They don't want to make the same mistake they made in the 1980s," said Nicole Van Den Heuvel, Rice's director of the Center for Career Development.
During that epic bust, many large energy companies eliminated on-campus recruiting efforts, losing a generation of potential talent that pursued other careers. But many senior-level executives now recognize that such shortsighted decisions contributed to the talent shortages in specialty areas that they're still grappling with today, said Angie Gildea, who leads the talent management group for energy at KPMG in Houston.
Houston-based Halliburton has cut nearly 14,000 jobs worldwide since last year, when oil prices began plummeting from more than $100 a barrel to around $40. Still, the oil services giant is taking a long-term view toward hiring, spokeswoman Susie McMichael said in a statement. In some cases, the company has unique positions to fill, but overall, it wants to sustain its talent pipeline and its brand reputation on campus.
Shell takes a similar long-term approach.
"Our graduate career opportunities remain healthy, and our current university recruitment targets have not been impacted by the current business environment," spokesman Ray Fisher said in a written statement.
"They're still coming," agreed Jamie Belinne, assistant dean for career services at the University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business.
Belinne was worried about the upcoming attendance of a job fair next month. But just a week after one big Houston company announced layoffs, she got a request from the company for a recruiting booth.
So far, she has confirmed 130 employers - including Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips - and has room for 15 more. Belinne is confident the career fair will be full by the time the booths are unpacked, the banners are hung and the brochures are displayed on the tables.
Part of her confidence stems from three pre-recruiting mixers the college already hosted that drew 30 to 45 employers at each.
Belinne acknowledged that energy companies are not taking on as many new workers as they did when oil prices were soaring. Employment in some specific areas, such as the construction of oil field platforms, has fallen dramatically, she said.
Nor have low oil prices deterred student attendance at job fairs.
Last fall, Kathleen Tillman went into her senior year at Texas A&M University feeling confident. She had just finished an internship with Tenaris, a Luxembourg-based pipe and tube maker, and had a job offer in hand upon her graduation with a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering. After looking at other opportunities, she accepted a spot in technical sales that is part of a trainee program that provides extensive training, job rotations and international experience, including seven months in Argentina.
By the time spring rolled around and oil prices were plummeting, several of Tillman's fellow engineering students were panicking. Some couldn't find openings, and offers to others were being revoked.
"I feel pretty fortunate," Tillman said. "A lot of stars aligned."
Tenaris' global trainee program coordinator, Morgan Stelly, allowed that the company doesn't have as many openings for new graduates as it has had in previous years. But it has decided this is the right time to ramp up rather than pull back its presence on several key college campuses.
The company already has a strong toehold at Texas A&M and would like to increase its presence at such schools as UH and the University of Texas, Stelly said.
"We want to be a big name on campus," she said.Armed with pikes and halberds, they have defended Popes for more than five centuries, but the elite soldiers of the Swiss Guard have revealed an unexpected culinary side to their duties, with the publication of a book of favourite pontifical recipes.
The cookbook, entitled "Buon Appetito, Swiss Guard", reveals the particular tastes of Pope Francis and his two predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II, shedding light on classic dishes from their home countries of Argentina, Germany and Poland.
The current occupant of the Seat of St Peter has a sweet tooth – one of Pope Francis’s favourite dishes is “dulche de leche”, a milk pudding that originates from his native Argentina.
He is also keen on spicy empanadas, as well as “colita de cuadril”, or grilled sirloin steak.
The recipe book, published this week, has been compiled by David Geisser, a 24-year-old soldier from Zurich who joined the Swiss Guard in February 2013, having been a professional cook in civilian life.
He compiled the recipes, while the text was written by Sgt Erwin Niederberger, 36, who was a trained pastry chef in Zug before joining the elite corps in 1999.
“The idea came from our commandant about two years ago. He checks out the background of new recruits and he saw that Geisser had published a couple of cook books in Switzerland,” Sgt Niederberger told The Telegraph.
“The book reveals a lot about the daily lives and the history of the Swiss Guard.”
John Paul II was particularly partial to “pierogi”, a type of Polish dumpling made from unleavened dough which are stuffed with potato, sauerkraut, meat, cheese or fruit.
“After he was shot in St Peter’s Square in 1981, he ate pierogi while he was recuperating in hospital – it made him feel at home and gave him a bit of comfort,” said Sgt Niederberger.
“They are typical of Cracow, which is where the Pope was from – they are a sort of Polish ravioli.”
Benedict XVI, who created history last year when he abruptly resigned as Pope, loves specialities from his native Bavaria, including wurstel salad, a pork dish called ‘schweinsbraten’ and baked cherries topped with whipped cream.
They too are in the hardcover book, which was launched in Switzerland on Wednesday and has so far only been published in German.
If it proves popular, it will be published in English next year.
Daniel Anrig, the commander of the elite corps, said no one should be surprised that the Swiss Guard held food in such high regard.
"A soldier can only fight and wage war when he has eaten sufficiently and well," he said.
The introduction to the book said it would appeal to anyone interested in cooking as well as people who were curious about the Swiss Guard and “some of the secrets of the Vatican”.
The cookbook also contains the favourite recipes of people close to the Popes.
Georg Ganswein, a German monsignor who is private secretary to both Benedict and Francis, loves “saltimbocca alla romana”, which consists of prosciutto and veal cooked in white wine and butter.
Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, is an aficionado of gnocchi, or potato dumplings.
Along with cooking suggestions, the book includes the prayers that the guards recite before sitting down to eat in their barracks inside the Vatican City State, the world’s smallest sovereign nation.
The Swiss Guard was formed in 1506 as a body of mercenary fighters by Pope Julius II.
The tiny force, which consists of around 110 officers and men, is responsible for the Pope’s safety and the security of the Vatican in general.
They can be seen on guard outside the Vatican every day, dressed in striped blue, red and gold uniforms and carrying halberds as their traditional weapons.
The Swiss Guard’s most significant military engagement was in 1527 when 190 guards died fighting Holy Roman Empire troops during the Sack of Rome, allowing Clement VII to flee to safety from the Vatican through a stone passageway.
The corps works alongside the city state’s equally small police force, the Vatican Gendarmerie.By Tony Romeo
HARRISBURG, Pa. (CBS) — The ongoing debate over raising the minimum wage continued in the state Capitol this past week.
Supporters of an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour held an event at the state Capitol at which time they released a study on the impact it would have on Pennsylvania by The Keystone Research Center — for whom Mark Price serves as a labor economist.
“We estimate that roughly that roughly $1.8 billion would be stimulated into the economy if we raised the minimum wage to $10.10,” Price says. “That increased spending would in turn generate 6,000 jobs.”
But Alex Halper of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry says there are studies showing a negative impact.
“I think numbers that we’ve seen from very legitimate, authoritative sources like the Congressional Budget Office are pretty compelling,” he says.
Governor Tom Wolf supports an increase in the state’s minimum wage.When Japan got its hands on a Marvel property back in the 1970s, it added something that is now recognized as very Japanese: giant robots, which Japanese Supaidaman used to battle his foes like a web-slinging Gundam pilot (even though the original Mobile Suit Gundam wouldn’t make its debut until two years later).
Jump to today, and both Marvel and Gundam are going strong in their respective home countries. However, if Marvel ever wants to increase its market share in Japan, maybe they should be working to create Gundam robots versions of their most famous characters. If you’re having a hard time imagining that crossover, we’ve found some fan art that will have you writing letters to both companies to make this happen.
On the Facebook page DC/Marvel-Comics/Movies, fans are encouraged to share creations, gossip and chat about all things comic book and movie-related. The moderators themselves will share amazing things they have found too and we have to admit that a Gundam/Marvel crossover is pretty intriguing. The original art was done by Aburaya Tonbi on pixiv and this is certainly a mashup that we are huge fans of.
▼ Spider-Man keeps his slim figure for increased mobility and speed.
▼ Cap still looks extremely patriotic and we can only imagine what kind of damage his shield does now.
▼ We imagine Tony Stark doesn’t care about how much this upgrade cost, since he’s a billionaire.
▼ Gerbera Black Widow is ready to put the sting on other robots.
▼ Gelgoog Marine Hawkeye looks like he is still bringing a bow to a fight with super-advanced technology.
▼ Mighty Thor becomes even mightier with the edition of tons and tons of metal.
▼ Loki always seems a little top-heavy, but he’s a god.
▼ This huge green machine is still smashing all those who get in his way.
▼ The “twins” live again!
▼Eye patch? Check.
▼ Ant Man and Wasp are a deadly and dynamic mini-Gundam duo.
▼ And we thought Professor X was dangerous with just his telepathy…
▼ Magneto looks a bit like Onslaught here, but don’t tell him we said that.
▼ Emma Frost is still wearing a revealing costume in robot form.
▼ Wolverine keeps his claws and iconic colors, but we have to wonder if he still has super healing
▼ Like Wolverine, this Gundam is ready for close quarters combat
▼ Sorry, Cyclops, even now no one likes you…
▼ In a non-mutant world, Juggernaut probably would be a sumo wrestler.
▼ The Silver Samurai is already wearing armor, so this isn’t much of a stretch.
▼ “Master Strange,” bringing an element of magic to a futuristic world
▼ Deadpool’s Kapool “DeadKapool” already knows that you love him.
▼ Brother and sister reunited in robot form.
▼ Kinda perfect, since Goufs already use that similar whip-like weapon.
▼ Taskmaster isn’t a super popular character, but he fits pretty well with the Gyan.
▼ Not sure how well Ghost Rider’s flaming head will burn in outer space…
▼ Acguy Racoon & Catol “I am” Groot
▼ Gundam “Punisher” is ready to make up for all the mistakes he made in life
Whether you’re an Avengers fan, an X-men fan, or a fan of any of Marvel’s other iconic comic book characters, there’s something for everyone. Just like the multitude of robots in Mobile Suit Gundam, they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors. You can find more of Aburaya Tonbi’s work on his pixiv page, so be sure to check it out if you like this fan art.
Related: Aburaya Tonbi Pixiv page
Source: Facebook/DC-Marvel-Comics/Movies
Top image: Facebook/DC-Marvel-Comics/Movies (1, 2) (edited by RocketNews24)The debates prompted by the Panama Papers, while usefully illuminating the extraordinary corruption of many foreign leaders, may have distracted us from the real problem in Britain. Unlike in Russia or China, the corruption in British politics does not stem from those in power abusing their position for personal enrichment. Instead, it comes from the structure of our decaying political system. Propped up by money from vested interests, the rigid two-party straitjacket has left the UK with a malfunctioning democracy and led to widespread public disillusionment.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s clear that people are looking for a new kind of politics that goes beyond traditional party lines: a politics first and foremost of engagement and transparency, not reducible to the old left-right divide.
The barriers to political participation must be removed and the stranglehold of the big party machines broken
After leaving David Cameron’s staff and moving to California in 2012, I founded a tech startup – Crowdpac – to give American voters the tools and information to help build a better democracy, and now we’re bringing the site to the UK. My background may be on the right of politics but this is not a party-political endeavour, and will be led by one of Britain’s leading leftwing campaigners Paul Hilder (previously of 38 Degrees, Change.org, the Labour party and other movements).
Change is long overdue. In the 1950s, politics was simpler. Workers voted Labour, the middle class and the wealthy voted Conservative. About 90% of votes went to one of these two parties. But by 2015, the combined total had dropped to just over two-thirds. Voters today are searching for new options beyond the two-party model.
In today’s age of nearly unlimited information, our world views are nuanced and sophisticated, but our creaking democratic processes struggle to reflect this. Where do you go if you are a Conservative on the economy, a Green on the environment, Labour on social justice, Liberal Democrat on human rights? That is not an unusual combination. But Westminster politics still pushes a false, binary simplicity.
This is where the corruption comes in, because the principal barrier to a more open and diverse politics in the UK is money. Thankfully, it plays a far lesser role in Britain than America – where money from fundraising Super Pacs dominates campaigning. But even here, you need cash to stand for office, to run a campaign, to get elected. Who can afford to do that? Only the centralised party organisations. And where do they get their money? The same old sectoral interests – the financial industry on the right and the unions on left.
Time for decent Tories to speak up. Our democracy is being rigged | Owen Jones Read more
Even if an independent candidate does get on the ballot, it’s next to impossible for voters to discover that there might be someone outside the two-party system who genuinely matches their views.
This is what we hope to change with Crowdpac. The first, very basic version will include a “political matchmaker” that gives you a personal political map and shows voters in London the mayoral candidates closest to their views. But ultimately we will be introducing crowdfunding tools designed for political action, to empower people to fund the change they want to see rather than just taking what they’re given by the political establishment. This has already been used in the US by one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement to crowdfund his campaign to be mayor of Baltimore, and by anti-Trump Republicans running a campaign to draft House speaker Paul Ryan to run for president.
If we’re ever going to see the kind of modern, responsive and open-minded politics that people are crying out for, we have to break the grip of the party machines and get more independent, and independent-minded, candidates elected to office, at every level of government. But such candidates face enormous obstacles. Only parties have the muscle to win most elections, and party insiders control candidate selections tightly.
The barriers to political participation must be removed and the stranglehold of the big party machines broken, so that the power can be taken out of the hands of the insiders, the moneyed interests and the Westminster power brokers – and put where it belongs: in the hands of the people.By David on Tuesday 9 March 2010, 19:27
Hello world,
we are a bunch of millions of developers and users. We want our libre software we create, develop, maintain & use to exist as long as human beings exist, to preserve our citizen freedom and such other things...
We need the corresponding technologies to make it as efficient as it could be, because we often don't have infinite energy to get all of those done...
That's also why Ada has something to bring to the GNU Community.
Goals :
Communicate & Promote to the GNU community about the amazing open Ada technology that is available.
Present and promote all Ada Open Source Projects & Initiatives that can interest the GNU Community.
Promote software engineering to the GNU Community
Get prepared :
Brainstorm about the GGA Initiative, complete the goals
What tools do we need? (Wiki,...)
How to communicate nicely?
Brainstorm about how to launch the GGA initiative
(Contents, Events, Comic Strips, Tutorials...)
Act :
Create categories for all kinds of subjects
(Software Engineering, Process, Technology, Education,...)
(Software Engineering, Process, Technology, Education,...) For each category create the key ideas we want to share
For each category create the contents, events, comics, tutorials,...
For each category add the links to other Ada websites, projects & initiatives
...
To get redactor permission on the GGA Initiative, please subscribe at http://www.gandi.net/login/new and send your login name at [1], I will add it to the redactor list.
Do not hesitate to discuss about it on your preferred newsgroups, may be a redactor would input the discussion synthesis on the blog.
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Get a free DNS using your new account at https://dix.gandi.net/ (10_000 left until the 10 march 2010)
[1] contact@ this host name (without blog.)The facts of the Plymouth case challenge our understanding of human nature. Not simply the idea that people can find pleasure in the sexual abuse of very young children. But the revelation that women were involved.
But, as I have reported here before, child abuse is far more commonplace than most people comprehend and there are an increasing number of studies suggesting the involvement of women is significantly under-reported.
According to research by the National Centre on Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States, the sexual abuse of children by women "constituted 25% (approximately 36,000 children) of the sexually abused victims" in their study. "This statistic is thought to be underestimated due to the tendency of non-disclosure by victims", the report goes on.
In the UK, Childline says that 11% of the calls received from children alleging sexual abuse suggest the perpetrator is a woman.
The NSPCC says that women are the abusers in 6% of cases highlighted in their study.
However, all these estimates - from the last few years - are far higher than had previously been acknowledged.
Michele Elliott, founder of the children's charity Kidscape and author of the book Female Sexual Abuse of Children: The Ultimate Taboo put it this way today:
"Women abuse children for the same reason men abuse children - for sexual gratification, for power. Quite frankly it is something they enjoy doing. I know that is hard for the rest of us to comprehend but women are no different than men in that case."
In June this year, the Australian child welfare charity Child Wise began a television advertising campaign highlighting the risks from sexual abuse by people entrusted with the care of children. You can see the latest ad here.
Child Wise has calculated that almost a third of sex abuse by women takes place in an organisational setting, notably kindergartens and baby-sitting. The majority of such abusers are not coerced by a man but initiate the abuse themselves. The damage can last a lifetime.
Police in Britain fear that new technology has made all forms of child abuse easier and more commonplace.
As in today's case, the internet allows paedophiles to communicate and share child pornography. Mobile phone cameras mean images can be shot and disseminated around the world within seconds.
A kindergarten close to the Plymouth nursery involved in today's case is banning mobiles with cameras on its premises. But risk can never be eliminated.
Background checks on staff won't spot those who have never abused before. The new vetting scheme currently being rolled out across England, Wales and Northern Ireland would not have helped in this case.
But there is another danger too. That we allow fears about paedophilia to damage the relationship between adults and children and to undermine the trust that makes communities function.Today, we will be discussing knee injuries, the scourge of all competitive athletes. We have all heard of horror stories about freak knee injuries and long training lay-offs. However, few athletes have a good understanding of what actually occurs when they “tweak” their knee.
Let’s start by taking a look at the anatomy of the knee:
Knee anatomy 101
The knee joint is basically the junction between the femur (thigh bone) and the tibia (shin). It allows for movement in the form of extension (kicking out) and flexion (curling in) of the shin. There are various factors that ensure that the joint is stable and movement occurs only in the ways stated above and not in any other direction.
Firstly, the joint is supported by various ligaments. Ligaments are tough, fibrous connective tissue that help to hold the joint together and prevent any unwanted movements. The main ligaments of the knee joint are the collateral ligaments and the cruciate ligaments.
The medial (side on the inner part of the thigh) and the lateral (side on the outer part of the thigh) collateral ligaments prevent the shin from moving side to side with respect to the thigh.
The anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments prevent the shin from moving forward and backward with respect to the thigh. They also prevent the shin from twisting around the long axis of the thigh.
Secondly, there is a tough protective capsule surrounding the knee. This capsule is filled with synovial fluid, a kind of lubricating fluid that helps reduce friction.
Thirdly, the joint is supported by the tone of the muscles. The quadriceps and the hamstrings help to stabilize the joint by pulling the two ends of bone together.
Lastly, the joint also has a rim of connective tissue called the menisci that encircle the surface of the joint. Each meniscus improves the stability of the joint by creating a better fit between the thigh and the shin. The menisci also help to distribute the load evenly over the joint during movement.
Furthermore, the surfaces of the joint in contact with each other are lined with cartilage, which act as a protective cushion that prevents bone from grinding against bone.
That in a nutshell, is the basic anatomy of the knee. Knowledge of the structures of the knee is important, as it is these structures that get damaged in knee injuries.
Anterior cruciate ligament tears
Introduction
The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is the most commonly injured knee ligament. In the United States there are between 100,000 and 200,000 ACL ruptures per year. [1]
ACL tears can occur via contact or non-contact injuries. Contact-related ACL injuries usually occur from a direct blow causing hyperextension or valgus deformation (Knee collapsing inwards) of the knee. This is often seen when an athlete’s foot is planted and an opponent strikes or lands on him on the outer aspect of the planted leg.
It can also occur if the knee is forcibly twisted, such as in a heel hook.
Non-contact ACL injuries occur when an athlete who is running or jumping suddenly decelerates and changes direction (e.g. cutting) or pivots or lands in a way that involves rotation or valgus stress of the knee.
Predisposing factors
Gender
Interestingly, female athletes have higher rates of non-contact ACL tears as compared to male athletes across most sports. [2] Several explanations have been proposed by researchers:
Female athletes tend to have quadriceps-dominant deceleration. Dominance refers to the muscle group being used preferentially to control deceleration. Several studies have found that in female athletes the quadriceps group generally contracts first during deceleration, while in men the hamstring group generally contracts first. The quadriceps muscles are less effective at preventing the tibia from moving forward with respect to the femur, which increases the stress placed on the ACL. [3]
Studies have also shown that women generally have weaker hamstrings and greater strength imbalances between the two muscle groups, and such imbalances increase knee instability. [4]
These findings suggest an important role for injury prevention training designed to correct relative muscle weakness and imbalance.
Increased valgus angulation of the knee during sudden changes in direction or landing greatly increases the stress placed on the ACL.
Several biomechanical studies have found that female athletes are more likely to place their knees in positions of increased valgus angulation when changing direction or landing. [5] Thus, training to correct faulty biomechanics may reduce susceptibility to ACL injury.
Studies of ballet and modern dancers illustrate the importance of relative muscle weakness and poor biomechanics as risk factors for ACL tears. Dance training involves holding positions that strengthen the knees, hip stabilizers and torso, and perfecting jumping and landing technique.
Female dancers sustain ACL injuries at much lower rates than female athletes in other sports. [6] Studies |
just 4GB so no need for that. After all, this is not meant for day-to-day use or long-run use.c- Device for Boot Loader Installation MUST be:/dev/sdc ImationFlashDrive (4.1 GB) is the MBR of your USB Drive.If you are going to install Lubuntu Boot Loader (GRUB2) to the MBR (sdc) of your USB Drive, then you are NOT going to mess with your Internal HDD and its Boot Loader no matter what OS you have there.This is the safest way to do it. Later, will explain in details how safe and good that is.d- Please, make sure this is the final screen that you'll see before you go on with the installation:e- Click on Install Now. The installation will start and once it's done, restart your machine.As long as your USB is plugged in AND as long as your BIOS has the same settings/configuration that you set at the beginning of this guide THEN... your machine will BOOT FIRST from your USB Drive.It's okay to install Lubuntu GRUB2 to the MBR of your internal HDD but that will replace and overwrite whatever is installed on the MBR of your internal HDD. Above all, your USB MUST BE Plugged in ALL THE TIME because GRUB2 files will be stored in your USB Drive since you have installed Lubuntu over there.This is NOT recommended AT ALL. Please avoid that.USB Devices are mobile devices that you can carry with you wherever you go. If you make sure to install GRUB2 during the above installation on the MBR of your USB Drive then you are basically creating a mobile OS that can work on any machine and you are not messing around with your internal boot loader.As always, this guide will be updated on daily basis if neededEnjoy!Boston Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge said he has not spoken with the core members of his team about their future plans, but suggested Thursday that he anticipates that both head coach Doc Rivers and center Kevin Garnett will be back with the team next season.
Making his final weekly appearance of the 2012-13 season on Boston sports radio WEEI, Ainge said he is giving both Rivers and Garnett space to make decisions about their futures, but has no reason to believe that, with both under contract with the team next season, they won't return.
"Doc is always unsure [about his future]," Ainge said. "Coaching is very, very draining. Every year with Doc, he's had to go home and sort of recharge and ask himself that question, 'Is this something that I'm passionate about and want to continue doing?' I understand that. And we sorta give him time to unwind and relax, and after a couple of 92s on the golf course, he usually comes back."
Pressed further on what he believes Rivers will do next season, Ainge added, "I think Doc will be coaching the Boston Celtics."
Rivers signed a five-year, $35 million contract extension with the Celtics following the 2010-11 season. That hasn't stopped his name from dancing in rumors about other vacant jobs, and a report by ESPN's Stephen A. Smith suggested there were whispers around the league about a potential deal that could land Rivers, Garnett, and Paul Pierce with the Los Angeles Clippers as part of a blockbuster swap.
Said an amused Ainge: "Hey, listen, those things are silly. Those are a waste of time to even acknowledge."
Pressed on Smith's suggestion that there could be lingering friction between Ainge and Rivers, Ainge added, "Well, you'd have to ask Doc what he thinks, but what I think is that I have the best coach in the NBA and I'm not the least bit tired of hearing his voice. We have a great relationship from what I feel, and what I perceive, and so I have no idea where that's coming from. But it's certainly not coming from my side of the table."
When the conversation swung to Garnett, Ainge said he approaches that situation very similarly to the way he does Rivers.
"I do the same thing as I do with Doc: I give him some time away and I'll touch base with KG probably sometime next week," Ainge said. "He's put so much into the game, he invests as much as any player I've ever seen. And he just needs time to chill and contemplate his life and then we'll talk at some future time. But I do anticipate that KG will play. Just like I did last year, I feel the same this year. I don't know for sure, but we'll know more in the next couple weeks."
Ainge admitted the first decision as far as team personnel likely will start with Pierce, who is set to enter the final year of a deal scheduled to pay him $15.3 million for the 2013-14 season. Only $5 million is guaranteed in the deal, and the Celtics have their amnesty clause in play if they wanted to move on without Pierce.
Ainge was asked about what goes into deciding Pierce's future in Boston.
"Conversation with my coach, conversation with Paul and his representatives," Ainge told WEEI. "Opportunities that may present themselves. There's a lot that will go into it, but it hasn't even started yet, we have until June 30 to make any decision.
"Listen, Paul's been one of the greatest Celtics of all time and that will play part in it. We love what he's done for us, but ultimately we have to do what we think is the best for us from this point forward. And I think that Paul still has a lot of basketball left in him."
Ainge also offered a positive update on point guard Rajon Rondo, who is rehabbing from ACL surgery in February.
"So far he looks good; him and [Leandro] Barbosa [who the Celtics also lost to an ACL tear in February] have both been rehabbing and both have looked good from their ACL [surgeries]," Ainge said.
"From everything our medical staff has told us, Rondo is doing great and he should be ready by training camp."On September 18th, 2012, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new bi-partisan bill that reduces workers’ compensation costs for businesses in California, while also increasing the benefits for people who were injured on the job. It is estimated that the bill will save businesses in California close to $1 billion in the upcoming year and it also allows for increased payments to disabled workers. However, the bill limits litigation, a limit which will allow fewer benefits for people who are unable to return to work.
The bill, SB863, would change how benefits are calculated for injured workers in California. It also creates a binding arbitration process to resolve coverage disputes and eliminates coverage for conditions that most commonly resulted in lawsuits in the past. These conditions include issues like insomnia and mental health disorders.
One major issue opponents have with SB863 is that the bill restricts the ability of an injured worker to access certain medical treatments and it also restricts compensation if a worker is permanently injured. More importantly, permanently disabled workers will not be able to return to work at the same pay grade.
Iowans can expect to see very few, if any, changes to the current Iowa workers’ compensation laws. That said, the old adage in politics – as California goes, so goes the nation – is in full effect. James P Hoffman is an attorney based in Iowa who specializes in workers compensation law, personal injury, and social security disability, who can help you navigate these changes. Currently, the laws in Iowa are slated to stay the same, but there are still compensation issues Iowa is overcoming. A pressing one: wage theft
According to the Iowa Policy Project, non-injured Iowans may be losing as much as $600 million each year due to wage theft. Issues such as nonpayment of wages, tipped job violations, and improperly classified employers are literally adding up to the millions.
The case cited by the Iowa Policy Project was that of Henry’s Turkey Service, located in Atalissa. Henry’s Turkey Service hired developmentally disabled workers in jobs at West Liberty Foods, a West Liberty turkey processor.
Henry’s collected from the wages and Social Security disability payments; in return, the men were paid a $65 monthly stipend that did not vary for hours worked or overtime. Monthly deductions were taken for room and board and “kind care.” There were no written authorizations for the deductions and eventually these unscrupulous business practices resulted in 9,000 separate violations and a $1 million fine. The Department of Labor added another $1.7 million to the fine for unpaid wages and penalties.
If a worker was injured on the job, denied benefits, or is having difficulty with Social Security, he should consider taking legal action. A lawyer that is well-versed in the principles of Iowa workers’ compensation and personal injury law can get the rewards and benefits an injured party is entitled to. An inexperienced lawyer, in contrast, may fall short.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Liverpool are ready to make a move for Newcastle’s England winger Andros Townsend.
Townsend, 24, has a £10.5m buy-out clause in his contract and Newcastle face a major battle to keep him after being relegated to the Championship.
Liverpool have joined the growing list of Premier League clubs who have shown an interest in the England international.
Manchester City are another big gun watching developments while Crystal Palace, Southampton and West Ham have all registered serious interest.
(Image: Reuters)
Townsend would represent good value for Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp wants to bring in more pace to his attack at Anfield.
Rather like with City, if Liverpool cannot get one of their bigger more expensive targets then they will look towards Townsend.
As a result, Townsend is likely to bide his time on his future after becoming aware of big clubs being keen on him.
That may mean potential deals drag on as Newcastle are desperate to keep him - but fear they could be fighting a losing battle.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play nowWe published an article by James Ferguson a few weeks ago pointing out that it is entirely possible for a family on tax credits to work very few hours a week but still take home an income similar to that of a junior barrister or doctor. Several readers have taken issue with this.
The tax credit and benefit system is ridiculously complicated (the easiest way to check all benefit entitlements is to use this website) so rather than bicker back and forth on it we are looking at some worked examples.
Here’s the first – a family with three children living near Devizes in Wiltshire. One parent works 24 hours a week at £7 an hour (the magic number when it comes to tax credits). The other does not work.
The family’s total earned income comes to £8,700 (take-home pay is £8,623 after NI). Their tax credits come to £11,930.10. Their council tax assistance is £685.33 and their Housing Benefit comes to another £6,950. On top of that they get child benefit of £2,501.20. That gives a taxpayer-funded benefits total of £22,067.63 (£424.31 a week).
Add that to the earned income and you get £30,690.53. That money is tax free. If it were earned in the free market by someone not in receipt of benefits it would equate to a pre-tax income of just over £40,500. Junior doctor levels? Yup.
Here are several other examples (thanks to our web researcher, Marina Gerner). A family, again with one parent working for 24 hours a week on £7 an hour, and the other parent not working at all, would earn the following:
With no kids: Pay is £8,700 (take-home pay is £8,623 after NI). Council tax help £492.19. Housing benefit £6,706.26. Total benefits (£7,198.45 per year/ £138.38 a week) plus actual earned money comes to a net £15,821.45. If it were earned by a single earner, non-benefit recipient, this would equate to a pre-tax income of about £18,750.
With two kids: Pay is £8,700 (take-home pay is £8,623 after NI). Total tax credits £9,114.06. Council tax help £432.91. Housing benefit £6,472.35. Child benefit £1,788.80. So total benefits (£17,813.12 per year/ £342.52 a week) plus actual earned money comes to a net £26,436.12. If earned by a single earner, non-benefit recipient, this would equate to a pre-tax income of about £34,500.
With five kids: Pay is £8,700 (take-home pay is £8,623 after NI). Total tax credits £17,458.86. Council tax help £753.38 Housing benefit £7,831.89. Child benefit £3,926.00. So total benefits (£29,970.13 per year/ £576.27 a week) plus actual earned money comes to a net £38,593.13. If it were earned by a single earner, non-benefit recipient it would equate to a pre-tax income of about £54,000.
Let’s take a different scenario. A two-parent family, with each working 35 hours a week, on £7 an hour.
With no kids: Joint gross pay is £25,382, which gives net take-home pay of £23,434. No tax credit or benefits.
With two kids: Joint gross pay is £25,382, which gives net take-home pay of £23,434. Total tax credits £3,023.82. No council tax help but housing benefit is £795.98. Child benefit £1,788.80. So total benefits (£5,608.60 per year/ £107.86 a week) plus actual earned money comes to net pay of £29,042.60. This equates to a pre-tax household income of around £33,600, assuming that each partner gets paid the same (roughly £16,800 each).
With three kids: Joint gross pay is £25,382, which gives net take-home pay of £23,434. Total tax credits £5,805.42. No council tax help but housing benefit is £1,249.16. Child benefit £2,501.20. So total benefits (£9,555.78 per year/ £183.76 a week) plus actual earned money comes to net pay of £32,989.78. This equates to a pre-tax household income of around £39,500, assuming that each partner gets paid the same (roughly £19,750 each).
With five kids: Joint gross pay is £25,382, which gives net take-home pay of £23,434. Total tax credits £11,368.62. No council tax help but housing benefit is £2,155.52. Child benefit £3,926.00. So total benefits (£17,450.14 per year/ £335.58 a week) plus actual earned money comes to net pay of £40,884.14. This equates to a pre-tax household income of around £51,000, assuming that each partner gets paid the same (roughly £25,500 each).
One parent working for 24 hours a week on £7 an hour Two parents each working 35 hours a week on £7 an hour Number of children 0 2 3 5 0 2 3 5 Gross pay £8,700 £8,700 £8,700 £8,700 £25,382 £25,382 £25,382 £25,382 Take-home pay after NI £8,623 £8,623 £8,623 £8,623 £23,434 £23,434 £23,434 £23,434 Tax credits £0 £9,114.06 £11,930.10 £17,458.86 £0 £3,023.82 £5,805.42 £11,368.62 Council Tax help £492.19 £432.91 £685.33 £753.38 £0 £0 £0 £0 Housing Benefit £6,706.26 £6,472.35 £6,950.00 £7,831.89 £0 £795.98 £1,249.16 £2,155.52 Child Benefit £0 £1,788.80 £2,501.20 £3,926.00 £0 £1,788.80 £2,501.20 £3,926.00 Total benefits £7,198.45 £17,813.12 £22,067.63 £29,970.13 £0 £5,608.60 £9,555.78 £17,450.14 Total net income £15,821.45 £26,436.12 £30,690.53 £38,593.13 £23,434.00 £29,042.60 £32,989.78 £40,884.14 Equivalent pre-tax income £18,750.00 £34,500.00 £40,500.00 £54,000.00 £25,382 £33,600 £39,500 £51,000
Look at these examples, and at the numbers in bold (the effective gross pay) in particular, and you will see something shocking. In most cases the effective gross pay of the family working 24 hours a week is higher than that of the family working 70 hours a week. And the net pay ends up slightly lower for the skivers than the hard workers – but only very slightly. In the end, the effect is that for every hour past the first 24 hours a week, the working couple (who let’s not forget are working nearly three times as many hours as the other lot) are between them getting an effective extra take-home wage of just £1 or so per hour.
We haven’t just made these numbers up for political effect. They are what they are. That’s something that explains an awful lot about the UK. It explains just why so many people work part time (why wouldn’t you?) and it makes a damn good start at explaining why our welfare bill is so utterly out of control.
We aren’t encouraging people to work full time in productive jobs – and to work their way up within them paying tax as they go. No, we are actively incentivising people to take low paid part time jobs and to stay in those low paid part time jobs, taking benefits as they go. The way the system works, they’d be crazy not to. After all, there aren’t many things you can do that make you £50,000 plus for working 24 hours a week.NBA Players Association executive director Michele Roberts has garnered attention and respect with her strong statements and staunch representation of the players’ interests since taking over the position last August.
Perhaps her words have created the perception that rocky times lie ahead for the league and its players as negotiations begin for a new collective bargaining agreement. The NBPA will opt out of the current agreement — consummated after the 2011 lockout — following the 2016-17 season, but Roberts told the Globe last week that she is optimistic that not only a new deal could be reached without another work stoppage, but perhaps prior to the current CBA expiration.
While the NBPA quickly rejected the “smoothing” concept suggested by commissioner Adam Silver and owners regarding the expected exponential increase of the salary cap for the 2016-17 season, Roberts said she views the $24.9 billion war chest from the nine-year television deal as a positive, suggesting the league is fully healthy.
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“We want a deal. We want a deal that is as fair as we can get. We understand you’ve got to give a little to get a little,” she said. “There’s going to be a deal and my view is let’s get it done. Silver has said the same to me, so I think the good news is we don’t have the backdrop of poverty. There’s all this money. The game is growing in popularity. Everyone should be singing, ‘Hallelujah.’ They’ve got a new commissioner. I’m new. I have no bad blood with Adam because I don’t know him. Nor he with me. Everything in the world suggests we should be able to get through this without a problem. And if that doesn’t happen I would be, and I think Mr. Silver would be, disappointed.”
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When asked whether a deal could get done before 2017, Roberts said, “Sure. Wouldn’t it be great for everybody, the players, for the owners, and God knows the fans, if we could say these were the major issues that we knew we had to deal with and we saw no reason to wait until 2017, so we got them done? Not only is there not going to be any opting out, but we’ve agreed to these new terms and an extension of the CBA. Wouldn’t everybody just be delighted? It would be great for the game.”
The NBA and NBPA have discussed the league’s “smoothing” concept, a plan that would gradually increase the salary cap instead of dealing with a potential 33 percent increase in the first season after the new television deal begins in 2016-17. After meeting with the executive committee during All-Star Weekend, Roberts and the NBPA refused the offer. She did say, however, there are no contentious feelings between the sides. In 2011, the players and owners waged war until a last-minute agreement ended the lockout, reducing the schedule to 66 games.
“I give the commissioner the benefit of the doubt,” Roberts said. “I believe he will try to get the best deal he can for the owners and I fully expect him to know that I will try to get the best deal I can for the players. That should not create hostility because as a lawyer I’ve always understood that my ‘opponent’ is representing [their] client the best they can, as I do.
“We know there has to be a deal, or there’s going to be a work stoppage. And then we all have to deal with the wrath of the fans. The one thing that I would like to believe, and still believe, is that the commissioner, the league, the owners as much as the players, do not want [a work stoppage].”
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Roberts said she hopes both sides are willing to concede items for a fair deal.
“$24.9 billion ain’t a problem,” Roberts said from her New York office. “There’s only a problem because the owners have suggested that there is, that there’s a problem with the injection of that money into the system. Frankly, we don’t quite understand why that’s a problem. If it’s not a problem that the teams can make more money, why is it a problem if the players are going to make more money?
“It’s too bad that this successful [television contract] negotiation has suddenly become a problem that I can’t get my arms around.”
Roberts said she told Silver after being selected as director that she would need time to form a staff and research league issues. She said that process is nearly done, meaning substantive talks can begin perhaps this year.
“They can begin to happen very soon, and that’s our plan,” she said.
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There is a concern that old factions will affect the new negotiations, some owners refusing to relent on anything for fear of reverting to their 2011 financial issues, and a group of players who felt the owners were exaggerating their losses four years ago, especially after the $2 billion sale of the Clippers. In negotiations with players in 2011, the league claimed perhaps two-thirds of the 30 teams were losing money.
“That’s why it may have been unfortunate if there was some misrepresentations made about the health of some of these teams because you only create mistrust going into the next round of negotiations,” Roberts said. “That’s unfortunate. I would submit that it’s in the league’s best interest not to try to do that again. Don’t try that again. There’s no human being out there that’s reasonable that, having heard about the TV deal, and if you’re aware that gross receipts are going up, ticket sales are going up, I’d be very disappointed if we heard that cry of poverty again.
“So if we could avoid a repetition of that cry of poverty and all the mistrust referenced by the players can be resolved, we can go on and not say, ‘You lied to me,’ but just go back to business.’’
Roberts is setting the climate for negotiations, but she doesn’t want to offer the impression that players will be intractable on all issues. Besides finding common ground on how to split basketball-related income and perhaps an adjustment to the salary cap structure, there are issues such as the schedule, age limits, and standard penalties for off-court issues that are negotiable, according to Roberts.
“There’s always going to be a give-and-give,” she said. “There will be some items that will be of no consequence to the players. ‘Sure, you want that? It doesn’t affect us. Fine.’ It’s never a good thing to walk in and say, ‘My position is not going to move.’ We just have to keep talking.
“Lockouts happen when you stop talking. Strikes happen when you stop talking. You keep talking, and talk until you have a new contract.”
During past negotiations, there was major ambivalence among the players, especially some of the star players. There was disenchantment among many players with previous executive director Billy Hunter, who was removed from his position in a vote following the agreement on the last CBA.
Roberts appears to have increased participation from the players, and the NBPA scored a coup by adding four-time MVP LeBron James to the executive committee. James was occasionally active during the previous CBA talks, but Roberts anticipates the players will be more prepared for this round.
“Every meeting we’ve had when we’ve discussed these issues, the players have been thoroughly engaged,” she said. “I am told that there was not this level of discourse with my predecessor and the teams. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t do something, if not spend the entire day, preparing for these negotiations.”
NAMING RIGHTS
Ex-Celtic Walker is ready for rebranding
He’s no longer Bill Walker, who played 37 games over his first two NBA seasons in Boston before being traded to the New York Knicks. He is Henry Walker, who has transformed himself into a key component off the bench for the Miami Heat after more than two years out of the NBA.
In 17 games, Walker has averaged 8.1 points, and he hit four 3-pointers in the Heat’s 93-86 win over the Celtics on Wednesday. Once a high-flyer brimming with potential, Walker was humbled by his NBA experiences after being waived by the Knicks following the 2012 season.
He never got an opportunity — or earned an opportunity — to play more, and suddenly he was a memory.
“I just didn’t have fun coming and playing anymore,” he said. “It was more work than something that I love to do. I just had to step away from it. It gradually got to a point where I don’t even know if I want to play anymore. It was a tough time for me but I had a lot of maturing to do. Mostly it was on me, it was my fault. Things affected me that I could have taken control of and turned it into a positive. I let [it] linger on.”
Walker’s experience in Boston was mixed. He possessed talent, but coach Doc Rivers was never pleased with his work ethic. Walker was never in premium shape and never the last one to leave practice. After a storied prep career and strong freshman season at Kansas State, Walker thought he would immediately become an NBA standout.
But he sat on the bench as a little-used rookie, trying to soak in the experience of playing with Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen but lamenting his lack of playing time.
“When I was younger, I didn’t realize everything I had,” said Walker, who played in the NBADL, Venezuela, and the Philippines before signing a 10-day contract with Miami last month. “I was kind of one of those guys who felt like I was entitled instead of just going out there and trying to fit in with the team and do whatever I could to help the team. I was more trying to find my way instead of trying to find a role and be comfortable in that.
“I learned everything I know now from being over [in Boston]. The way you work. I loved it.”
The NBA is a roles league. Some players have massive roles, others minor roles, but those who learn their roles can flourish. Hundreds of big-time college players learned the hard way in the NBA that their game had limits, and were forced to learn more complementary roles.
“If you don’t have the mind to where you just want to come in and learn, you have to adapt because everybody’s the man where they came from,” Walker said. “You have to figure out how to try to fit into their culture. It’s hard for some guys when you’ve been the focal point your whole life, to come in and the balance isn’t on you anymore, you have to do a role. That was kind of hard for me to accept at first.
“Now I’m a little older and recognize that it’s better to have a role and play my role to best of my ability, be a star in my role. Instead of trying to dictate and do other things besides what the team is doing.”
Walker has had to redefine his game. He never fully got the springs back after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament twice before reaching the NBA, and his athleticism was matched and sometimes exceeded when he reached the highest level. That took time to digest.
“It was frustrating. I lost a lot of athleticism, a lot of quickness, a lot of verticality to my game,” he said. “I had to learn how to play without doing those things. It’s like having a Porsche or something but you can’t drive stick. It’s just sitting out there. It’s the landings for me. I can take off, it’s the landings that tear me up. I got kind of a ground game now. I’m learning that still myself. It’s sometimes where you feel, ‘Hey, I can make this play,’ but you’ve just got to play within the dynamic of the team.”
As for the name change, Walker said it was time for something different. He felt he had been typecast as a malcontent. He was miserable during his time with the Knicks and wanted a fresh start, so he went by his middle name.
“It’s like a corporation rebranding themselves,” he said with a bright smile. “They do it all the time. So I just took kind of a note of that, and just be better, and if I got the chance to do this again, just take full advantage of everything, work the hardest that I could, and it’s working out so far.”
Walker said the primary factor in his resurrection was fatherhood. He has a 3-year-old daughter and joked that he’s got her on that UConn plan, already shooting baskets on a Fisher-Price set.
“It slowed me down, all the things I used to think about when it was just me. I don’t even worry about that stuff anymore,” he said. “I’m just trying to do whatever I can to make sure my daughter’s future is set. It knocks out all the useless stuff you used to do. It gives you focus.”
There is still time for Walker to approach reaching his potential. He’s only 27 and has turned himself into a capable outside shooter and solid defender. It took years, but those lessons of preparation and professionalism have finally sunk in from the Boston days.
He realizes why Rivers was hard on him, and why he was shipped to the Knicks — the Celtics acquired Nate Robinson for an NBA Finals run. Walker harbors no bitterness, and embraces his new home and new identity.
“Some days I’m Bill Walker. It depends on how they know me,” he said. “I can’t even explain it, to be able to make it to the league, be out, and make it back again, it’s something I’ll be able to use to teach my daughter. I hope I inspire other people. It’s a blessing.”
Layups
While Celtics assistant coach Jay Larranaga has sparked interest from college programs, such as George Mason, where his father, Jim, led the Patriots to the Final Four in 2006, fellow assistant Walter McCarty is also an intriguing college prospect. McCarty was intrigued by the Holy Cross opening that was recently filled by Bill Carmody and would be interested in the right position. McCarty was an assistant at Louisville under former Celtics coach Rick Pitino... Kawhi Leonard said he is 100 percent healthy again, giving the Spurs their most versatile player back for the stretch run. Leonard will be a restricted free agent this summer and will receive his share of offer sheets, likely including one from the Celtics. Boston coach Brad Stevens gushed about Leonard’s defensive prowess... While the Rookie of the Year award seems headed to Minneapolis and Andrew Wiggins, Chicago’s Nikola Mirotic is making a late push by carrying the Bulls for the past few weeks. Mirotic is becoming a go-to player for coach Tom Thibodeau. After averaging just 7.1 points before the All-Star break, Mirotic is averaging 17.3 points in his last 19 games along with 6.9 rebounds. Among others making a push are Philadelphia’s Nerlens Noel and Orlando’s Elfrid Payton. The Celtics’ Marcus Smart, by the way, is 11th among rookies in scoring... As the season winds down, there are two players in jeopardy of one-game suspensions because of technical fouls. Phoenix’s Markieff Morris and Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook each have 14 technicals, leaving them two from receiving a suspension as their teams fight for playoff berths. Morris also has four flagrant foul points — as does Boston’s Smart — and is one flagrant 2 foul from a suspension... Two players have stood out to NBA scouts during the NCAA Tournament, and both are point guards. Ohio State’s D’Angelo Russell and Notre Dame’s Jerian Grant were both splendid distributing the ball and increased their draft stock... The Wizards signed former Celtic Will Bynum, who spent most of this season in China after being waived by Boston in October. Like many NBA players who have been cut loose, Bynum put up numbers overseas and returned when the Chinese Basketball Association season ended.
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Gary Washburn can be reached at gwashburn@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @GwashburnGlobe. Material from interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report.It’s no secret the role of the internet is changing. Even as it connects more computers, people, and ideas every day, governments and companies around the globe are becoming concerned that too much freedom isn’t such a good thing. Bills keep coming from all directions, designed to impose more governmental controls on the internet – readers from the U.S. may remember the SOPA firestorm of early this year. For zealous defenders of the free and open internet, it’s nothing short of war.
Vinton Cerf, Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” and one of the men sometimes referred to as a “father of the internet,” has a piece out in CNN about why he thinks that maintaining the free and open internet is vital to the future of humanity. It’s a primarily economic argument, though philosophy certainly has its place here. Here’s a little bit:
According to a new OECD study, the net already accounts of 13% of American business output, impacting every industry, from communications to cars, and restaurants to retail. Not since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, or Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, has a human invention empowered so many and offered so much possibility for benefiting humankind. Today, this free and open net is under threat. Some 42 countries filter and censor content out of the 72 studied by the Open Net Initiative. This doesn't even count serial offenders such as North Korea and Cuba. Over the past two years, Freedom House says governments have enacted 19 new laws threatening online free expression.
It’s no surprise that Cerf and Google favor the open internet – Google’s raison d'etre is organizing the vast stream of information that an unfettered internet makes available. It begins to look like a very different – and less important – company if governments enact large-scale controls on the internet. But corporate interests aside, Cerf’s argument is a strong one. In a way, it approaches libertarian capitalism by espousing the idea that no government is the best government. It’s interesting to think of the Internet as one of the few places where those ideas can actually be tested. He closes by reminding us that new technology is always feared.Some readers have asked whether the picture of very low taxes on the very rich changes once you take taxes on corporate profits into account, and impute them to stockholders. The answer is that yes, it does, somewhat — but there are a number of implications of such an imputation, and if I were a conservative, I really wouldn’t want to go there.
On the question of how profits taxation plays into tax burdens, the CBO has already done those calculations. In particular, it did a special version of its usual tax shares analysis that looked inside the top 0.01 percent, taking the data up through 2005 (pdf). According to this analysis, in 2005 the top.01 percent paid only 17 percent of income in income taxes — but they faced an overall federal tax rate of 31.5 percent, with almost all the difference being imputed corporate taxes.
But is this really where the right wants to go? I thought corporations were people — by which Romney meant not that they eat and sleep, but that they employ people, and by being nice to corporations we’re being nice to workers. If you say instead that corporate profits benefit only the stockholders — which is what you’re implicitly saying if you impute all profits taxes to the stockholders — so much for the warm and fuzzy feelings.
More than that, however, if we do the imputation, the historical story becomes one of a simply huge reduction in tax progressivity over time. Piketty and Saez (pdf) tell the tale:
A gigantic tax cut for the top 0.01 percent, mainly coming from lower corporate taxes (with an assist from lower estate taxes). And do you really want to claim that the U.S. economy |
we went to Bethesda, North Wales, for this one and I fucking loved it. We just stayed in a cottage that was attached to the studio and every day I'd walk to the Tesco Express, sit in the pub for a few pints and write, then go back and watch Tipping Point and The Chase in the afternoon. It was just my normal life but being able to justify drinking in the afternoon. As a lyricist, it was the point where I stopped caring what anybody thought and just wrote for myself and allowed myself to be as esoteric as I wanted. But as an era, it was tainted by the fact that we didn't get to capitalize on it or enjoy it too much.
Tom: The music is less tainted by the scenario, for me. Everything that's on No Blues works really well; there's a narrative. Normally within a couple of months you're like "Shit, I wish we hadn't done that, I wish we'd done this differently', but this is one of the few records where I don't have any of those thoughts. By this point we weren't trying to make ourselves be perceived a certain way, we just made a record that we wanted to make.
1. Romance Is Boring (2010)
Why, in your professional opinion, is this your best?
Tom: In a weird way, this was probably the most self-conscious record, and it's probably the most try-hard record as well. A lot of it was a reaction to being called "twee" and "pop" so we wanted to make these really aggressive songs in strange time signatures. I would never make songs like that again, at the moment I'm not in that frame of mind where I would, so when I listen to them I'm like, "Shit, I can't believe we made this," It was the record that took the longest and we spent the longest on. There's a lot of detail, a lot of complexity for us, it's like indie-pop-prog or something… There's a lot in there I still like.
Gareth: Yeah, it ended up being recorded over three or four months, beginning to end. Lyrically, it's so dense, there's so many words, it is quite referential and things cut back and forth from each other. I like albums where lyrically it works better as a whole than as individual tracks and I think this is one of those. Also, the first track we put out from it being "The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future" was the first time we'd done something that was slow and quite emo. So that made a lot of people who previously dismissed us step back a bit and wonder if, actually, they do like it after all. For me the thing that puts this in the top spot is that it was when we were touring the most and when I feel like we were being our best selves, I suppose. Looking at the tracklist now there are a lot of songs that we maybe took for granted at the time that have now found themselves to be cult favorites or whatever.
Los Campesinos! has such a distinct sound. Do you find it difficult trying to stay true to that while also keeping things interesting for yourselves and in terms of what else is going on in music or is that something you try not to consider much?
Tom: With the first album, it was just whatever we could play, whatever came out—that was the sound. It's guitars and drums and bass and that's all we could do. That's why it gets weird, because all of a sudden you're doing it as a career and you have to write another record and question why you're doing it and what it should sound like. But I think the advantage our band has is that we've never been cool, so we've never really had to worry about trends.
Everything we do, whether we wanted it to be or not, is kind of outside of what is commercially relevant. We're outsiders and we've always been outsiders and maybe that's why the people who do give a shit about it give a shit about it. I've always admired bands like Pavement or Yo La Tengo whose sound hasn't really changed that much, and when you name those bands you know exactly what they sound like, whereas there are bands these days where it's almost a different genre album to album. Ultimately then they can dilute their personalities because of that. So I don't really mind sounding the same.
Gareth: As far as I'm concerned, Tom is a genius and he can do anything and everything, but it wouldn't be Los Campesinos!. This sounds incredibly cheesy and over the top, but for those of us in the band and those who like our band – because not a lot of people like our band, but those who do really, really like our band—Los Campesinos! has become something bigger than the sum of its parts, and it's not something we're even in a position to attempt to change. Whatever we do is what Los Campesinos! is and for us to make a conscious decision to try to change that wouldn't be true to what the band has become and how much we've put into it. The opportunities Los Campesinos! has given us as people and as a band are countless, and the relationship we've got with people who come to our gigs is overwhelming. I don't feel in control of that at all.
Sick Scenes is out now via everywhere.
Follow Emma on Twitter.Driverless bus trial notches up 2,000 passengers
Updated
Climbing aboard the Intellibus, as it's called, felt a bit like being part of a flash mob.
We were five strangers who had been given instructions on where and when to meet.
Right on time the bus and our chaperone, Andy, appeared on the South Perth foreshore, and after signing our lives away we were off.
Andy likened the Intellibus technology to Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to follow home.
In this case the bus's on-board computer followed the virtual crumbs dropped by its programmers.
"It will stick rigidly to the centimetre on the path that we've programmed in," Andy said.
What's the gaming console for?
There are five levels when it comes to just how automated a driverless vehicle is.
The Intellibus is a level four.
That means it must have someone on board who can grab the controls, which look like they belong to a gaming console, if necessary.
The bus is also fitted with sensors to detect obstacles like rubbish bins, badly parked cars and people.
"We had the odd larrikin poke their arm out in front to see if it will stop and it does," Andy said.
How many people have been on board?
The trial has attracted a huge level of public interest.
This week the 2,000th passenger climbed on and more than 4,000 people remain on a waiting list.
My fellow passenger, Jenny, said she signed up because she's interested in technology.
"I'm also interested in environmental causes and I have a background in mathematics and physics," she said.
How fast can it go?
The maximum speed the bus can travel at is 45 kilometres per hour.
On our trip, we went pretty slow, travelling at between 11kph and 14kph.
I asked another passenger, Cass, if she felt safe.
"It feels really safe, it feels like it's going to be able to work out the problems it has to solve at the pace that we're going," she replied.
Andy said the bus was set to a slightly higher speed at the start of the trial but the programmers reduced it after feedback.
"The public were saying, 'oh, it's a trial, we just want it to go a little bit slower'."
Could the bus be hacked?
Another passenger, Lorraine Barnett, asked Andy that very question.
"There's only one link to the vehicle and that's effectively the GPS link, the only thing that could possibly happen that could interrupt that and the vehicle would just stop," he said.
"But no you couldn't hijack it and drive it into the river."
Are there any driverless buses in other Australian cities?
WA isn't the first state to test a driverless vehicle.
South Australia has introduced legislation allowing them to be trialled there too.
But Anne Stills from the Royal Automobile Club, WA's roadside assistance provider, said WA was the first state to host a driverless bus.
"We wanted Western Australia and Australia to be in a position to be ready for this type of technology," she said.
"So it's going to bring wholesale changes to regulation and all sorts of other areas and sectors and having a shuttle like ours really takes it from theory and puts it into reality."
Ms Stills said the bus had been taken off the road for periods during the trial, which began in August 2016, to get software updates.
"We liken it to the trend of iPhones… the technology is moving so fast, within just a couple of months of receiving our vehicle we have had seven or eight software updates."
Has the bus crashed?
No, so far so good and if today's passengers reflect the market appetite, the future for driverless technology looks bright.
"I will be in a driverless car in my lifetime, yes," Ms Barnett said.
Topics: inventions, road-transport, perth-6000
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While they were destroying the economy, Republicans did not forget about their War on Women, so please don’t feel left behind, ladies.
Republicans sneaked a moral conscience provision in their defundy/delay ObamaCare measure passed on Sunday. That’s code for insurance doesn’t have to pay for your birth control, you “sluts”. This little doodad was slipped in during a House Rules Committee on Saturday evening. All of the Republican men who fathered children they have been denying also offered to pay back support.
Naturally, the National Organization for Women was “appalled” by the actions of House Republicans and called them out for playing hide and sneak with women’s health. Clearly, NOW operates in the past when women had “rights” and we trusted women to make their own decisions.
In a press release issued Monday, NOW asked, “What about a woman’s conscience?”
This outrageous measure is an aggressive continuation of the Republicans’ War on Women. Republicans are playing “hide and sneak” as they attempt to enact birth control restrictions while hoping no one is paying attention. What the radical fringe that now controls the GOP hasn’t figured out yet is that women — including the 99 percent of sexually active women who have used birth control — are not so easily fooled. Women voters will hold them accountable for their continuing attacks on our access to basic reproductive healthcare. No woman — no matter who she works for — should be denied health care as basic as contraception. Politicians who vote to restrict birth control will undoubtedly pay a price at the polls in 2014.
Here’s a clue, NOW: Republicans don’t think women are human beings (see their many attempts to compare us to barn animals), so therefore, in their mind, women do not have a conscience. Refer to your Binders Full of Women for clarification, and please stop raising silly points.
Never mind the fact that birth control reduces abortions and forget about your crippling endometriosis and fibroids, girls, or the fact that 1.5 million women rely on the birth control pill for exclusively non-contraceptive purposes. Republicans are against birth control because you look better in the kitchen.
In fact, a 2011 Guttmacher study found that “more than half (58%) of all pill users rely on the method, at least in part, for purposes other than pregnancy prevention—meaning that only 42% use the pill exclusively for contraceptive reasons.”
Remember when Republicans pledged that they wouldn’t stuff unpopular issues into must pass legislation? “Advance Legislative Issues One at a Time: We will end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with “must-pass” legislation to circumvent the will of the American people. Instead, we will advance major legislation one issue at a time.”
Not so much.
So when Republicans refused to push back against conservative mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh when he called Sandra Fluke a “slut”, it wasn’t because they are weak, fear-driven children. It’s because secretly they agreed with him when he said:
“What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.”
The Republican idea is that birth control is directly related to sex and Republicans are generally against sex unless the person engaging in it is a male elected official having an affair or breaking the law (Sanford, Vitter). Republicans are also allegedly against abortions, and anyone who is not logic impaired can sort out the relationship between birth control and abortion (birth control was designed to prevent pregnancy, hence it’s name), but they are still against birth control because – – sex. Females having sex. Females making choices. UGH. Binders full of women having sex and not asking permission. Double UGH.
Never mind that pregnancy that almost killed you, this is all about slut shaming.
The War on Women is alive and well, patriots.
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:A timeline is a graphical representation of a chronological sequence of events.
Timeline or time line may also refer to:
In computing [ edit ]
TimeLine, project management software marketed by Symantec
A Facebook, profile format
In entertainment and media [ edit ]
In gaming [ edit ]
Timeline (1985), a two-player chess variant designed by George Marino for Geo Games
(1985), a two-player chess variant designed by George Marino for Geo Games Timeline (video game), a 2000 video game published by Eidos Interactive and based on the eponymous 1999 Michael Crichton novel
(video game), a 2000 video game published by Eidos Interactive and based on the eponymous 1999 Michael Crichton novel Time Line (2002), a boardgame containing time travel elements, designed by Lloyd Krassner for Warp Spawn Games
(2002), a boardgame containing time travel elements, designed by Lloyd Krassner for Warp Spawn Games TimeLine (2003), 54-card boardgame designed by James Ernest for Cheapass Games
In music [ edit ](Joe Raedle/Getty)
Illustrating once again its well-deserved reputation for pointing out the bleeding obvious, the New York Times today informs its readers that people who share a common ancestry often take different approaches to life.
The paper’s case study du choix involves Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two Republicans of Cuban extraction who have had the downright temerity to live their lives in dissimilar ways. Marco Rubio, the Times records, was “nurtured” by Cubans in Miami and “bounces effortlessly between two cultures” and two languages. Ted Cruz, by contrast, is more of a Texan than anything else, and as such is “partial to cowboy boots, oversize belt buckles, hard-right politics and the fire-and-brimstone style of the Baptist church.” Unlike Rubio, Cruz had a relatively mono-cultural upbringing: He “attended overwhelmingly white Christian schools in Houston,” “prefers Spanglish to Spanish,” and “changed his Spanish-sounding name, Rafael Edward Cruz, as a teenager.” These decisions, the Times suggests, may hurt him come election time.
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Voters are fickle creatures, and the Times may well be right in its electoral prognostications. If so, one will have to ask what this says about the manner in which we see race and culture in the 21st century. How long, I wonder, should Cruz have waited before more tightly binding himself to the culture of his home? What obligations do émigrés have to the countries that they have left? And at what point should the children of immigrants be permitted to shed the old country’s ways without upsetting their co-ethnic countrymen? Cruz, Texan state senator Jose Rodríguez complains, “doesn’t do anything to suggest to people that he is a Latino senator from Texas.” Okay. But why should he? Had Cruz’s parents come in through Ellis Island in 1906, I daresay that Rodriguez’s complaint would seem utterly comical. Nobody in his right mind would accuse the great-grandson of Irish immigrants of having “sold out” by adapting to his home state’s foibles, and nor would they wonder aloud why he eschewed the shamrock lapel pin in favor of everyday American dress. Is Cruz to be bound to his father’s culture because his father is still alive?
RELATED: No, Rubio’s and Cruz’ Conservatism Does Not Make Them ‘Traitors’ to Hispanics
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Elsewhere in the piece, the Times submits half-critically that, by changing the name he goes by to “Ted,” Cruz has “de-emphasized his Latino identity.” A similar complaint is often thrown at Bobby Jindal, whose given name, his enemies are fond of pointing out, is “Piyush.” What a tangled web this approach weaves. We are told ad infinitum that identity is little more than a socially and historically constructed concept, and that one is able to liberate oneself by controlling it. In consequence, one might ask what right anybody has to “assign” a set of cultural values to a person and then to complain when he rejects them? If Rafael wants to be Ted, he’s Ted. If Piyush wants to be Bobby, he’s Bobby — or, indeed, he is “Susan” or “Walrus” or “Mambo Number Five” or whatever exercise in patois-pushing is popular on the quadrangle this week. Once upon a time, swift assimilation was regarded as something to which new Americans should plainly aspire. In the age of limitless self-actualization, has it now become a liability?
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#share#There is a certain perversity in the trajectory that America’s self-described arbiters of “tolerance” have taken over the last half-century. Quite rightly, the 1960s brought with them a revolution against the antiquated and illiberal belief that men should be judged by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. From Detroit to Chicago to the streets of Selma, African Americans who were sick and tired of being lumped together in a single bloc insisted righteously that they be regarded on their own terms: as rational actors possessed of agency and worth and equal rights under the law. At the time, one might have assumed that this movement would serve as the overture to a genuinely individualistic culture. Unfortunately, it did not. Indeed, many of those who lionize the heroes of the Civil Rights era are engaged at present in an attempt to impose upon civil society the very walls that have been broken down within the law. Consider, if you will, the sort of language that progressive activists habitually use to describe minorities who do not agree with them. This story, from Tuesday’s Washington Post is illustrative:
Liberal Hispanic groups have launched a campaign designed to turn Latino voters against the two Cuban American Republicans who have risen to the top tier of the GOP presidential field — assailing Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as traitors to their own culture.
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“Traitors,” incidentally, is not hyperbole. It’s a direct quote:
Dolores Huerta, an influential labor leader and civil rights activist, called Cruz and Rubio “sellouts” and “traitors” at the gathering and said the Hispanic candidates “are turning their backs on the Latino community.”
Huerta was joined in this assessment by the head of a Democratic party front-group:
“It’s not comfortable for us to do this, to call out members of our own community who don’t reflect our community values, but we have no choice,” said Cristóbal Alex, president of the Democratic-backed Latino Victory Project.
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Put another way, Rubio and Cruz stand accused of being what in our current political parlance, would be termed “cucks” — that is, members of one group who are primarily concerned about the perceived interests of another.
RELATED: Enough with the Triangulation, Rubio and Cruz Need to Show They Can Lead
To grasp just how ugly this way of thinking is, try replacing the words “Hispanic” and “Latino” in the excerpts above with “Anglo” or “Caucasian.” As might a dim white supremacist, Alex and Huerta are supposing there is only one legitimate way to be of their ethnicity and that is to agree with them. Worse, they are presuming that there exists a set of “community values” to which all members of the “Latino” tribe are expected uncritically to subscribe, and that because Cruz and Rubio have refused to fall into line they must be expelled. Had Alex argued instead that Rubio and Cruz might struggle with Hispanic voters because their political positions do not appeal to the majority, he would have been on solid ground. But he didn’t. Had Huerta noted that, statistically, most of her members preferred Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party, she would have been stating nothing more than an uncontroversial fact. But she didn’t. Instead, the pair appointed themselves as spokesmen for the volk, and began excommunicating the “cuckspanics” with extreme prejudice. Are we still moving forward?A woman looks at anti-Israel cartoons displayed at the second international exhibition of drawing and cartoons on the Holocaust in the Iranian capital Tehran on May 14, 2016 (AFP Photo/Atta Kenare)
Tehran (AFP) - A contest of anti-Israeli cartoons opened Saturday in the Iranian capital, with many entries deriding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government's Middle East policies.
The exhibition, totalling 150 entries from 50 countries, was launched on the eve of the Palestinian commemoration of "nakba", which means catastrophe in Arabic, marking the 1948 creation of Israel.
The Iranian government has distanced itself from the contest, which Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said was organised by a non-governmental organisation without any support from the authorities.
Several cartoons on display poke fun at Netanyahu, with one depicting the Israeli prime minister as a member of the Islamic State jihadist group and holding a sabre in his hand.
Another shows a map of the Middle East with a coffin bearing the word "Holocaust" flattening Palestinians in place of what should be the country of Israel.
"We are not seeking to confirm or deny the Holocaust," said organiser Massoud Shojaie Tabatabaie, himself a cartoonist.
He said the exhibition was a rebuttal to the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked by Islamists last year.
The best cartoon will be awarded $12,000, said Tabatabaie. An earlier edition of the exhibition was held in 2006.
In April Zarif insisted that the cartoon festival was not endorsed by the Iranian government, in an interview published by The New Yorker magazine.
He said the contest was being organised by a non-government organisation "that is not controlled by the Iranian government. Nor is it endorsed by the Iranian government."
Asked why Iran has allowed the exhibition to go ahead, Zarif said: "Why does the United States have the Ku Klux Klan?
"Is the government of the United States responsible for the fact that there are racially hateful organisations in the United States? Don't consider Iran a monolith. The Iranian government does not support, nor does it organise, any cartoon festival of the nature that you're talking about."
Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month as well as the 68th anniversary of its foundation.
Last year Tabatabaie also organised an international exhibition of anti-Islamic State group cartoons in which caricatures of Arab and Western leaders were displayed besides those of top jihadists.It’s funny how quickly we forget the past. My over-riding feeling today watching the tweets rolling in from Jerez was just this, as the eight teams to hit the track amassed a paltry 93 laps of running.
For the first time in a few years, I opted not to go to the first test of the year. Jerez was always going to be disrupted at best. At NBC, we decided to miss Jerez and attend Bahrain in the hope that by then the cars would have some miles on them and the drivers be able to provide slightly better feedback on their aspirations for 2014 than they would after a couple of outlaps, a blown engine and a rain delay.
It isn’t that the F1 teams and engine manufacturers have forgotten how to do their jobs. It is simply the fact that the technical regulation changes for 2014 represent one of the biggest shifts in the sport’s rules for a generation. Not only do we have a total shift in engine and power philosophy, but we also have badly worded aerodynamic regulations to contend with.
So it wasn’t surprising to see that the day was filled with negativity towards ugly noses, and bewilderment at the low level of completed laps. Indeed, last minute hitches meant that Marussia only sent their car to Spain today and Red Bull got just 3 laps completed on Day 1.
But should we be surprised by this?
It wasn’t so long ago that testing was conducted pretty much wherever and whenever teams wished. A few of them would gang together and take over a track for a week and pound around with as many drivers as they wanted. The peak probably came in the 2006 pre-season. According to the excellent FORIX website, there were 63 sessions of pre season testing at 21 circuits over 192 days. Sixty-one drivers turned out 91,568 laps and amassed 411,012km in running. That’s an awful lot more than one car per team and 12 days of group testing at the two tracks permitted for 2014.
But if we look back to that very first day of pre-season testing for 2006, on November 28, 2005 at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, Nick Heidfeld ran 28 laps for Sauber and Alex Wurz just 11 for McLaren. The other car that day was McLaren tester Gary Paffett who ran 58. But nobody turned their noses up at Wurz’s 11 laps that day. Quite simply, it was testing. And whether you ran 11 laps or 111 laps, testing was testing and you’d have good days and bad days. That’s what testing was for. 97 laps were run on November 28, 2005. Only four more than today.
The problem today is that everything is condensed and put under the microscope. By limiting testing and grouping it together, the world’s media, now emboldened with the ability to report news in real-time via social media and scrolling live updates on their websites, can pounce on everything.
Lewis Hamilton suffered a wing failure. That will be the lead story on Mercedes’ first day of testing. Never mind the fact they were ready to hit the track when the clock hit 09:00 and should quite comfortably have set the most laps of the day without that issue. The failure of the wing is the news. In the past, it would have been shrugged off as just one of those things in testing. Not now. Because now there are only 11 more days for “one of those things” to further knock the team back.
By far the biggest talking point thus far however has been the new generation of F1 noses. Although I am yet to see them in the flesh, I’m already getting used to them. And I must say that I absolutely love the fact that this shift in regulation has given us a field of completely unique cars, each one with their own individual interpretation of the rules. Of course, whichever car ends up being fastest will be the design around which we see the field converge before the regulations are hopefully reworded for next season, but for now at least it is great to see the thought process of each design team in the open.
It doesn’t take away from the fact, however, that the cars look stupid. They are not aspirational creations, and that is something which Formula 1 must address. The technical regulations were made with good intention but they were badly worded. And now we have a situation in which the teams are openly calling their cars ugly, questioning their safety, and decrying the governing body for letting things get this far.
They are right, of course, but the teams are utterly hypocritical in being so upset. The Technical Working Group, now replaced by the controversial Strategy Group, was integral in the formulating of the new rules. At what point in these discussions was the question of safety raised? At what point was the wording raised? At what point did somebody suggest that this was not the route the sport should be going?
I asked Caterham’s Mark Smith recently why, with regulations forcing teams to adopt low noses, we weren’t going to see glorious creations such as the 1980s and early 90s low nosed F1 cars. The answer was simple. We know more about aerodynamics today than we did 30 years ago… so much so that if the 1980s F1 regs were in place today, we probably wouldn’t see such simple and graceful designs as we did back then.
It’s a fair point. But it also reinforces the fact that a bunch of supposed design and technical geniuses got together and bashed out a set of regulations that have resulted in these… things.
And ultimately, this is what has me worried about the future of F1. The teams, by their very nature, are competing entities. They are so focused on maintaining their own competitive advantages that when looking at the manner in which the sport is taken forward they lose sight of the bigger picture. Their focus is on their interests and their interests alone.
Why hasn’t FOTA worked? Because a group of competitors will never agree on everything all the time. There will always be fractures. Sadly, the teams couldn’t keep their focus away from their own interests for long enough to keep their collective will in tact. That is why FOTA splintered. That is where FOTA failed.
Now we have ugly cars, and a stupid double points rule for the final race of the season. Team discussions have recently taken place. The double points rule was not reversed. Despite dissatisfaction from fans, the media, and even the reigning four time world champion…
The teams are as much to blame for the ugly cars as the FIA. The teams are as much to blame for this stupid double points rule as Bernie. And the teams, by not pulling together and agreeing on a resource restriction or a cost cap are to blame for such limited testing, because they’ve had to have cost cutting measures thrust upon them.
Frankly I don’t know what the answer is. Bernie has always acted as a benign dictator, and one worries about who will smack the teams’ heads together when he is gone. Somebody has to do it. Either that, or the teams must realise that in the interests of the sport they need to remove themselves from having any say at all in the direction in which Formula 1 is taken.
Because sadly, it seems they’re too busy staring down their now globally mocked noses to see that a bigger picture even exists.
AdvertisementsWe are doing Great! We are getting pledges now faster than ever. We have just 3 Days and need to raise $16,000 join us today and HELP ELECTRICITY - CHANGE HISTORY!!
ABOUT OUR PROJECT TESLA'S NAME HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM OUR HISTORY! HELP US MAKE THIS FILM AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT WHO DR. TESLA IS...WE NEED TO GET BACK HIS LEGACY AND CHANGE HISTORY!
“ELECTRICITY” is a film - docudrama about the life of Nikola Tesla, the creation of electricity and many other important inventions we now enjoy in our modern lives. This film tells a story about the importance of one man and his many technological gifts to the world, and how his name and legacy were removed from America's history.
THROUGH SUPPORTING THIS FILM, HELP US TO CORRECT HISTORY Have you ever felt unrewarded or pushed aside for your efforts and contributions in something that you worked very hard for? Then Imagine if you had created something so important that the world as we know it today could not exist without your invention. Now, imagine that you did all for these very important things and your name was removed as the inventor and even erased from history itself. The more information created and distributed about this great American Hero will help people come to know Dr. Nikola Tesla, helping to correct America's history.
THE TEAMS BACKGROUND! Wilhelm Cashen, engineer and entrepreneur with a long career in electromagnet controls and systems, has followed his mentors Nikola Tesla, throughout his career. Wil’s past career has prepared him to use his vast knowledge in electromechanics to interpret Tesla’s inventions and vision for the film. Carol’s strengths and background are based on personal relationships and understanding of human interaction. Carol discovered through personal investigative work- Nikola Tesla the man, the humanitarian and the lover. (click here for more on the team)
THE FILM We are creating a docudrama that will crack history wide open to expose Dr. Nikola Tesla an inventor, scientist, scholar and visionary who from 1856 – 1943 changed our lives forever. Dr. Tesla’s legacy is defined and ever present through his many inventions and patents, such as the (A/C) alternating current electric power generator, used to this day to deliver on demand electricity to our homes and businesses, robotics, remote control, radio, neon light, wireless communication, wireless energy, X-ray and many more important inventions that shape our lives daily and our future. (Film Synopsis)
Amazingly, even today in our electric powered modern society, Dr. Tesla is not taught in our schools at any level, and in fact- you probably have never heard of Nikola Tesla. This is one of the most important stories of all time.
Make a difference! Join us in producing this docudrama journey that will uncover one man’s life. A man that gave so much to our existence and received so little in return. Through this docudrama and your important contributions, we, together will return his legacy and place his name rightfully in the minds of millions of people who will come to know the name Nikola Tesla. Please help!
OUR REWARDS We proudly display photos of all of our Rewards so that you, the Kickstarter Backer can see and understand what you will receive for your very important pledge. The rewards we provide for your backing is something we take very seriously. For the production of "Electricity" we carefully researched companies and artists who have designed and created one-off items for us.
USE OF FUNDS
Typically budgets for a docudrama of this scale and quality require a network budget of more than $300,000. We have pulled in favors from close entertainment industry friends who have agreed to help at much lower rates because they know that this is a story that has to be told. The money raised from Tesla Kickstarter Backers will be spent on completing this production and to provide the rewards for the Tesla Kickstarter Backers.
ADDITIONAL FUNDS
If we are blessed with additional funds, it will bring us closer to producing the docudrama in many other languages to distribute into China and other regions of the world where Nikola Tesla’s name is unknown.
DELIVERY TIMES OF REWARDS MAYBE DIFFERENT
Please note that many of our rewards are completed at varying delivery dates. This is due to the production time of some of the items and many of the film related items.
SHIPPING REWARDS
Once our FUNDING is SUCCESSFUL, we will send you a message at the email address you have provided to Kickstarter. We will ask you to provide shirt size and other important information about your reward, and your “Ship To” address.
CAN I GIVE MY REWARD AS A GIFT?
YES YOU CAN! If you would like to pledge to the film but give the reward to someone else, complete the standard process of making your pledge on Kickstarter. For billing purposes, the pledge must be in your name only. Upon FUNDING is SUCCESSFUL, when we send you the email message, just provide their size and other important information including their ship to address of who you want to receive it. We will ship your reward directly to them.
SPECIAL NOTE: if you would like special handling to ship your reward items to multiple locations, there will be an additional shipping and handling change for each item shipped to a separate and different location.
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Kickstarter does not allow pledges through the Paypal online payment system. To allow all Backers the opportunity to be a part of, and HELP TO CORRECT HISTORY please visit: http://www.TheTeslaStore.com
PLEASE NOTE: Pledges and / or Donations gifted through the Paypal online system do not effect, and will not be added to the Kickstarter totals. We will provide you with all of the Reward offerings under the same integrity and security that is provided you with Kickstarter.The government might scare the Bishop of Chios Island by pressing charges against him and trying to stigmatize him as a racist. But the government will still not scare the angry majority of Greeks.
The real reason for prosecuting Bishop Markos, it seems, is that the government expects that Turkey's migration deal with the EU will collapse, and that if it does, the migrant flows in the coming months will increase dramatically. The government, according to some members in the opposition, has no friendly way to manage illegal migration and therefore prefers to impose restrictions on freedom of speech and prosecute anyone who objects.
If it is a "racist crime" for a citizen to express accurately the percentages of refugees and illegal migrants entering the country, what will come next, the Thought Police?
The Minister for Immigration Affairs himself, repeatedly stated that 50% to 70% of migratory flows to Greece were illegal migrants and the rest were refugees. The illegal migrants come from 77 different countries.
In coalmines, from 1911 to 1986, canaries operated as an early warning system for the leakage of hazardous gases. Whenever the birds showed signs of distress, the miners knew trouble was coming.
Greece has deep problems. Greece is presently in the "coalmine" of an endless economic and immigration crisis.
This month, for the first time, there was a request to activate an anti-racist law, passed in September 2014, against a Greek citizen who also has institutional status.
The coalition government of Alexis Tsipras (SYRIZA) and Panos Kammenos (Independent Greeks) asked the district attorney to prosecute the Bishop of Chios Island, Markos Vasilakis, because he dared to say, during a sermon, that the thousands of people who recently arrived from Turkey on the island of Chios are illegal migrants, and not Syrian refugees.
Chios, the fifth-largest island of Greece, is only 3.5 nautical miles from Turkey, and therefore offers an opportunity to migrants and refugees to cross from Turkey into the European Union.
Chios is also one of a few Greek islands that has received the largest waves of migrants. Its population of 51,320 inhabitants now accommodates, according to the latest |
account whenever possible. We think the following changes address these concerns by providing users with more control over their privacy settings and making them more simple to use.
Starting today, Facebook will:
* Provide an easy-to-use “master” control that enables users to set who can see the content they share through Facebook. This enables users to choose, with just one click, the overall privacy level they’re comfortable with for the content they share on Facebook. Of course, users can still use all of the granular controls we’ve always offered, if they wish.
* Significantly reduce the amount of information that must be visible to everyone on Facebook. Facebook will no longer require that users’ friends and connections are visible to everyone. Only Name, Profile Picture, Networks and Gender must be publicly available. Users can opt to make all other connections private.
* Make it simple to control whether other applications and websites access any user information.
While a majority of our users love Facebook apps and Facebook-enhanced websites, some may prefer not to share their information outside of Facebook. Users can now opt out with just one click.
I encourage you to take a moment to read our CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post and check out the new Facebook Privacy Page.
Thanks,
The Facebook Ads TeamAbbott rightly points out in that book that we rarely know in advance what a new government will be like. Few in 1975 would have expected the Fraser government to keep as much of Whitlam's legacy as it did; few in 1983 would have tipped the Hawke government to become the path breaker for micro-economic reform. He might have added that few anticipated the global economic slumps that helped undermine the Whitlam and Rudd/Gillard governments.
But Battlelines (soon to reappear in a new edition), and Abbott's years as Opposition Leader, provide strong leads on how he might tackle the challenges he would face as PM.
Like John Howard, Abbott is a mixture of tribal ideologue and political pragmatist. Howard's success came from his remarkable ability to balance the two. As I wrote in 2005, he was ''a man of extraordinary self-discipline and patience, who listens to critics, weighs up arguments carefully, and judges shrewdly how far he can push things''. His tribe was small business, but part of him was the tracksuit-wearing patriot who wanted to be (and was) prime minister for all of us.
Abbott is different. His tribe is a smaller one: affluent Catholic traditionalists. Since student days, he has defined himself more by what he is against than by what he is for. He is for the monarchy, and the church, and traditional values, but he decided long ago not to tie his political career to them. Howard once called him an ''arch-pragmatist'', and he is. Rule one for an Abbott government will be: do no harm to his chances of winning the next election.
Where Howard and Abbott also differ, however, is that, as yet, Abbott has shown no desire to be a leader for all of us. If he had that instinct, he would have handled the superannuation and public transport issues differently. With one important exception - indigenous Australians - he has shown no empathy with the groups Labor and the Greens represent. If they propose doing something, such as tackling global warming, his natural instinct is to oppose it.What started as an outer space scare worthy of its own Event Horizon movie ended up being a big misunderstanding. It all began with a Star Citizen community member, “Lauresh,” attempting to organize a women’s-only group in the wake of some especially, er, uncomfortable forum threads, a place to go hang out on days when the wider universe left her cold. Since this is the Internet, her plan was immediately met with a barrage of ugliness and vitriol. To top it all off, she was then banned from Star Citizen’s forums, an unceremonious opening of the airlock that rightfully left many eyebrows raised and confused. Apparently, however, that part was a huge mistake, and Roberts Space Industries not only wants to allow players of any sort to form their own groups, but plans to give them the tools to do so.
The was apparently handed out because Lauresh was from a group associated with Something Awful that had recently been doing a lot of trolling. RSI’s moderators assumed this was just another instance of rowdy attention-grabbing and decided to send all involved packing. A pretty gross assumption given the subject matter? Absolutely. But it was the exact opposite of what RSI is hoping to achieve in the long run. Developer Ben Lesnik explained:
“On the greater subject of women in the Star Citizen universe, the answer is that yes we should go out of our way to create a safe space for them. Women online, and especially women in gaming, have it very, very tough in ways that men absolutely do not understand. This isn’t an argument for the community to have, it’s a fact. Our moderators (and game designers and programmers and everyone else involved in Star Citizen) should do everything possible to create a safe environment, not encourage typical internet knife-fighting in this regard.” “Men don’t have to deal with this sort of thing, and it’s so systemic. For years I was part of a community that simply didn’t have women. At first I thought it was because space sims didn’t appeal to women… but I came to understand it was because of how immature the average forum user was towards them. It broke my heart hearing from women who loved fighting aliens but who had to pretend to be men in order to even talk to anyone about it, lest their PM inboxes fill up with come-ons and their social networking get invaded with awful dudes.” “As if it even needed to be said, there is more than enough room for a female-only group in the ‘verse. Making connections like that is what our Organizations system is for, and there’s absolutely no additional room to argue with that.”
That’s very good news, obviously. A very, very inauspicious beginning, but RSI at least seems to be plotting a course to something much better. That said, it doesn’t really solve the community organization issues that spawned this issue in the first place, nor does it necessarily make the overall community a more hospitable place in the short term. These problems could be solved in time, but it’s going to require a lot more hands-on effort from RSI – not just assumptions and bans.
We shall see. For now, though, I at least applaud the no-nonsense stance they’ve taken. It’s needed. But statement of intent is just a start. Now it’s time to see if RSI will follow through.The structural engineering that goes into bridge design is becoming quite creative and passionate. There are a number of ways to design and construct a structurally sound bridge. An interesting article highlights very creative famous bridges with unique designs. Most of these famous bridges are also regarded as landmarks. Some have even become city icons because of their influence and engineering wonder. Below is a list of the most strangest and famous bridges in the world.
Henderson Waves Bridge : At 36m above Henderson Road, Henderson Waves is Singapore’s highest pedestrian bridge that is linking Mount Faber Park with Telok Blangah Hill Park. This bridge takes on a special look at night, with the wave-form illuminated with attractive LED light.
Sundial Bridge: The Sundial Bridge (also known as the Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay) is 700 feet long, 23 feet wide, and there are 14 cables supporting the bridge. It was designed by the famous architect, Santiago Calatrava and completed in 2003, and cost $23.5 million.
Pont Gustave Flaubert, France: Pont Gustave Flaubert is a large vertical-lift bridge with an efficient design over the River Seine at Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Haute-Normandie, France. This is is the highest lifting bridge in Europe and its shape led to call it the “butterfly”.At the top, an elegant steel structure supports the pulleys with three parallel frames, designed in such a way that members carry normal forces only.
Millau Viaduct Bridge: The Millau Viaduct is a cable-stayed bridge in southern France and crosses the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains. It was designed by the French structural engineer Michel Virlogeux and British architect Lord Foster, it is the highest road bridge weighing 36,000 tonnes. The central pillar is higher than the famous French icon, the Eiffel Tower.
AdvertisementsThere is a case to be made that John Tortorella, Mike Sullivan and Glen Gulutzan have been doing three of the best coaching jobs in the National Hockey League this season.
It’s amazing, really, when you remember that not that long ago they were coaching together, on the same team.
It must have been the best coached team in the past decade, right?
Yeah, no.
Led by Tortorella, the 2014-15 Canucks were among the most dysfunctional teams to have ever played hockey in Vancouver.
We look at Torts’ top 10 moments from that season:
1. The dressing room incident
No conversation about Tortorella in Vancouver can end without The Locker-Room Incident.
Calgary Flames head coach Bob Hartley iced his goons to start a game, so Tortorella responded with his. Seconds later, hell broke loose on the ice. But it was nothing compared to the hard-to-believe theatrics that followed during the first intermission. To this day, the clip of the incident remains riveting.
You see Tortorella try to charge through a mass of Flames, but someone has his collar hooked from behind, like he was an out-of-control, leash-less dog.
There’s Kevin Bieksa, whose head appears at the very back, as he clearly travelled through the back channel to get a closer look. Then there’s Flames’ goalie coach Clint Malarchuk, whose nostrils are flaring as he propels himself out of the Flames’ room looking to punch Torts in the face.
It is something to behold, and thankfully there was a video camera recording in that corridor so we’ll never, ever forget.
2. Benching Roberto Luongo for the Heritage Classic
Tortorella’s most accomplished moment in Vancouver just may be the fact that he’s the one who finally got Roberto Luongo traded.
In the history of the NHL, no goalie has wanted to start a game less than Eddie Lack wanted to start the Heritage Classic. Luongo had been waiting all year for that moment, the big stage in B.C. Place Stadium. And for reasons no one has ever understood, Tortorella sat the sure-to-be-hall-of-fame goalie.
Tortorella famously said after the game, “I would make the same call.” Really? You embarrassed a great goalie, inspired him to again ask for a trade, and started a string of transactions that forever changed the Canucks.
And for what?
3. The Murphy Bed
Management and Tortorella knocked heads over all kinds of issues, but when the coach started going home every day, skipping out on game-day skates, it drove the organization bananas.
So much so, they built a Murphy Bed in his office. If he needed an afternoon nap, the coach could now take it at Rogers Arena. There’s a great clip out there of Willie Desjardins getting his first tour of his new office and the look of “WTF?” on his face when he sees the Murphy Bed is priceless.
4. The Speech
When it was all over, Tortorella made what could have been his biggest contribution to the Canucks.
In his post-mortem presser, Torts laid it all out there. Prophetically, Tortorella announced that the NHL had become a “young man’s game.” He said the Canucks were too old, too stale and too obsessed with trying to recreate 2011. He suggested the organization needed to rebuild.
Of course, instead of heeding the coach’s words, Jim Benning was brought in as general manager to turn things around quickly, in an attempt to squeeze another run out of the Sedin twins.
Wonder what would have happened if Tortorella had been promoted to GM, instead of fired?
5. Tortorella vs. David Booth
In July, Booth revealed he actually still has nightmares about Tortorella. These two were oil and water. Booth was the proud hunter and Torts the dog-obsessed animal guy.
There was the time Torts called Booth a weird dude. Another when he chewed him out for being late for a meeting, when he wasn’t at all late.
And, of course, the coach’s comments after a loss in Detroit when he said: “I thought our best forward was David Booth, which is good for him but not good for us.”
Ouch.
6. The Alex Edler situation
It is wild, especially considering how successful these coaches have been, that in Tortorella’s one season in Vancouver, Alex Edler and Chris Tanev barely played together.
Other than three games and a few shifts here and there, the team’s best defensive pair was never an option for Tortorella and Sullivan.
Not only did they refuse to play Tanev and Edler together, they spent much of the season playing Edler, a left-shot defenceman, on the right side on a pairing with Jason Garrison.
The results were awful, and Edler had what many believe to be his worst season as a Canuck. The team was outscored at a 7-3 rate when he was on the ice that season at even strength.
7. The Sedin thing
This is basically how the season went with Torts and the Sedins.
Torts: I’m going to play my top guys tons. I’m worried about this game, not game 50.
Media: Uh, you sure you want to do that?
Torts: They’re playing great, we’ll have more off days, fewer practices and keep them fresh. I’m doubling down and will have them kill penalties, too.
Media: Wait, what? They’re well into their 30s and the team just spent five years limiting their ice time, believing it managed fatigue and health while maximizing performance. Is this going to end well?
Of course, it did not end well. The Sedins fell off a production cliff in the second half of the season.
And just about the first declaration that happened when the new management team and coaching staff took over was this: “We’re going to manage the Sedins’ ice time.”
8. Tortorella’s thing with Alex Burrows
Communication was never Tortorella’s strong game. Take Burrows. The pair didn’t have any one-on-one conversations until the second half of the season, when they exchanged pleasantries after running into each other in a hallway in Montreal.
But it was more than a lack of communication. Tortorella pushed the team at different points to buy out Burrows’ contract.
Had the Canucks listened we’d be missing out on this season, which has been something of a resurgence for the Vancouver legend.
9. Tortorella’s honesty
Give the coach this: He always spoke his mind. Even if it meant him admitting he didn’t know who a Canadian icon was. In this case, it was Sarah McLachlan, who performed at a team function.
He did apologize for having no clue who she was, telling everyone he “lives under a rock.”
10. Cheering for Team Sweden
There were many apologies during Tortorella’s season. The most memorable, however, was when he had to say sorry to an entire country.
The coach had said he wanted Sweden to win the Olympics because he thought it could help turn around the seasons for Edler and Daniel Sedin.
That didn’t fly too well in Canada, where Tortorella soon came out with his mea culpa.
“If I have insulted anybody, that certainly wasn’t my intention and I think all of you know that,” he said. “But it was a careless use of words, and where I should be more cognizant. I want to clear that up.”
jbotchford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/botchfordPORTLAND, Ore. -- Police continue to search for a driver who sped away from a Southeast Portland crash that killed a man earlier this month.
Crime Stoppers of Oregon is offering a reward for information that leads to an arrest in the case.
The crash happened around 4:30 a.m. May 5 on Southeast 82nd Avenue, just south of Flavel Street. Responders found Theodore Cornelius Jones, 45, on the sidewalk suffering from traumatic injuries. He was taken to a hospital where he later died.
The driver who fled may have been driving a dark-colored sedan. The suspect continued southbound on 82nd Avenue after hitting Jones, police said.
The driver of a red pickup was following the suspect. Investigators hope that person will come forward as a potential witness.
Police said Jones was trying to cross the street just south of Flavel when he was hit. Investigators released video from the motel where the man was staying, that showed what happened.
"From the video it looked like the pedestrian saw the vehicle coming, tried to hurry across the street, just didn’t make it. The vehicle struck the pedestrian and just kept going," said Sgt. Erin Smith of the police bureau's traffic division.
Jones was thrown from the edge of the street onto the sidewalk.
A distraught woman who gave KGW her first name only said she saw it all happen, then went to comfort the dying man.
"I was just letting him know that, 'It’s OK. You’re not alone, everything’s going to be OK. Hang in there," Tamara said.
To submit an anonymous tip to Crime Stoppers
Text CRIMES (274637) - Type 823HELP, followed by the tip.
Online at http://crimestoppersoforegon.com/submit_online_tip.php
Call 503-823-HELP (4357)
Visit http://www.tipsoft.com to download the TipSubmit app for the iPhone or Droid.Adam Duvendeck is a five-time member of the USA Cycling track world championship team who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Summer Games.
Track cycling is the coolest Olympic event you’re not watching. It’s understandable, because the sport is pretty esoteric, even among cyclists.
Everyone’s heard of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong is a household name and even your grandfather knows a mountain bike from a road bike. But mention keirin and Sir Chris Hoy and people think you’re having sushi with a knight of the round table. So let me make this easy for you: Track cycling is NASCAR on bikes. If that sounds awesome, that’s because it is.
Depending upon the event, riders race solo against the clock or in packs of as many as 40 riders. If that doesn’t pique your interest, keep in mind they’re doing so on bicycles with no brakes. That, for the most part, makes the bikes safer because hitting the brakes mid-turn would make you slide off the banked track. Watching Olympic-caliber riders whipping around a velodrome is a sight to behold, almost symphonic in its beauty. But when it goes bad, it can cause the kind of crashes that go viral on YouTube.
More Olympians talk sports:
Olympic Sailors More Than Earn the Label 'Athletes'
Jason Read on Rowing's Existential Charm
Sada Jacobson Baby On The Nuances of Fencing
Video: Alexander Massialas on Why He's Lopsided
Video: Tony Azevedo, U.S. Water Polo's 'Savior'
Olympian Anna Tunnicliffe Takes to the Waves
Video: Archer Brady Ellison Shows Some Serious GearBecause everything happens faster on a track, especially one banked 40 degrees or more, track cycling requires more than brute strength. It requires quick thinking and quicker reflexes. It isn’t always enough to be the fastest; you also must be smart. That’s one thing that drew me to the sport. Oh yes, I loved the physical agony I had to endure competing at the international level. But I also loved the strategy required to beat guys who put in just as much time training and wanted nothing more than to pound me into the ground getting to the finish line.
So, about the pain. Track cyclists love pain. We cherish the fact a good workout makes us want to throw up. We know we’ve done well when all we can do is curl up in the fetal position and quiver after a sprint. Track cyclists know one speed: Flat-out. We don’t do leisurely six-hour rides. Our training is all about maximizing output – going as fast as we can as long as we can. A typical race might last 10 seconds or 30 minutes, depending upon the event. Track racing takes the fastest aspects of road racing and condenses it into one intense burst. Those lead out trains you see at the end of a Tour stage? The ones where riders put down more than 2,000 watts sprinting the last few hundred yards to the finish? That’s all we do, and we do it with one gear and direct drive (no coasting).
There are some variables in our training and riding style, of course, and they mostly come down to the type of event we’re competing in. It can get confusing for newcomers, but all you need to know is there are two types: Sprint and endurance. While I have my own personal bias about which is more exciting (sprint, of course!), neither discipline disappoints if you’re into action. Sprint racing includes three Olympic events:
Team sprint – The three riders of a given team start side-by-side. When the gun goes off, riders form a line. Each leads for one lap, racing against the clock for 750 meters.
Match sprint – A highly strategic one-on-one race that requires speed, smarts and great track position to maximize your efficiency over 750 meters.
Keirin – No, not the beer, one of the most exciting races anywhere. Six riders follow a motorized pace bike that brings them up to speed and keeps them there for 6.5 laps of a 250-meter track, then pulls off. At that point it’s a 2.5-lap drag race with high speed, great danger and lots of contact. It’s awesome.
Riders in these events look like linebackers. Male sprinters often squat more than 500 pounds and have legs like barrels. Everyone at the gym where I trained called me “Quadzilla” because I could easily put up more than 450 pounds on the squat rack. Sprint riders are specialists; you don’t see us crossing over to other cycling disciplines, simply because our bulk would be a hindrance climbing the Pyrenees.
That’s not true of endurance riders, who often include guys you see winning those frantic sprints in the Tour de France or Tour of California. Sprinters typically have fantastic top speed – it isn’t unusual to see the best of them top 40 mph – and they’re usually a little beefier than your typical road racer. The Olympics features two endurance events:
Team Pursuit – Four members of a team ride single file, drafting, to complete 4,000 meters faster than the team that started on the opposite side of the track.
Omnium – This is new to the Games, and it’ll be great. Think of it as the cycling equivalent of the pentathlon, with six races of 200 meters to 14 kilometers for men. Many of the events used to be individual Olympic events, and the decision to consolidate them in the omnium was not without some drama.
Track cycling dates to the late 1800s and has appeared in all but one modern Olympics. The events haven’t changed much in all that time, but the bikes couldn’t be more modern. They have more in common with fighter jets than the bicycle you rode to the park last weekend. They feature carbon fiber frames and components, they’re wind-tunnel tested for maximum aerodynamic efficiency and they typically cost more than your car. The British team, for example, is riding rigs designed with help from McLaren – the Formula 1 racing and exotic supercar outfit – with price tags rumored at six figures.
The tracks these athletes ride on are no less impressive. They’re made entirely of wood, usually Siberian pine because it is dense yet malleable. They’re 250 meters around and steeply banked to let riders turn easily at high speed. You can’t appreciate how impressive the banking is until you’ve stood atop the corner of a track like the velodrome at the Home Depot Center near Los Angeles and realize you’re 2.5 stories up. I promise it will send a chill down your spine. It’s one of the things that make this sport so great.
Track cycling is everything people, especially Americans, love about sport. It has high speed, high intensity and the constant threat of a colossal pile-up in races often decided by hundredths of a second. Why would you miss that?
Adam Duvendeck is a five-time U.S. National Track Cycling Champion who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Summer Games. He currently manages The VELO Sports Center – America’s only world-class indoor velodrome, located at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California.Until Mr. Trump’s latest outburst, the fate of the legislative filibuster was far from assured.
Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the former majority leader, predicted last year that Democrats would try to jettison the filibuster if Hillary Clinton won the presidency and Democrats won the Senate, only to see Republicans continue the stalling tactics they employed so successfully against President Barack Obama. And Democrats had already shown a willingness to make changes with their 2013 maneuver to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for most judicial and executive branch nominees.
Then Mr. Trump’s victory completely turned the tables, with the Republicans who now controlled Congress and the White House ruminating about gutting the filibuster if Democrats stood in the way of the Trump agenda. Republicans in the House and conservative groups cheered on the idea, saying it could finally break a logjam in conservative legislation.
Early in Mr. Trump’s tenure, some Senate Republicans said a change in the filibuster rules on legislation remained a possibility if Democrats refused to give any ground to the unified Republican government. But the shaky start of the Trump administration and the ensuing chaos seem to have left Republicans on Capitol Hill less inclined to take big political risks for the president.
The certainty of the sentiment against a change was striking.
“He can say what he wants,” Mr. Flake said of Mr. Trump. “This is separation of powers. We appropriate.”
Mr. McConnell, who considers himself an ardent Senate institutionalist, was always reluctant to endorse such a radical departure from Senate tradition, and he said so repeatedly. He did, however, engineer a change that allowed Republicans to break a filibuster against Neil M. Gorsuch with a simple majority vote and put him on the Supreme Court last month.
But that outcome seemed less an affront to the Senate culture than payback for, and a natural progression from, the Democrats’ 2013 decision on nominations. It settled that score and made senators less interested in going further, drawing them back from the brink of more changes.
Sixty-one senators signed a letter circulated by Senators Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, backing the 60-vote threshold on legislation. The negative response to Mr. Trump’s morning Twitter posts — “Either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51%. Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” he wrote, saying the budget compromise was only necessary because of the filibuster — appeared to seal the deal.Wiki Photo
Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
When the Dollarhite family of Nixa, Mo., first started raising and selling bunnies as part of a lesson to teach their teenage son about responsibility and hard work, they had no idea they would eventually meet the heavy hand of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to a recent article covered in Breitbart’s Big Government, the USDA recently ordered the Dollarhite family to pay more than $90,000 in fines because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a year — and if they fail to pay the fine by Monday, May 23, the fine will multiply to nearly $4 million.
It all started back in 2006 when John Dollarhite and his wife Judy rescued two rabbits that ended up breeding. The family cared for and raised the new rabbits, and eventually began to sell them to neighbors, friends, and others for $10 or $15 each. Having started by first selling the animals for meat, and later for show, the Dollarhites carefully and humanely raised the small creatures on their three-acre homestead, all while teaching their son honest values in a business environment similar to running a small lemonade stand.
Eventually, the Dollarhites developed such a highly-respected reputation across Missouri that the popular Branson, Mo., theme park Silver Dollar City, and even a local pet store, Petland, began purchasing bunnies from the family in 2009. And according to John, individuals from both Silver Dollar City and Petland, as well as a rabbit competition judge, told him that the family’s bunnies were among the best they had ever seen — healthy, beautiful, and very well-cared for.
All seemed well until a USDA inspector showed up at the family’s home in the fall of 2009, and asked to do a “spot inspection” of the rabbitry. The inspector made no indication that anything was amiss, but only that she wished to see the facility. After meandering the premises, the inspector claimed that a few very insignificant aspects of the raising facility were in violation of USDA standards, even though the Dollarhites were not USDA certified, nor were they required to be. She then asked if the Dollarhites wished to be part of the voluntary USDA certification system, upon which they told her they would look into it.
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After the inspector left, the Dollarhites heard nothing more from the USDA until January 2010 when a Kansas City-based USDA inspector called the family and said he needed to have a meeting with them because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a single year. When the Dollarhites asked why this was a problem and what law this violated, the man refused to offer an explanation over the phone.
Upon meeting in person, the inspector said he was only there to investigate the rabbitry and take notes for a report, upon which he instructed the family to contact another USDA office if they failed to hear anything further from the USDA after six weeks. As the eighth week arrived without any communication, John called the office and was redirected to the Washington, DC, office where a lady shockingly and bluntly explained to him that she had his report, and that the USDA planned to prosecute him and his family “to the maximum that we can” in order to “make an example” out of him.
Shortly thereafter, the Dollarhites received a letter from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) ordering them to pay a fine of $90,643 for supposedly violating a mystery law that prohibits the selling of more then $500 in rabbits within a year, even though the Dollarhites were in full accordance with Missouri state law, did not sell their rabbits across state lines, and raised their rabbits humanely and in excess of minimum requirements. The letter outlined that the Dollarhites had until May 23 to pay the exorbitant fine, or else face additional fines totaling nearly $4 million — all for selling about $4,600 worth of rabbits that netted the family a mere $200 in profits.
The whole scenario proves, once again, that the USDA is nothing more than a tag-team terrorist duo with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both agencies’ insatiable lust for power and control over private affairs is never satisfied, as they continue to prowl around like bloodthirsty predators seeking whoever and whatever they can devour. When will Americans finally stand up to their tyranny and say enough is enough?
To read the full account of the Dollarhite saga, visit:
http://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2…Originally posted on milo.mcmaster.ca/showcase/poster2012
Poster Competition
The McMaster Innovation Showcase 2012 poster competition is your chance to show an audience of investors and technology scouts how your research could change the world.
The poster competition is open to all faculty, staff and students at McMaster, HHS and SJHH, and the deadline for submission of abstracts is May 30 June 5, 2012. Abstracts selected for poster presentation will be notified by June 6, 2012.
Prizes
The top poster in each of our three categories (greatest commercial potential, greatest social impact, and most groundbreaking research) will be awarded a $500 prize. Posters will be judged partially by a panel of invited experts. This year the poster competition will allow attendees to vote as well.
Guidelines for Posters
Judges will look for innovative ideas that solve tangible problems. The posters are expected to describe inventions or ideas and must address the following questions:
What is the problem are you trying to solve with your invention? How big is the need for a solution to the problem? Who are the end users / customers of the solution? How will the end users / customers benefit from the solution? What is your solution to the problem? What technology is being used to create the solution? What are the advantages of your technology? Is it better/faster/cheaper, or is there no solution yet? What is the current state of the solution or invention
Logistics
Posters should be no larger than 48 inches square. Poster boards will be available for you to tack your poster to. (You will not need to pre-mount your poster.) Accepted posters should be installed before 8:30a.m. on June 27 in CIBC Hall, McMaster University Student Centre (third floor).
Please note
It is important to remember that the Innovation Showcase is essentially a public forum, and as such, you should be careful that you do not include in your presentation enabling information that is not already protected by intellectual property protection of some kind, for example, a provisional patent application. If you are unclear about what information is protected, please consult your supervisor or a Business Development Officer.The Washington House of Representatives approved legislation that would eradicate medical marijuana dispensaries, aka "collective gardens," and enforce new limitations on patients that are registered with the program.
House Bill 2149, which passed by a substantial margin of 67 to 29, is basically designed to eliminate the competition for the recreational retail marketplace.
Representative Eileen Cody, the lawmaker who introduced the bill, and those that support the legislation are hopeful that banning medical marijuana dispensaries will not only help the state take full advantage of tax revenues, but also appease the federal government.
As of May 1, 2015, if the Senate votes in approval of this bill, state-authorized recreational marijuana retail outlets would be the only place for medical marijuana patients to purchase their supply.
Under the new regulations, patients would still have the right to cultivate their own plants, but the number would be significantly reduced from the currently permitted 15 plants to a mere total of six. (Three in the flowering cycle and three in the vegetation cycle.)
The amount a patient would be allowed to possess is drastically cut as well, being abbreviated from the current legal amount of 24 ounces of dried flowers to minuscule total of three.
"I think that we can satisfy some of the patients," Representative Cody avowed after the voting was complete. "I don't think that all of the medical marijuana community will be happy."
You think? That's the trouble with most politicians: they think!
"Our cowardly legislators voted to effectively end medical cannabis here," Steve Sarich, executive director of the Cannabis Action Network declared. "Patients are in shock. If the Senate votes to pass this bill, Washington will be the first state to end medical cannabis."Modern society provides us with all sorts of breath-freshening products: toothpaste, mints, mouthwash, gum, and even weird, translucent strips that dissolve in your mouth.
All these products have one thing in common: their default flavor is mint.
"The idea that mint equals freshness is an illusion"
By now, this seems quite natural. So it's hard to appreciate how interesting it is that Mentha spicata (spearmint) and Mentha × piperita (peppermint), a pair of shrubs native to Europe and Asia, have come to symbolize freshness for all of American society.
What's more, says cosmetics historian Rachel Weingarten, "the idea that mint equals freshness is more of an illusion than anything else. It's a triumph of advertising."
Peppermint does include menthol, which triggers receptors in your mouth that make it feel cold. But exclusively linking this feeling to our concept of "fresh breath" is pretty arbitrary — other countries, after all, have very differently-flavored toothpastes, such as clove and aloe.
So how did mint come to stand in for freshness? Here's the story.
A brief history of mouth care
"Our current use of mint is very a modern kind of thing," Weingarten says. In ancient history, spearmint and peppermint were mainly used as food and drink flavorings, or as medicines.
During the early Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder wrote that mint could be used as a remedy for 41 different ailments. Among other things, he wrote, it could be used to treat bleeding, liver disease, vomiting, and headaches. However, when it came to breath-freshening, this was his advice: "It is recommended to rub the teeth with ashes of burnt mouse-dung and honey."
for centuries, other plants were used to sweeten people's breath
For centuries, other plants and substances were used to sweeten people's breath. In the late 1700s, a French surgeon and dentist named Julien Botot introduced the first modern mouthwash, a fluid that contained gillyflower, ginger, and cinnamon, but not mint.
In the US and Europe, toothbrushing gradually came into fashion during the early 1800s, but for decades, people simply used water or abrasive powders while they brushed. To improve its flavor, some added crushed herbs — occasionally mint, but also things like rosemary, parsley, and sage.
Towards the end of the 19th century, a Connecticut dental surgeon named Washington Sheffield sold the first premixed toothpaste, and was quickly imitated by Colgate & Co. Both of their products contained some mint oil as a flavoring, but they also included other flavors. Neither was prominently advertised as mint — and at this point, the idea of "fresh breath" wasn't something commonly sold to consumers.
How mint took over
Two companies helped push mint to dominate the freshness market. Both relied upon marketers doing a very good job manipulating consumers to sell their products.
As Charles Duhigg writes in The Power of Habit, marketing |
as early Christian Ireland and the Plantations. Indeed, what is the point in learning about them?
The Story
Imagine reading the third book of the Hunger Games series without ever reading the first two, or watching Game of Thrones from the most recent episode without ever watching the earlier seasons. Sure, you’ll pick up on bits and pieces of the story as you go along, but without reading or watching what happened before, you’ll never gain a complete sense of the story, the events that have happened in it, and what the characters have been through. Every character has an origin and every story has a beginning, including our own.
We live in the longest-running and most complex story there has ever been. Most of us exist in this story as background characters, only a few of us go on to influence the overall plot. Some parts of the story began a long time ago, other parts are just starting now.
Take, for instance, the story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland: the long-running discrimination and bigotry that resulted in decades of death and destruction. It’s certainly a dramatic story, and much more likely to capture the attention of students then, say, the Plantations – but how can one understand the former without the latter? The Plantations may come across as dull and uninteresting, but they’re a prequel to the partition of Ireland and the Troubles. History is full of prequels and sequels. The world we live in today is a sequel of sorts to the events of World War II. It will in turn become the prequel to something else.
The characters
Of course, just because most of us might be background characters in the larger story, that doesn’t mean we’re barely a part of it. We all have our own stories: where we came from, what we’ve been through, and how we came to be who we are. Even if we never turn out to be as prominent a character as Rosa Parks, Michael Collins, Mary Robinson or Barack Obama, we still have our individual parts to play – just as each of those four people did before they were famous, and just as they would have done anyway.
Irish people often tend to cherish our stories. The struggle for independence still captures peoples’ imaginations today, and we have given a great amount of attention to commemorating the many centenaries that take place in this decade – not least the one coming up in 2016. Even Ruairi Quinn himself acknowledges the importance of the story and his role in it – he wrote about it in his 2005 memoir, Straight Left.
The historians
So, how can we expect children growing up today to enter this story as adults if they don’t know what’s already happened in it? How can someone properly understand the economic downturn, the Garda surveillance controversy, or the recent horrible discovery in Tuam without knowing what previously happened in the story that led to these events?
Ireland has developed around that story. Our cities and towns have developed around that story, and we as individuals have developed around that story. The popularity of shows such as Who Do You Think You Are? and The Genealogy Roadshow is evidence enough of our desire to know the origins of our part in the story. To answer Ruairi Quinn’s challenge, historians don’t need to convince anyone that History matters. We have always been a nation of historians.
The future
My students came out of the exam centre in dribs and drabs. We chatted about the exam, and I congratulated them on all their hard work and effort. I was still thinking of their future as they walked off: how their stories would tie in to the larger one in which we all live. As they get older, those students will experience the latest twists and turns of that story. How can we expect them to live in it if they don’t know what twists and turns have happened already?
Jason Kelleher is a History teacher at the Cork Life Centre (www.corklifecentre.org), an education centre for early school leavers. I also run a revision site called History Help, and is on Twitter at @historyjk.Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE's former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, says Democrats shouldn't underestimate Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE.
"But it’s going to be much closer than many people think,” Weaver continued.
“I think some people on the Democratic side who think that, you know, Trump is such a buffoon that it’s already won — but I think he’s a very dangerous opponent and I think he certainly has the ability to win as well," he said.
Trump received a bounce in polling following the Republican National Convention last month, eliminating polling leads for Clinton.But Paul Reddam went a different route in his homage to Nyquist, the Detroit Red Wings forward. Reddam, a native of Windsor, Ontario, who owns thoroughbred horses, is a Red Wings fan, and with Windsor being so close to Detroit, he named his prodigious colt Nyquist after the gifted Swede. On May 8, 2016, the 3-year-old colt, a 2-1 favorite, won the 142nd running of the Kentucky Derby.
Attachments to athletes have been known to inspire people to name their pets and, in many cases, babies, after them.
Attachments to athletes have been known to inspire people to name their pets and, in many cases, babies, after them.
But Paul Reddam went a different route in his homage to Nyquist, the Detroit Red Wings forward. Reddam, a native of Windsor, Ontario, who owns thoroughbred horses, is a Red Wings fan, and with Windsor being so close to Detroit, he named his prodigious colt Nyquist after the gifted Swede. On May 8, 2016, the 3-year-old colt, a 2-1 favorite, won the 142nd running of the Kentucky Derby.
During Nyquist's outstanding three-year career at the University of Maine he led the Black Bears each season in scoring and the nation his second season with 61 points. He was a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award, given to college hockey's top player.
Following another season at Maine, Nyquist signed an entry-level contract with the Red Wings, who selected him in the fourth round (No. 121) of the 2008 NHL Draft following his second season with Malmö in Sweden.
Nyquist spend the majority of the next two seasons with Grand Rapids of the American Hockey League and helped the team win the Calder Cup in 2013.
Nyquist began the 2013-14 season at Grand Rapids, before being called up and scoring two goals in his first game, against the Carolina Hurricanes on Nov. 21, 2013.
During a 10-game stretch from March 16, 2013 to April 2, 2013, Nyquist scored 12 goals and 14 points. He finished with 28 goals and 48 points in 57 games.
In Nyquist's first full NHL season (2014-15), he reinforced what he had done as a rookie, as he finished with 27 goals and 27 assists in 82 games.
On July 10, 2015, Nyquist avoided salary arbitration by signing a four-year contract with Detroit.
NOTES & TRANSACTIONSA film about one of the most monumental and influential scientists in history will apparently not be shown in the United States because nobody wants to offend the creationist crowd:
A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.
Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.
The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.
However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.
Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.
The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as “a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying”.
Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.
“That’s what we’re up against. In 2009. It’s amazing,” he said.
“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
“It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.
“Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying ‘kill all religion’, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.”Rachel Barrett
·
The reason people need advice on using social media
is that they're a much more complex and nuanced way to communicate than a conversation or email.
· I started learning about this complexity when I was a teenager. I used to go online and use the Microsoft Comic Chat program, which had an interface like a cartoon storyboard. You'd choose an avatar and chat with people via comic-strip speech bubbles. That was my introduction to the Web and, in a way, to social media. I was in awe! I was talking—as a cat—to random strangers.
· The social-media landscape changes incredibly fast, so you have to be open-minded and nimble to keep up with it. In 2005, eons after I was a talking cat, I founded Reddit with my fellow University of Virginia graduate Steve Huffman. We wanted to create a front page for the Web. No avatars there—just pure social media, providing a way for people to share and discuss stories that interest them.
· What I learned in the span between Comic Chat and Reddit is that in the social-media world, "personal" and "brand" are very closely linked, and that building a business based on social media is really just a strategic application of your personal and brand identities.
· I have a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air—I don't go many places without a laptop—and I have a Galaxy Nexus. In other words, like a lot of people today, I can jump online in an instant. It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time. I use them on aggregate about 2 hours a day. My preferred platform is Reddit—surprise! But I use software called RescueTime to kick me off after an hour. And I maybe spend up to another hour on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
· One effective way of curbing your dependence on social media is to build time into your day where you're totally offline. I call that time girlfriend time. I live on the East Coast now, so the first few hours in the morning work especially well, since everyone in the West is still asleep.
· Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.
· This idea connects to my first rule of developing a social-media strategy: Make sure your product or service or cause is something people want. It's all about creating quality content. Maybe you can spam your way to short-term success, but that approach won't work long-term.
· Second rule: Understand the importance of being candid and transparent. There's a cliché about crisis being an opportunity, but when you do screw up—which shouldn't be too often—think of that screwup as a chance to show that you give a damn, that you are invested in your product or content. By admitting your mistakes and doing whatever it takes to make things right, you can win people over and even gain new users. The way you treat your users or customers, and how you personally present yourself through social media, is a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
· Third rule: You cannot be less than 100 percent committed. Hard work and hustle are just as important as the thing or idea you're trying to sell. Anything you post must have a purpose. And you have to be relentless about engaging your users, your fans, your customers—respond to every tweet, comment on every blog post. This makes sense not only as a way to get a better understanding of your users, but you also never know if one particular response is going to go viral.
· That said, using social media is not a popularity contest. Sure, it's nice to be noticed by a big audience, but that's not the most important metric. What matters is not the number of followers, subscribers, or whatever the equivalent.You want to get a feel of engagement, sentiment, and user morale. All of those are almost impossible to quantify. But anyone who pays attention to the conversations of their community will get a feel for these things.
· Start by making your customers or followers happy—they'll end up doing all the social-media magic. We had one Redditor (that's shorthand for Reddit user) who was corresponding with a well-known hotel chain. He jokingly requested that his room be prepared with a bathtub full of Reese's Pieces and a bed full of puppies. This person arrived at the room to find a bag of Reese's Pieces and a handwritten note with an enclosed picture of a kitten. It was a small gesture—maybe cost the hotel just a few dollars—but it was a gesture of the emphasis the hotel puts on customer care. The Redditor wrote about the incident, and it made it to the front page, where it was read by hundreds of thousands of people and linked to blogs everywhere. So in pursuing their mission of delivering a great customer experience, this hotel chain ended up with more exposure and goodwill than a very expensive ad campaign could provide.
· Ignore what your competition is doing. Shortly after we launched Reddit, we found out about another social-news site, Digg. We realized that what your competitors do should be irrelevant. Stay focused on your own plans and strategy. More often than not, what can ruin a business isn't what a competitor does, but rather something that happens internally. When we started Hipmunk, a travel site, we were well aware of Kayak. We didn't focus on being better than them. We just set about creating what we thought would be the best travel search site. This single-minded focus can be applied to almost every venture on the Internet.
· Is there a real importance in creating a unique online identity? Well, I don't want to get into this whole way of thinking that everyone is his or her own special snowflake [laughs], but I've found that if you are true to yourself and your product or idea, the differentiation will grow almost organically. And from differentiation comes success.
· The social-media landscape today is very different than the one we faced when we launched Reddit. It was successful because it preceded this flood and stood out as something unique. Starting Reddit today would be much harder, but there are so many more ways for great ideas to spread online now.
· So you have to keep in mind, success very rarely happens overnight. For those who use social media strictly for personal reasons, success is defined as engaging with people and communities you really care about. Regardless of your social-media goals, have patience and temper your expectations. Things need time to blossom, so you have to resist the urge to change tactics and embellish your plans. There's beauty and strength in simplicity and clarity.
5 Things You Should Never Do When Using Social Media
(1) Talk to people any differently than you would if they were right in front of you.
(2) Feed the trolls.
(3) Engage in shameless self-promotion. Better to post positive things about other people's work and then let the good karma work for you.
(4) Drink to excess. (If you do, disconnect from the Internet.) An inebriated slip of the thumb on your Twitter feed can do major damage.
(5) Be mean to @MollyRingwald. Seriously, she's a big fan of Reddit, and she's very nice.Express News Service By
BHUBANESWAR: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has rapped the State DGP for non-compliance of its order for Crime Branch (CB) enquiry and action against guilty police officers in a case of paedophilia by a French tourist on Puri beach in 2013.
The Commission had issued the directions to the DGP on September 16 last year and had sought a report on the action taken within four weeks. “No enquiry report has yet been received from Odisha CB/CID so far. Further, it has also not been informed as to what action has been taken against IIC, Sea Beach police station Pravesh Chandra Sahoo. Inaction on the part of authorities has resulted in serious violation of human rights of the victim children, the rights panel stated taking stern note of the lapse.
It has asked the Chief Secretary why interim relief of Rs 10,000 should not be granted to each of the four victim children.
Mathieu Nicolas Furic (46) was able to flee Puri after allegedly sexually abusing four children due to the inaction of police. Furic, who arrived in Puri on November 18, 2013, had checked out of his hotel on November 26, 2013 immediately after another tourist and US national James Foster Gorman caught him in the act with a group of boys on Penthakata beach in Puri on the same day. Gorman had lodged a complaint with the Sea Beach police.
Acting on a complaint by rights activist Akhand, the Commission had then sought reports from the State police authorities on the incident. Additional DGP, HRPC submitted his report stating that IIC Pravesh Chandra Sahoo was guilty of dereliction of duty for not registering a case immediately. “It was on the intervention of Puri SP that the FIR was registered on December 2 after a week’s delay,” the report said.
The Commission had then directed the DGP to get a fresh enquiry conducted by CB and to take appropriate action against delinquent police officers. But it has not been done.Denmark Reaches 2020 Goal for Solar Energy 8 Years in Advance
September 24th, 2012 by Nicholas Brown
Why the Demand for Solar PV Panels in Denmark Exploded
Regarding reaching this milestone so early, Kim Schultz, the project manager of Invest in Denmark, said:
“The demand for solar cells has increased dramatically since net metering was implemented in 2010. Net metering gives private households and public institutions the possibility of ‘storing’ surplus production in the public grid, which makes solar panels considerably more attractive.”
“Denmark benefits from a strong design tradition and this also characterizes the Danish solar sector in which aesthetics and thinking ahead of user needs is a central part of product development. This means that solar solutions are more likely to meet consumers’ demands.
“Last but not least, Denmark has a unique energy system with a very high share of renewable energy. This makes the energy system very suitable as a platform for Smart Grid technologies, which are a key element to fully exploit renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind energy.”
Denmark has a much larger wind energy target set for 2020 — to obtain 50% of its electricity from the wind. Denmark has also been a world leader in low-cost green transportation — in particular, regarding bicycles. Copenhagen (Denmark) and Amsterdam (in the Netherlands, of course) are well known as the best large cities in the world for bicycling.
Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of DenmarkThe story is the same for many: “I started playing pickup games in college.”
“I played in college, at Ball State. It was just pickup behind the dorms,” Fort Wayne Ultimate Frisbee organizer Jeff Ratajczak said. “I played competitively in Orlando before we moved here. We moved back here 14 years ago, almost. I played pickup and leagues and all that ever since then.”
Ultimate Frisbee, or simply Ultimate, is a combination of soccer, a little bit of hockey and some football played with a disc.
The aim is to throw the disc to a teammate inside the defense's end zone. The player with possession of the disc cannot take any steps and must find a way to throw the disc to a teammate to advance.
If a pass is not successfully completed, whether due to an incomplete pass, block or interception, the disc switches possession.
Players are often drawn to the game because of the lack of intense competition that other sports have.
“I played a lot of rec sports (growing up), I played soccer in high school and I did a lot of intramurals in college,” said Peter Schweitzer, 30. “I really enjoy the people I play with, I enjoy that it's competitive but it's just a really good group of people. I guess that's the biggest thing. It's very competitive but, yet, it's great attitudes.”
For Bridget Bol, who played four years with mixed club teams at Purdue, the Fort Wayne league provided a perfect opportunity for her and husband, Ryan, to make friends.
“I have an older brother, Michael Wellman, and he played in college at Marquette and he would come home in the summer and we would throw around the Frisbee,” Bol said. “When I went to college, I sought it out right away. I know he had a lot of fun. I did track and cross country when I was in high school and I love the sport. I love Frisbee. I love how competitive it is as well as spirited. I think a lot of other sports, they get too much into the game.
“I played a summer in Fort Wayne since my parents live here. I played a summer here before I got married so we wanted to get involved again, not only just to make friends but to get in shape.”
Ultimate was brought to Fort Wayne by Mike Miller in the early 1980s after he played the game at Dayton University. He organized pickup games with co-workers at Magnavox and organized tournaments.
The Fort Wayne Ultimate Frisbee league started in the mid-1990s and has grown to be the largest Ultimate league in the state with 20 teams and almost 300 players the past two years, according to Ratajczak. There are also leagues in Decatur, Goshen and Indianapolis.
“When I first moved here (in 1999), we struggled to get 4-6 teams.” Andy Temple, 41, said. “When I first moved here, most people who played started in college but didn't necessarily pickup. Now, a lot of these guys started playing pickup in high school or just with their friends.
“It's physically active game. You're not necessarily limited because of age. As long as you understand how the game flows, you can still play and be competitive with younger people.”
Tournaments in Fort Wayne began in the 1980s, with memorable occurrences: crabgrass on the playing field, 98-degree heat with humidity and cooling off in nearby ponds.
Currently, the league hosts pickup games every Saturday at 2 p.m. at The Summit on West Rudisill Boulevard. With league spots filling quickly, pickup games are encouraged to get introduced to the game and the group.
“The pickup is where you can get a good introduction,” Temple said. “Pickup is a little less stressful. It's a good time to come out and see what the game's like without feeling too intimidated.”
More information can be found at Fort Wayne Ultimate Frisbee on Facebook.
areichel@jg.netWorld leaders get it: The public doesn't trust them after decades of rising inequality and feeling left out by global trade.
Many economists believe the political uncertainty of Brexit and Donald Trump pose major risks to the global economy. Those risks stem from public mistrust for government leaders and their inability to distribute wealth more evenly and help people who believe they have been hurt by trade.
"I am seriously concerned on this," Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, told CNN's Richard Quest at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington.
"You can look all over at the advanced economies -- the British referendum, the campaign in the United States... more and more people don't trust their elites. They don't trust their economic leaders, and they don't trust their political leaders."
(Schauble noted that the public doesn't trust the media, either.)
He's not alone. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, three months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, believes more needs to be done to fix income inequality and who benefits from global trade. Saying that global economic growth is low is no longer an excuse, he argues.
"Growth has been too low, but also sharing the fruits of growth has not been there," Carney told Quest.
Carney said governments can rebuild trust by being candid with the public.
Related: Brazil's finance minister jokes about job security
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde acknowledged that countries need to address the "backlash that we are seeing in many corners of the world -- against trade, against innovation."
"Too slow for too long benefiting too few," Lagarde told Quest, referring to global growth.
The sobering comments come about a month before the U.S. election, which has had an anti-trade flair all year. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has threatened to get rid of trade deals and slap tariffs on Mexico and China.
His rise was just as unexpected as the British vote in June. One reason for Brexit was a belief that trade had hurt more people than it benefited.
Although a trove of analysis points to the contrary -- that trade helps more people than it bruises -- Carney realizes the benefits of trade, such as lower consumer prices, need to be explained in more concrete ways.
He asked rhetorically: "How do we make trade tangible?"Leicester City and Bournemouth are battling it out to sign Udinese’s highly rated midfielder Jakub Jankto. The Czech Republic Under-21 international was scouted by Arsenal throughout last season but Leicester and Bournemouth have jumped the queue by telling Udinese they are ready to make an offer now.
Happy homecoming for Liverpool as Roberto Firmino double sinks Leicester Read more
Jankto spent last season on loan at Ascoli in Serie B but is back with Udinese for this campaign, with the manager Giuseppe Iachini ready to give the 20-year-old a chance in the first team.
Jankto signed for Udinese in 2014 after playing youth football for Slavia Prague in the Czech Republic. He played 34 league games for Ascoli last season, scoring five goals, impressing with his tireless running. His preferred position is on the left in a 4-3-3 formation but he can operate in a variety of positions on the left-hand side.
Udinese would prefer to keep the player but his contract runs out after this season and they are fearful of losing him on a free transfer next summer. The club would accept bids of £8m or more for the 20-year-old.Politics
Today the same people who were in the forefront of the Telangana movement are marginalised and ignored
A new state is not just an economic entity. It is also a political space. While miracles cannot be expected in implementing the economic agenda of a political party that newly assumed power, the people of the new state certainly have the right to expect political morality and respect for the Constitutional principles that respect the rights of the citizens.
Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) won the elections in May 2014 and will celebrate the second anniversary of the government on 2 June 2016.
When we review the performance of the TRS party in power for political morality and respect for the Constitution, the two years present a rather dismal picture.
Telangana Rashtra Samiti won 2014 elections with 63 seats out of a possible 120 assembly seats. Today, on the second anniversary of the government, it is more robust, having put on the weight of 23 seats. Twelve elected members of the legislative assembly belonging to the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), six from Congress, three from YSRCP, and two from Bahujan Samaj Party ‘defected’ to TRS.
Such defections happen soon after a candidate contests on an opposition platform, viciously berating and challenging the politics of TRS. The voter has believed the legislator’s campaign and has voted him in, but the candidate chooses to jump loyalties soon after. This is a mockery of the electoral process and the voter.
There has been no challenge to this from Constitutional authorities like the Election Commission or the courts. In one case, one of the defectors from Telugu Desam Party continues as a minister in the government while continuing to be listed as a TDP member.
TRS is solely concerned about decimating the opposition by whatever means and has pursued the objective surgically. A despicable manoeuvre of corruption is being dressed up as political strategy in self-congratulation. This is not the new politics that Telangana people wanted. The class who play this game has neither ideology nor principle when they pick their political killing fields and its consequences will not benefit the people.
We all understand that in a resource rich state like Telangana, being close to the centre of power will ensure access to the feeding trough in the spoils bonanza that soon must follow, with mega allocations for irrigation and other works that are planned. There is no higher principle here.
Each of the by-elections held since 2014 witnessed perverse political games. The cash-for-vote farce just before the legislative council elections that involved high drama between the TDP and TRS quietened soon after with a truce between the two chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Of course no legal outcome is likely till the next election, seeing how the institutions that are required to provide the checks and balances for democratic practice are compromised.
However, the biggest shock comes from the style of governance of this government. During the agitation for statehood, two things were often repeated by the TRS leadership. One is the need for wide consultation with Praja Sanghalu (civil society groups), that were in the forefront of the movement and provided ideological coherence and credibility to it. In fact, an advisory body of Praja Sanghams was one of the priority items in the TRS manifesto.
Today the same entities and people who were in the forefront of the Telangana movement are marginalised and ignored. Academicians, artists, poets and activists are watching from the sidelines with increasing alarm at the way the government is further strengthening the already entrenched systems of exploitation in the state.
The second was implementation of the socio-economic agenda of progressive political formations, including that of Maoists, and suspension of all repressive activity of the security forces in the state.
In fact, TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao gave public statements saying, “We’ll hold talks with the Maoists. The talks won’t be at the police level. They will be at the highest level, involving the CM and other key players. The agenda of the TRS is the same as the socio-economic agenda of the Maoists. We will implement it.”
Not only has the socio-economic agenda been set aside, in a series of instances, the TRS government has illustrated to the civil society that all demands and dissent will be crushed. It began with Shruti, Sagar encounters, followed by several other fake encounters and repression in the state.
TRS that spun dreams of encounter free state has now decided to be invisible and silent not just on these issues. They are actively colluding with the Central government in undermining Rohith Vemula case at the University of Hyderabad.
The very first project of this government when it came to power was to militarise the police force and give it more impunity than it had before. No demands for justice against human rights violations are heeded. Public meetings of rights organisations are either denied permission or after permissions are given, withdrawn. Rights activists are harassed, hounded and intimidated.
The decision-making is centralised at the top, and the top leadership is just not accessible to anyone. It takes a Tim Cook to meet them. No ordinary citizen of Telangana can have access to the centre of power. In less than two years, the sacrifices of the crores of poor people who came on to the streets democratically since 1969 to demand a separate of Telangana have been forgotten.
The Telangana state today is inviting global capital to come play, and promising the earth to them, literally. Even so, the government is proposing to close thousands of schools, depriving remote communities, especially girls, access to education. There is gross neglect of the university system. When Tim Cook and his Apple corporation does set up in Hyderabad, it will not be children of Telangana who work in the company, because they will still be illiterate and unemployable, as they are today.
After draught and water woes that traditionally compelled people in Telangana to migrate in distress, they are now being subject to a fresh round of displacement and dispossession ensuring permanent migration, perhaps. This time, the government is taking over thousands of acres of their patta and other lands also to accommodate reservoirs, all in the name of solving the water crisis in Telangana. Displaced communities have been protesting on the streets.
That is how many families in Telangana will usher in 2 June, even as the glitter of comprador celebrations will seek to mesmerise us on the streets of the capital and out of television screens.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author. The News Minute is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability or validity of any information in this article. The information, facts or opinions appearing in this article do not reflect the views of The News Minute and The News Minute does not assume any liability on the same.• Rummenigge says Bayern are 'locomotive' of German football • Bayern will open offices in the US and China in next six months
The European champions Bayern Munich are planning to build on their football and financial success with an international campaign of marketing and summer tours, promising to be the "locomotive" for German football's effort to rival the Premier League and Spanish La Liga's global popularity.
Bayern's chairman, the former international centre forward Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, told the Guardian he rejects complaints that Bayern's playing strength and huge wealth is making the Bundesliga uncompetitive, arguing instead the club's success and profile should be considered a great asset to German football.
While criticising the tradeable ownership of the Premier League, in which England's top clubs have been bought by US investors, Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, Rummenigge said Bayern, still 82% owned by the club's 225,000 fan-members, admire and will seek to emulate the English game's profile and earnings overseas.
Bayern will open an office in New York "within weeks", Rummenigge said and prepare for a summer of playing tours. Another office will be set up in the new year in China where, Bayern, like Premier League clubs, anticipate huge commercial opportunities.
"The Bundesliga is today growing and doing well but the Premier League by far is still number one in the world," Rummenigge said. "The English clubs are doing a fantastic job internationally and we have to follow. Then, when we start this initiative, the other Bundesliga clubs have to follow the example of Bayern."
Pointing to the gap between the Premier League's international TV deals from 2013-16, which at £2.3bn is more than 10 times that of the Bundesliga's current €70m a year, Rummenigge said: "You see the Bundesliga, and Bayern Munich as the locomotive of the Bundesliga, has to do much more."
This has become Bayern Munich's response to the growing observation that the club, with its 71,000-capacity Allianz Arena, lucrative sponsorships, European playing success and propensity still to sign their Bundesliga rivals' best players, have become too overwhelmingly strong for the German league. Already this season they are four points ahead of second-placed Bayer Leverkusen and the club's former coach, Felix Magath, recently argued that the Bundesliga is "pre-awarded to Bayern".
To the suggestion from Eintracht Frankfurt's coach, Heribert Bruchhagen, that the German clubs playing in the Champions League should share their money around the Bundesliga, Rummenigge argued Bayern's strength should not be clipped but built upon.
"People are looking at us being too strong in the Bundesliga at national level," Rummenigge said, "but we are looking at the European and international level and we see we have to further and, at the end, it will help the Bundesliga."
Bayern's clean sweep of European Champions League, Bundesliga, German Cup and Super Cup and a relentless commercial operation, despite 16,000 season tickets offered to members at only €150, €7.50 per domestic match, produced a record income in 2012-13. Bayern's total, €433m, was almost €130m more than the club's nearest rivals in the Bundesliga, Borussia Dortmund, who made €305m, and Bayern's signing from Dortmund of Mario Götze, leaked just before the Wembley Champions League final between the two clubs, has reinforced the growing divide. Bayern's income was similar to the £363m record turnover of Manchester United, whose international earnings, principally from sponsorships, Bayern will now seek to emulate.
Bayern earned €150m from matchday income, including their winning run in the Champions League, £102m from sponsorship, with shirt sponsor T-Mobile omnipresent at the Allianz Arena, and €44m from domestic TV rights. Champions League earnings were €63m, the source of Br |
to the last meeting of the Contact Group on December 24th combat operations nearly halted, indicating the desire of all parties to at least explore political and diplomatic options. Russia signaled it’s interest in a political solution, which in the words of Russian foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov would have to include a ‘constitutional reform‘ in Ukraine, while probably retaining the option of resuming military operations if no deal was to be reached. As the meetings resulted in nothing more than a prisoner exchange between the self-proclaimed ‘Republics’ and the Ukrainian government, the latter part seems to have materialised, and news of renewed violence came shortly after the failed deliberations.
And though it may seem that Russia’s economic woes taken together with the conciliatory signs may signal a breakthrough in the making, it is unlikely that the Kremlin will alter it’s stance on Crimea. This after all is a fact neither the Western nor the Ukrainian government seem willing to accept. Herein lies the main problem for any political solution to the war in Ukraine, because Putin practically overcommitted himself to Crimea by calling it a holy place for Russia in his state of the nation address in December. Putins position inside the Russian system of power rests on his ability to act as a intermediary between different rivalling factions, or clans as they sometimes are called. By overcommitting like this he signalled to his peers and rivals that whatever the cost, he won’t let Crimea be taken from Russia, basically tying his own personal success to Russia’s newest province.
Thus any political solution of the war in Ukraine from a Russian point of view would have to include the West to at least ignore the question of the legal status of Crimea. Obviously this would be hard to swallow for most western leaders, even though a solution could stop short of the west actually accepting Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The scenario for this could lie somewhere along the lines of the Israeli-Syrian Golan Heights Case: no official recognition, no finalised peace deal, but a somewhat stable working relationship. But as long as the Ukrainian government still believes in succeeding with it’s military operations in the Donbas region, it understandably won’t consider giving in to Russia’s demands. And the western States, clinging to the somewhat overrated notion of credibility in international affairs, is not willing to accept Russia breaking one of the most important rules of the concert of Nation-States, namely the territorial integrity of each of them, which they believe might inspire other states elsewhere to probe into the same misbehaviour.
This leads to a paradoxical situation on the ground. Russia, even though it obviously does not seem interested in taking on the burden of more economically unstable provinces, has to keep up support for the self-proclaimed Republics because it needs them as a bargaining chip in any possible deal with Ukraine and the West. And Kyiv, still hoping for any kind of significant military support by the West, won’t give in to a diplomatic process as long as there is hope for altering the facts on the ground in taking away this bargaining chip in Ukraine’s eastern provinces. Not to speak of the different rebel factions and warlords, who clearly do have their own reasons for keeping the hostilities alive.
Currently all the involved parties do have a interest in continuing the war of attrition in the Donbas region, and the NATO states, that could easily alter the fortune of Ukraine, remain indecisive. This means that all the conciliatory signs aside, and in spite all the fruits a political solution could yield, this war will most likely drag on throughout 2015.Syria has accused the US of committing a "war crime" after a helicopter raid within its borders left eight people dead. Sam is a BBC user who lives in Abu Kamal, the Syrian border town where the attack happened on Sunday. He describes the local anger at the attack directed at America - and at Syrian authorities. I live less than two miles (three kilometres) away from where it took place. I was asleep at the time, but went to the hospital less than two hours afterwards. Nearly everyone who had heard about it was there. Syrian TV showed what appear to be bloodstains at the site of the attack Most of the people here have bitter anti-American sentiments and this has only added fuel to the fire. We are also very disappointed with the lack of response from our own authorities. The attack was in the village of Sukariya, which is inhabited almost entirely by the Mashahda tribe. They are very relaxed, laid back people, not very religious - there's no Mujahideen from this tribe. The guard and the woman who died were very simple people. They lived in a tent and were being paid to guard building materials such as cement and timber, 24 hours a day. These people will have had nothing to do with the insurgency in Iraq. Most of the people who live here have families in Iraq. A lot of smuggling goes on: bringing guns and sheep from Iraq to Syria.
There is security everywhere in this country. The government is very severe with the locals; if they have a tip-off that someone has a stolen gun, the place will be surrounded in two minutes. But yesterday there was zero response. The attack happened close to a bridge over the Euphrates and there are military posts either side of the bridge - so very near. But the army is indecisive when it comes to action. The people who were killed were harmless, they should have been protected. It is a very saddening experience. People talk about patriotism, but when it comes to action - nothing. People here hate America more than before and they are disappointed in their own authorities' response.
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Amazon’s competitors — a group that basically includes every retailer under the sun nowadays — have more reasons than ever to fear the world’s largest e-retailer. Membership in Amazon Prime, the service that includes unlimited free two-day shipping and tends to boost customer spending at Amazon dramatically, has doubled in less than two years. Analysts predict it’ll easily double again by 2017.
Last week, a report from Morningstar and Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimated that there are now 10 million subscribers to Amazon Prime, which offers free streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows and, most important, free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases. The service usually costs $79 annually, though it’s cheaper for college students ($39 annually, after six months free).
It’s unclear exactly how many Prime subscribers there are at any given time (Amazon doesn’t make this info public), but it sure looks like membership soared. It’s been estimated that there were fewer than 7 million subscribers at the start of 2012 and about 4 million members in the fall of 2011. The numbers have likely been boosted by Amazon including free Prime trials with sales of the Kindle tablet, but even so, the increases are impressive — and are presumed to keep occurring with regularity. The Morningstar report predicted that there could be 25 million Prime members by 2017.
(MORE: Is There a Future for Same-Day Delivery? How About Online Grocery Shopping?)
Even more interesting than the growing Prime ranks is what Prime seems to do to subscribers. A 2010 Businessweek story stated that Amazon Prime broke even within three months of launching, not the two years predicted by its creators. That’s because customers spent as much as 150% more at Amazon after they became Prime members. Subscribers not only ordered more often, but after paying the $79 fee, they started buying things at Amazon that they probably wouldn’t have in the past. Since shipping was always speedy and free, members saved themselves a trip to the store for things like batteries and coffee beans. “In all my years here, I don’t remember anything that has been as successful at getting customers to shop in new product lines,” Robbie Schwietzer, vice president of Amazon Prime, told Businessweek.
The net result of Prime membership — and the thing that has to scare the bejesus out of Amazon’s competition — is that it tends to cause subscribers to stop shopping anywhere else. It’s assumed that Amazon’s prices are competitive. With Prime, shipping costs become a total nonissue. Subscribers automatically defer to shopping at Amazon first because they know shipping is free. And when they spot something they like at another retailer’s site or in a store (yes, it still happens), Prime members are likely to see if Amazon also sells the item. Chances are, Amazon does, the price is about the same or better, and two-day shipping is, of course, thrown in for free.
Sure, Amazon “pays” for all the shipping on Prime orders. A 2011 investigation estimated that the average Prime member used $55 worth of shipping and $35 in digital content annually. That’s $90 total, so Amazon was “losing” $11 annually by collecting its $79 membership fee.
Regardless of what might seem like a net loss, Amazon Prime has been and continues to be a hugely profitable enterprise for the e-retail giant. A Prime member now makes $1,224 in Amazon purchases each year, on average, compared with $505 for non-Prime customers. After factoring in costs incurred for shipping and streaming, the average Prime member yields Amazon $78 more in profits than other customers, according to Morningstar. Yep, it’s nearly equal to that $79 membership fee.
(MORE: Best Buy Swears Shoppers Don’t Have to Bother Showrooming Anymore)
Wired notes that “Amazon could cut the price by $50 and still make far more than what the company makes off non-Prime customers.” Such a decreased price would probably boost Prime membership through the roof, as more shoppers would find it worthwhile to pay the fee in exchange for a year’s worth of unlimited two-day shipping. “They should be able to give Prime away for free,” says CIRP partner Michael Levin.
An extreme Prime price cut could wreak havoc throughout the retail world. Just imagine if, suddenly, tens of millions of consumers doubled their annual spending at Amazon.com like previous Prime customers have done. Such a change would hammer Amazon’s online and brick-and-mortar competition, and probably also hurt the chances of emerging same-day-shipping services, whose fees fewer would be willing to pay. When two-day shipping is always free, after all, it’s much harder to justify forking over $10 or more to get an item a little quicker. (Amazon also offers same-day shipping in several major cities, and it gives a discount on the expedited service for Prime members.)
That said, there are reasons why Amazon is likely to maintain the Prime fee structure as is. Sure, there are all those millions of $79 yearly fees to consider. That’s easy money for Amazon. And based on expanding Prime-membership numbers, the world’s largest e-retailer doesn’t appear to need help growing its subscriber base.
But there’s more to it than that. From the get-go, many Prime members have been motivated to spend more at Amazon not just because prices were good and shipping was free, but because they want to get their money’s worth out of their $79. If a customer is not ordering all that much, the subscription fee isn’t worth paying. If Prime fees go away, the compulsion to “get your money back” goes away too. When something is free, consumers tend to think it’s not particularly valuable.
(MORE: Hurray for $4 Beers! Baseball Teams Stop Ripping Off Fans with Jacked-Up Concessions)
Of course, there are many options in between $0 and $79. Amazon is famous for aggressive pricing tactics, and it has always seemed willing to accept smaller transaction profits so long as it wins the sale. “Your margin is my opportunity,” is a favorite quote from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. His company is driven to make more sales and attract more customers, and a cheaper Prime-membership fee would help with both.The Israeli group Breaking the Silence issued a report this morning containing testimony from Israeli soldiers about the savagery and criminality committed by the Israeli military during the attack on Gaza last summer. The Independent has a good article describing the report’s findings: “The Israeli military deliberately pounded civilian areas in the Gaza Strip with incessant fire of inaccurate ordinance” and “was at best indifferent about casualties among the Palestinian population.” At best.
This should surprise nobody who paid any attention to the brutal Israeli destruction of Gaza or, for that matter, countless Israeli attacks before that. The U.N. has said that 7 out of 10 people killed by the Israelis were civilians, “including 1,462 civilians, among them 495 children and 253 women”; video of Israelis killing four Gazan boys as they played on a beach sickened anyone decent.
Nonetheless, reading the accounts from these Israeli soldiers is revolting and important in equal parts. It shines considerable light on the reality of what Israeli loyalists have long hailed as “the most moral army in the world,” one unfairly held to a difference standard that ignores their great “restraint.”
The Intercept has chosen some selected, representative excerpts from the report, with the rank of the testifying soldier indicated (each one was granted anonymity by the report’s organizers). This is the savage occupying force known as the Israeli Defense Forces:
“Whoever you see there, you kill”
Staff Sargent, Armored Corps:
[A]fter 48 hours during which no one shoots at you and they’re like ghosts, unseen, their presence unfelt – except once in a while the sound of one shot fired over the course of an entire day – you come to realize the situation is under control. And that’s when my difficulty there started, because the formal rules of engagement – I don’t know if for all soldiers – were, “Anything still there is as good as dead. Anything you see moving in the neighborhoods you’re in is not supposed to be there. The [Palestinian] civilians know they are not supposed to be there. Therefore whoever you see there, you kill.... The commander [gave that order]. “Anything you see in the neighborhoods you’re in, anything within a reasonable distance, say between zero and 200 meters – is dead on the spot. No authorization needed.” We asked him: “I see someone walking in the street, do I shoot him?” He said yes. Did the commander discuss what happens if you run into civilians or uninvolved people? There are none. The working assumption states – and I want to stress that this is a quote of sorts: that anyone located in an IDF area, in areas the IDF took over – is not [considered] a civilian. That is the working assumption. We entered Gaza with that in mind, and with an insane amount of firepower.
Shot a “grandpa” while he lay wounded on the ground
Staff Sargent, Infantry:
We were in a house with the reconnaissance platoon, and there was some soldier stationed at the guard post. We were instructed [during the briefings] that whoever’s in the area is dangerous, is suspect.... A soldier who was in one of the posts saw an old [Palestinian] man approaching, so he shouted that some old man was getting near. He didn’t shoot at him – he fired near him. What I know, because I checked this, is that one of the other soldiers shot that grandpa twice.... I went up to a window to see what was going on out there, and I saw there was an old man lying on the ground, he was shot in his leg and he was wounded. It was horrible, the wound was horrible, and he looked either dead or unconscious to me..... And then after that, some guy from the company went out and shot that man again, and that, for me, was the last straw. I don’t think there was a single guy in my platoon who wasn’t shocked by that. It’s not like we’re a bunch of leftists, but – why? Like, what the hell, why did you have to shoot him again? One of the problems in this story is that there was no inquiry into it, at least none that I know of.
“Any person you run into: shoot to kill”
Staff Sargent, Engineering Corps:
They warned us, they told us that after a ceasefire the population might return.... The instructions were to open fire. They said, “No one is supposed to be in the area in which you will be”.... [W]e asked, “Will the civilian population return? What will the situation look like now when we go in [to the Gaza Strip] again?” And they said, “You aren’t supposed to encounter the civilian population, no one is supposed to be in the area in which you’ll be. Which means that anyone you do run into is [to be regarded as] a terrorist.” The instructions are to shoot right away. Whoever you spot – be they armed or unarmed, no matter what. The instructions are very clear. Any person you run into, that you see with your eyes – shoot to kill. It’s an explicit instruction. No incrimination process is necessary?
Zero. Nothing.
Used tanks to crush Palestinians’ cars purely for “fun”
Staff Sargent, Armored Corps:
During the entire operation the [tank] drivers had this thing of wanting to run over cars – because the driver, he can’t fire. He doesn’t have any weapon, he doesn’t get to experience the fun in its entirety, he just drives forward, backward, right, left. And they had this sort of crazy urge to run over a car.... I mean, a car that’s in the street, a Palestinian car, obviously. And there was one time that my [tank’s] driver, a slightly hyperactive guy, managed to convince the tank’s officer to run over a car, and it was really not that exciting– you don’t even notice you’re going over a car, you don’t feel anything – we just said on the two-way radio: “We ran over the car. How was it?” And it was cool, but we really didn’t feel anything.... So he came back in, and right then the officer had just gone out or something, so he sort of whispered to me over the earphones: “I scored some sunglasses from the car.” And after that, he went over and told the officer about it too, that moron, and the officer scolded him: “What, how could you do such a thing? I’m considering punishing you,” but in the end nothing happened, he kept the sunglasses, and he wasn’t too harshly scolded, it was all OK, and it turned out that a few of the other company’s tanks ran over cars, too.
“The citizens of Gaza, I really don’t give a fuck about them”
Staff Sargent, Infantry:
It was during our first Sabbath. Earlier that day one of the companies was hit by a few anti-tank missiles. The unit went to raid the area from which they were fired, so the guys who stayed behind automatically cared less about civilians. I remember telling myself that right now, the citizens of Gaza, I really don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t deserve anything – and if they deserve something it’s either to be badly wounded or killed.... So this old man came over, and the guy manning the post – I don’t know what was going through his head – he saw this civilian, and he fired at him, and he didn’t get a good hit. The civilian was laying there, writhing in pain. We all remembered that story going around, so none of the paramedics wanted to go treat him. It was clear to everyone that one of two things was going to happen: Either we let him die slowly, or we put him out of his misery. Eventually, we put him out of his misery, and a D9 (armored bulldozer) came over and dropped a mound of rubble on him and that was the end of it. In order to avoid having to deal with the question of whether he was booby-trapped or not – because that really didn’t interest anyone at that moment – the D9 came over, dropped a pile of rubble on his body and that was it. Everyone knew that under that pile there was the guy’s corpse..... What came up during the investigation when the company commander asked the soldier, was that the soldier spotted a man in his late 60s, early 70s approaching the house. They were stationed in a tall house, with a good vantage point. The soldier spotted that guy going in his direction, toward his post. So he shot in the direction of his feet at the beginning. And he said the old man kept getting closer to the house so he shot a bullet beneath his left ribs. Kidney, liver, I don’t know what’s in there. A spot you don’t want to be hit by a bullet. That old man took the bullet, lay down on the ground, then a friend of that soldier came over and also shot the man, while he was already down. For the hell of it, he shot two more bullets at his legs. Meanwhile there was a talk with the commander, and because this was happening amidst a battalion offensive, it really didn’t interest anyone. “We have casualties up front, don’t bother us, do what you need to do.”
Shelling and machine-gunning “every house we passed” – then taking them over and using them
Staff Sargent, Engineering Corps:
I got the impression that every house we passed on our way got hit by a shell – and houses farther away too. It was methodical. There was no threat. It’s possible we were being shot at, but I truly wouldn’t have heard it if we were because that whole time the tanks’ Raphael OWS (machine guns operated from within the tanks) were being fired constantly. They were spraying every house with machine gun fire the whole time.... [D]uring our walk there was no sign of any face-off or anything. There was a lot of shooting, but only from us. How is the sweeping of a house conducted, when you enter it?
We would go in ‘wet’ (using live fire). I could hear the shooting, everything was done ‘wet.’ When we entered this house everything inside it was already a mess. Anything that could shatter had been shattered, because everything had been shot at. Anything made of glass – windows, a glass table, picture frames – it was all wrecked. All the beds were turned over, the rugs, the mattresses. Soldiers would take a rug to sleep on, a mattress, a pillow. There was no water, so youcouldn’t use the toilet. So we would shit in their bathtub.
“By the time we got out of there, everything was like a sandbox”
Staff Sargent, Mechanized Infantry:
By the time we got out of there, it was all like a sandbox. Every house we left – and we went through three or four houses – a D9 (armored bulldozer) came over and flattened it.... First of all, it’s impressive seeing a D9 take down a big two-story house. We were in the area of a fairly rich, rural neighborhood – very impressive houses. We were in one spot where there was a house with a children’s residence unit next door – just like in a well-off Moshav (a type of rural town) in Israel. The D9 would simply go in, take down part of the wall and then continue, take down another part of the wall, and leave only the columns intact. At a certain point it would push a pile of sand to create a mound of rubble and bring down other parts, until the house was eventually left stripped, and from that point it would simply hit the house [with its blade] until it collapsed. The D9 was an important working tool. It was working nearly non-stop.
Randomly obliterating homes with no warning, for revenge
Staff Sargent, Armored Corps:
On the day the fellow from our company was killed, the commanders came up to us and told us what happened. Then they decided to fire an ‘honor barrage’ and fire three shells. They said, “This is in memory of ****.” That felt very out of line to me, very problematic.... A barrage of shells. They fired the way it’s done in funerals, but with shellfire and at houses. Not into the air. They just chose [a house] – the tank commander said, “Just pick the farthest one, so it does the most damage.” Revenge of sorts. So we fired at one of the houses. Really you just see a block of houses in front of you, so the distance doesn’t really matter.
Photo of smoke from an Israeli air strike rising over the Gaza Strip on July 14, 2014 at the Israeli-Gaza border. (Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)Compatible with iOS 6
Requires iPad
Auxo for iPad has arrived! It's time to re-imagine your iPad's task switcher with this tailor-made incarnation of the popular iPhone tweak, Auxo.
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Apps in the multi-tasking tray will now display in the form of beautifully large and versatile card-like app previews. Easily remove apps by swiping down, or remove all apps with a tap and hold.
The redesigned auxiliary page gives you instant access to system functions such as brightness, volume and playback controls, all in one view.
Visible above the system controls is the media page, which displays a depth of information about the currently playing music such as titles, album artwork, and even track progress.
Also above the system controls are a variety of settings shortcuts called toggles (made with Flipswitch), letting you enable and disable functions without needing to open the Settings.
Slide on the top half of the auxiliary page to paginate between music info and toggles. Slide left on the bottom half to instantly get back to the apps.
International users: Auxo supports over two dozen different languages!
See larger Screenshots below..KIM Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes while he was defence minister in the 1980s.
"We spied on them and we extracted the codes," Mr Beazley told Parliament during his valedictory speech today.
Mr Beazley, who was defence minister from 1984 to 1990, said that when he took over the job he soon learned that the radar on Australia's Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region.
In other words, Australia's frontline fighter could not shoot down enemies in the region.
Mr Beazley said he was greatly tempted to "belt" the Liberals with this and lay to rest their claim to be best at managing defence.
"I shut up, I said nothing," Mr Beazley said.
"I went to the US and for five years, up hill and down dale, with one knock-down, drag-out after another, with Cap Weinberger, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, I tried to get the codes of that blasted radar out of them.
"In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves and we got another radar that could identify (enemy planes).
Mr Beazley said the Americans were Australia's most important ally.
"But they are a bunch of people you have to have a fight with every now and then to get what you actually need out of them," he said.
Mr Beazley said that the story of getting the Hornet codes was well known within Defence, but not beyond it.
He said the problem was that the old codes related to Warsaw Pact aircraft, rather than ones in Australia's region.
The Americans kept saying they'd provide the codes, but never did.
"So we tried to crack the codes so we could enhance them," Mr Beazley said.
"And we made a lot of progress."
Mr Beazley said the Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made.IMOC 2015 Italian Motorcycle Owner's Club Rally with the East Coast Ducs
Star of the show? A couple of beautiful 1991 Ducati 851 Raymond Roche Replica Superbike Racers
Classic Ducati
Monocilindri Ducatisti
1969 Ducati 250 MK3D
1966 Ducati 250 MK3
1964 Ducati Monza Bitza
Classic Ducati
1984 Ducati TT1 NCR, probably my favorite bike in the show.
1984 Ducati TT1 NCR from NYDucati
Custom 1995 Ducati 900SS
Ducati 888 Superbike a transition model between the 851 to the 916
Classic 1980 Ducati 900SD Darmah
Ducati 900SD Darmah
1986 Ducati 750 F1A
This was the 1978 Formula 1 900 NCR Ducati that Mike Hailwood rode to victory at the Isle of Man TT in 1978.
Modern Ducati
Ducati Desmosedici RR 850 / 1500
Ducati Desmosedici RR 850 / 1500
Ducati MH900ie
Ducati 916, an F1A an MH900ie and a Monster
Paul Smart GT1000
Valentino Rossi Ducati Monster
Moto Guzzi
Moto Guzzi 1100S
Moto Guzzi 1100S
Moto Guzzi Le Mans 4
Moto Guzzi Le Mans 4
Moto Guzzi 850GT Le Mans
Moto Guzzi Le Mans 1000
Moto Guzzi Ambassador
1998 Moto Guzzi California
2001 Gheezi-Brian Super Twin (of only 100 Made)
2001 Gheezi-Brian Super Twin
Aprilia
1995 Aprillia RS250 Max Biaggi
A few Aprilia Tuonos and RSVs
2003 Aprilia RSV1000 Mille R Haga
LaVerda
1969 Laverda American Eagle 750
1982 Laverda Jota 1000
Laverda RGS1000
Cagiva
Three Cagiva Gran Canyons
Cagiva Allazura
1963 Parilla GranSport 250
1955 F.B. Mondial 200CC
1975 Benelli Tornado S
1958 Parilla Lusso Veloce
Moto Morini 3 1/2
Harley Davidson, probably manufactured in the Italian Aeromacchi plant.
© 2015 Tigh Loughhead
I will write a ride report of the East Coast Ducati rider's club's trip up to Massachussets, but I wanted to catalogue some of the best classic bikes at this year's IMOC (Italian Motorcycle Owner's Club) rally.There were maybe a third fewer bikes this year, but still an amazing collection of Italian beauty.Benelli, Parilla, Mondial, Moto Morini and othersPresident Obama and actress Nichelle Nichols, in 2012. (Nichelle Nichols)
There was a time when the woman who portrayed Lieutenant Uhura was thinking about leaving the USS Enterprise, but Martin Luther King Jr. — a huge Trekkie himself — managed to change her mind. It’s a famous story, and actor Nichelle Nichols revisited it this week during a Reddit Ask Me Anything.
Nichols’s portrayal of Uhura marked the first time American television viewers got to see a black, female character who wasn’t a stereotype. But after the first season of “Star Trek,” Nichols decided it was time to leave the show and pursue the career she thought she really wanted, as a Broadway singer. She told series creator Gene Roddenberry she was going to leave.
A Redditor asked Nichols about King’s role in convincing her to stay.
Nichols responded that the story was true.
“I was offered a role on Broadway,” she wrote. “I was a singer on stage long before I was an actress, and Broadway was always a dream to me. I was ready to leave Star Trek and pursue what I’d always wanted to do.
“Dr. Martin Luther King, quite some time after I’d first met him, approached me and said something along the lines of ‘Nichelle, whether you like it or not, you have become an symbol. If you leave, they can replace you with a blonde haired white girl, and it will be like you were never there. What you’ve accomplished, for all of us, will only be real if you stay.’ That got me thinking about how it would look for fans of color around the country if they saw me leave. I saw that this was bigger than just me.”
She added: “I got to do a lot of singing after the series ended.”
When Nichols told this story on NPR in 2011, she described how King approached her:
On Saturday night, I went to an NAACP fundraiser, I believe it was, in Beverly Hills. And one of the promoters came over to me and said, Ms. Nichols, there’s someone who would like to meet you. He says he is your greatest fan. And I’m thinking a Trekker, you know. And I turn, and before I could get up, I looked across the way and there was the face of Dr. Martin Luther King smiling at me and walking toward me. And he started laughing. By the time he reached me, he said, yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan. I am that Trekkie.
According to Nichols, she told Roddenberry she had changed her mind (and why). His reply was along the lines of “finally, someone gets it.”
Another Redditor asked Nichols about whether Roddenberry ever talked about what he was trying to accomplish with the show’s groundbreaking multicultural cast.
“He didn’t talk about it, he just did it,” she replied. “It was who he was. He believed in that world, if you got it you got it. If you didn’t get it, you’d see it anyway.”
Here’s another version of the famous story, from a 2013 interview with the Archive of American Television:Pandagon is daily opinion blog covering feminism, politics, and pop culture. Come for the politics, stay for the complete lack of patience for the B.S. and bad faith coming from conservative leaders and pundits.
Not history’s greatest monsters.
It’s been really funny, if also deeply disturbing, to see conservatives desperately cast around for any opportunity they can find to derail Obamacare as October 1st, the day the health care exchanges start, comes nearer. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Republicans realize that once people start to use the exchanges, they are going to be enthusiastic about it, and so they’re trying to keep as many people as possible from getting to the exchanges to begin with. That’s because, at this point, Republicans aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they straight up don’t think that certain people deserve health insurance. The efforts to make sure as few uninsured people as possible get health insurance include attacks on the navigator programs to help people sign up for insurance (apparently, nothing—nothing—is worse to Republicans than the idea of some uninsured person getting an hour’s worth of help getting signed up for health insurance) and, of course, propaganda trying to scare people into not even looking at the websites where you can sign up for insurance. The Koch brothers especially have been aiming ads specifically at young people that are trying to make young people think that getting into an health insurance plan is like, the worst thing that could ever happen to you. They want young people especially out of it, because they know that getting young people into insurance plans is expected to lower the overall premiums for everyone, and because the Koch brothers are Batman villain-level evil, they’ve decided it’s important that people pay more for health care because that’s why.
Which is how we got this ad:
And one for the gents:
I’ve watched these ads a few times, and while there’s some sort of weak attempt to suggest that there’s a metaphor going on, in reality the message of the ads seems awfully straightforward: “Hey, young people! You might think getting health insurance so you can go see a doctor is a good thing! But if you actually go in to see a doctor, they will do invasive medical tests that are physically unpleasant. Why not just skip the whole thing? You don’t really want someone putting a speculum in your hoo-haa or a finger up your butt, do you? Health insurance is just a scam so that doctors can touch your private bits.”
There’s just no other way this ad works. It’s about trying to make the experience of going to the doctor seem so miserable that the viewer just decides to hell with all that. The clownish Uncle Sam and the tagline seem to be groping towards an incoherent government-in-your-business message, but the emotional ploy—i.e. the real point of the ad—is all about making medical care seem too scary to be bothered with.
That’s where we are in this country: Conservative activists, actively trying to keep people from seeing a doctor. Because, that’s why.
It won’t work, of course. As Matt Yglesias says:
The advertisement, I think, underscores the conceptual problem with the boycott movement. I’m not the world’s leading expert in the field but (perhaps unlike conservative movement leaders), I have spoken to young women in my life. And in my experience they already regard gynecological exams as a not-exactly-awesome way to spend the afternoon. They’re not light entertainment, they’re medically necessary health care. And yet if you lack health insurance, you may not be able to afford the health care you need. That’s really bad.
It’s true that men might be slightly more amendable to the idea that it’s better just to never see doctors at all, but I don’t think that’s true of young men in America, who are less taken in by the message that the emasculation of having a doctor see you naked is worse than, say, dying in a ditch somewhere. And the male ad is aimed at young men: The whole idea of the ad is that if you don’t get a health care plan, no one will be sticking a finger up your butt. I just don’t think they care that much. Young people these days are actually more invested in being healthy than their elders probably were at their age. They show strong interest in having health insurance. They eat better and exercise more. They’re a lot less homophobic and sexually uptight, which I suspect means they’re not as susceptible to these kinds of ads that prey on shame about your private parts in order to discourage you from getting health care. I just don’t think this sort of thing is going to work.
Like Matt says, this is about trying to sell the idea that buying insurance through the exchange is “actually worse than having no health insurance at all.” That’s really the corner they’ve painted themselves into, so it makes sense that anti-Obamacare people are trying to sell young people on the idea that having access to check-ups is some kind of terrible torture that they should avoid. |
Financially Successful Creators hasn't hinged on absolute numbers of followers or an absolute publishing threshold. Instead, the team looks for a qualitative combination of engagement, how consistently the people who are engaging are engaging, and the professionalism of public-facing materials.
All of this is why it’s difficult to qualify Creators before they actually launch -- and even more challenging to then applying that definition across the board to all potential Creators in different categories.
Instead, the Growth team decided to stick to the ultimate end quantitative criteria of a certain level of monetary earnings because it’s simple and functional for the growth team to optimize for that.
Ultimately, their two most basic criteria evaluate an inbound Creator's breadth of reach and depth of relationship with their audience.
The next section will go through each of Patreon's six hypotheses, where they came from, and what the growth team did to test them.
The 6 Hypotheses that doubled onboarding success
Hypothesis 1: Creators with the potential to earn life changing income are lurking in the funnel somewhere
What it meant
The growth team's first hypothesis was that qualified Creator leads were "lurking" in their onboarding funnel -- in other words, great leads were hidden but everywhere.
What does this hypothesis mean? Let's start with looking at its converse.
"The opposite would be to say that we're doing a bad job on acquisition and users aren't even clicking through. The opposite would that it's not an onboarding question, it's an acquisition problem."
Instead, the team's first hypothesis asserted that it wasn't an acquisition problem, that users were in fact hitting the site and even making it through part of the funnel, and some were even launching their Patreon page (the completion of onboarding). But, ultimately too many were dropping off in too many places.
"We believed they were dropping off at every step even though we couldn't necessarily drill down on where because for us, some drop-off is positive as it indicates that unqualified leads are self-selecting out," explains Raviv.
The team concluded that changes to the product at every single step would have a positive effect.
Where it came from
Early on, the Patreon growth team performed a small onboarding experiment where they only made changes at the very end of the funnel (the page editor). The improvement was the addition of simple text-based content that educated users on how to make a good Patreon page, and it was the same content that the teams on the front lines -- sales, community and customer support -- found themselves saying over and over again to Creators.
In the experiment, the user had to get through the entire rest of the funnel before they could reach the new and improved help content, which lived alongside the editor and was only presented to the user at the bottom of the funnel.
The results were impressive. According to Raviv, the inclusion of help text had a major significant impact on every level of financial activation:
"The fact that this bottom-of-funnel change could make such a difference told me that there were probably people lurking all the way to the bottom of the funnel that had potential.
If they're getting to the bottom of the funnel suddenly converting due to this change instead of dropping off, then they're likely to be hanging out at other parts of the funnel but dropping off before they even see this change."
What Growth did about it
This initial micro experiment told them that if they were really going to move the needle, they would have to address every single step of the funnel, from the first message on the landing page, all the way down to launching the Patreon page.
As a result, the team chose to implement a larger scale overhaul to the entire funnel, and they decided to call it Project Mondo.
Raviv explains:
"'Lurking'" means they're present, but dropping off all along the funnel. I probably won't be able to find exactly where they are with a single pinpoint experiment, so I need to cast the net wider. The results can also be multiplicative that way."
Learn About Growth, One Email Per Post.The president said last week that the strategy — which calls for securing population centers, reducing civilian casualties and strengthening the Afghan police and army — would continue despite his firing the top Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
In the increasingly restive provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan, the 1-87 will be opening a new front and waging a different kind of war. Its job will be to train the local police, secure a vital highway to Central Asia and expand the shaky writ of President Hamid Karzai ’s government in the north.
The soldiers will be living with the police in mud-walled outposts and conducting daily foot patrols alongside them into contested areas. The goal is to build public support for the police — no simple task, given its reputation for corruption and ineffectiveness.
Over the course of the next year, The New York Times will be visiting the battalion to chronicle its part in the surge and explore the strains of deployment on soldiers, many fresh out of basic training, others on their fifth combat tour in nine years.
If their mission cannot succeed in the relatively stable north, the policy seems unlikely to work anywhere in Afghanistan.
The battalion is the first large American military unit to be based in these provinces since the war began, and the troops expect to be challenged by emboldened insurgent forces that have been ambushing police checkpoints, vandalizing schools, mining roads and extorting merchants with growing regularity.
Lt. Col. Russell Lewis, the battalion commander, said that for most of the war, troops with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had not seriously contested Taliban -controlled areas in the north. That, he said, is about to change.
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The battalion, which began moving to Afghanistan in March, will be joined by late summer by an aviation brigade with transport and assault helicopters that will allow them to conduct missions deep into insurgent strongholds, which fuels talk of a possible offensive by fall.
“It will get hotter before it gets better,” Colonel Lewis said.
The deployment will also test the emotional mettle of soldiers and their families. Across eight time zones and 6,500 miles, linked by the fragile threads of the Internet and cellular technology, those soldiers will counsel children, comfort parents, manage marriages and mourn deaths back home, even as they struggle with loneliness, boredom and fear in Afghanistan.
They are almost all men, with a small attachment of women in noninfantry jobs. Many are begging to see combat. Others dread the prospect.
Specialist Samuel Michalik, a 24-year-old, single infantryman from Tennessee on his first deployment, offered one perspective.
“I think it’s safe to say that most people would want to see some action — they don’t want to be there and just be sitting around,” he said before the deployment. “If it’s my time to die or get injured, whatnot, I think then, God’s going to allow that. I’m at peace with that.”
Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, a 35-year-old single parent of two boys from Wisconsin, also on his first deployment, voiced a different view.
“If we are here for a year and don’t fire one round, I’m happy,” the sergeant said. “I’ve got two boys waiting for me that I want to go back home and be a dad to.”
Conflicting Emotions
The days before deployment are a time for rearranging the furniture of lives. Wills must be drafted. Single parents send children to grandparents, uncles and aunts. Cars are stored, apartment keys returned, phone service canceled.
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For Sergeant Sullivan, it was also a time to say goodbye, again and again, slowly.
The youngest of three sisters, Sergeant Sullivan, 31, was raised by a grandmother in Casey, S.C., after her father killed her mother and then himself. She graduated from a local college and worked for a year as a substitute teacher. But school loans weighed heavily on her, and in 2002 she enlisted.
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A night-vision goggles technician, she spent five months in Kandahar in 2004, calling it “a big field trip.” She resolved to make the Army her career.
That was before she had children.
In the hours before deployment, she was feeling the conflicting emotions of a parent in the Army. She is one of only about 20 women attached to the battalion, but there are dozens of other soldiers with children back home.
She wants to serve 20 years and make retirement, with its good pension and health care benefits. But leaving her children for 12 months seems the hardest thing she has ever done.
“I know what I’m doing is important, but my children are a priority for me,” she said. “Something’s got to change.”
The farewells were very different for Captain Bonenberger, 32, single and without children. He visited old girlfriends in New York City. He saw his parents in Connecticut. He drank too much with buddies in California. He stored up memories.
“I made spending time with friends and family a huge priority in my life, because I knew that when I was over there I couldn’t be thinking about that,” he said. “I can only concentrate on the present, on what’s in front of me, or it gets me really depressed.”
Raised in Branford, Conn., the son of a poet-turned-librarian and a classical-guitarist-turned-lawyer, Captain Bonenberger developed a childhood fascination with the military from reading Homer. He considered applying to West Point, but his father, who protested the Vietnam War in college, and his grandfather, a World War II veteran, were adamantly opposed.
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So he went to Yale, studied English literature and considered following his father into law. After graduation he worked for a consulting firm, tried his hand at writing and taught English in Japan. None of it spoke to him. Then came Abu Ghraib.
The reports of prisoner abuses there outraged him, but also rekindled an ambition to be an officer. He joined the Army in 2005, and a year later he was in Paktika Province along the Pakistan border.
The guy who could quote Alexander Pope learned about spitting tobacco and dodging mortar rounds, the strange allure of a hard life. “Everything is vivid, even the crappy food,” he said.
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Before his flight from Fort Drum, he itched to get going, to be there. He was part of the battalion’s planning team, but he hoped to finish the tour as a front-line company commander.
“For all of us, that’s the dream,” he said. “To lead soldiers.”
Private Stevenson, 19, had his own waking dreams in the hours before he left Fort Drum. He grew up in Port Arthur, Tex., never knowing his father. His mother, a corrections officer, died of complications related to AIDS when he was 15. He became homeless, quitting school and selling crack cocaine to survive, barely avoiding arrest.
One day a woman, the mother of a girl he knew, saw him sitting by the road, his life’s belongings in a plastic bin. She offered him dinner, and he stayed for two years, agreeing to her demand that he stop selling drugs. Today he calls her his godmother because, he believes, heaven must have sent her to save him.
Joining the Army seemed the next best step in setting his life straight. His slow drawl and easygoing style mask ambitions: college, perhaps law school, a family. More immediately, he longed to become a turret gunner, the first line of defense for a truck team.
As he sat on his bunk that final night, butterflies fluttered in his stomach. Would he see combat? Would he do the right thing if he did? He needed to know.
“Once the first bullet comes at me, and I know that I’ve fired back and I wasn’t hesitant, then I won’t be worried about it anymore,” he said. “Because I’ll know I can do my job without freezing up or any of that.”
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Weapons Status Red
When their bags were packed, the soldiers received the M-4 rifles that would be their constant companions in Afghanistan, then bade final goodbyes to family and friends. Inside a spare concrete building at Fort Drum, every corner seemed filled with quiet exchanges of love and grief.
Specialist Kiel Haberland, 26, hugged his wife, kissed their infant daughter and shouldered his pack. His wife, Sarah, put an arm around her mother-in-law, wiped away tears and strode away.
Then through the early morning darkness, he called: “I love you, Sarah.”
Another soldier helped: “He loves you, Sarah.”
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“I love you, Kiel!” she shouted back. But he had rounded the corner.
From late March until mid-April, the battalion moved in waves through Germany, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait to a small airstrip in Kunduz, about 150 miles north of Kabul across the rugged Hindu Kush mountain range. As their planes arrived, the soldiers received a bracing reminder that they had entered a war zone.
“The weapons status once we go outside that door will be red!” a sergeant major shouted inside the bare blue walls of the Kunduz air terminal. Then he led soldiers wearing heavy rucksacks and body armor on a brisk jog across a partly cleared minefield to their new home, Forward Operating Base Kunduz.
Just months before, the base, on a plateau overlooking the city, housed fewer than 200 National Guard soldiers. Now it was a microcosm of the surge itself, growing rapidly to accommodate nearly 800 soldiers from the 1-87. As bulldozers rumbled and Navy Seabees filled wire-mesh barriers, dozens of yellow tents rose on a gravel-paved field.
The enemy seemed to have taken notice. The day after Colonel Lewis arrived, insurgents fired a rocket at the base, the first such attack in nearly a year. The rocket missed by a long shot but sent a message.
“Let’s just be aware,” Colonel Lewis cautioned soldiers before a patrol two days later. “They’re reacting to us.”
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The first weeks of a deployment are often the most dangerous, as new soldiers in unfamiliar terrain make mistakes that can turn deadly. So as the battalion prepared for its first major convoy in mid-April, Sergeant Eisch and other platoon sergeants bore down on the newest soldiers, looking for signs of slackness or inattention — and barking orders when they found it.
A former wrestler and drill sergeant with a shaved head and fire-hydrant frame, Sergeant Eisch had missed previous deployments after winning sole custody of his sons, ages 12 and 7, in a bitter divorce. But this time, his brother volunteered to care for the boys.
Finally in Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch faced a new problem: kidney stones. He had conveniently failed to mention them to his doctor before deploying, fearing he would be held back. Now he had to make do with ibuprofen and fortitude.
“I made it this far,” he said. “I’m not going home.”
A Growing Insurgency
Below the base spreads a verdant plain of rice, wheat and cotton fields, grape arbors and almond groves. This is Afghanistan’s breadbasket, an ethnically diverse region of Tajik, Uzbek and Pashtun villages that seemed relatively stable after 2001, when Taliban fighters were ousted from Kunduz city after a 12-day siege. It was the last major city to fall to the American-led anti-Taliban forces.
But Uzbek, Pashtun and Pakistani insurgents, some of them fleeing the American offensive in Helmand Province, have filtered into havens in Kunduz, NATO officers say. In April alone, seven Germans were killed in ambushes in Kunduz and Baghlan Provinces. Intelligence officers with the alliance say that five of Kunduz’s seven districts are contested or controlled by the Taliban.
In their first weeks on the ground, the commanders from the 1-87 learned about the growing insurgent activity from the local police over tea, skewers of roasted lamb and small talk. Hundreds of fighters were massing in the Archi District about 25 miles northeast of Kunduz city, the police reported. The village of Gor Teppa, less than 10 miles to the northwest, had become the seat of a Taliban shadow government, protected by hundreds of homemade bombs buried in the area’s lone road.
And at 7 o’clock every evening, the Taliban shut down cellular telephone service across the province, punctuating their control of the night.
In early April, the commander of the battalion’s Alpha Company, Capt. Jeffrey Kornbluth, visited police headquarters in Emam Saheb, a district near the Tajikistan border. The police chief, Col. Kajum Ibrahimi, told him that Taliban forces — many of them involved in opium and weapons smuggling — had begun massing a few miles outside town.
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Captain Kornbluth explained that it would be weeks before all his soldiers and trucks had arrived. Colonel Ibrahimi’s face darkened and he sighed dramatically. “We need an operation as soon as possible,” he said.
Two weeks later, a platoon from Alpha Company returned to Emam Saheb. This time, though, the Americans agreed to help Afghan police officers who were trying to clear a Taliban stronghold near town.
The platoon’s armored vehicles turned down a narrow dirt road that snaked through farm land, accompanied by Afghan police officers on motorcycles and in Ford pickup trucks. Suddenly there was a boom and a puff of smoke: the truck carrying the platoon leader, Lt. Nathaniel Bleier, had set off a mine. The truck’s front left tire landed in a rice paddy a football field away.
No soldiers were seriously hurt, beyond a separated shoulder. But a few hours later, a road-clearing team found antipersonnel mines connected to a much larger bomb buried just up the road. The injuries could have been far worse.
As April flowed into May, Private Stevenson was promoted to private first class. Sergeant Eisch readied his platoon for its first foot patrols. Captain Bonenberger prepared plans for the summer fighting season and for his own two-week leave in June. Sergeant Sullivan began work on a backlog of broken night-vision goggles.
And on a single afternoon in early May, three separate patrols were ambushed by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades.
There were no serious injuries, but it had become clear: the battalion could not travel more than a few miles — in some cases just a few yards — beyond police outposts in contested areas without drawing fire.
“We’ve gone to where the guns are,” an intelligence officer said.
The 1-87 had found the war. One month had passed. There were 11 to go.Well, maybe this particular car isn’t the next big thing, but I predict that small, relatively inexpensive cars like this will be big in the collector car market in the coming years. This 1959 King Midget, found on eBay, wouldn’t be a big project for someone to restore and the price of $3,500 shouldn’t take too big of a bite out of anyone’s wallet. With a length of less than 10 feet it’ll be easy to squeeze onto your golf cart trailer to bring it to shows once you’re done restoring it.
Midget Motors Manufacturing Co. in Athens, OH started off small (you see where this one is going), selling government surplus items and manufacturing small scooters called the Super-Cycle. They also started offering the “Model I”, a small car in kit form that was available through ads that the founders of the company placed in the back of magazines. Eventually, the Model 1 was offered as a fully-assembled car and these were meant as an inexpensive alternative to other cars of the day. The founders of the company ran Midget Motors on a strictly supply and demand basis, they didn’t build up an inventory and then send out a sales force to get people to buy them. When orders would come in they would manufacture the cars in Athens, Ohio and ship them either in kit form or as completed cars, up until the Model III cars when they were all sold as completed vehicles. Pat Foster wrote the definitive history of the King Midget if anyone has any interest, it’s a great book.
As you can tell from the photos, this wasn’t a fancy car with a high-level of design, at least in the way that we think of design when it comes to cars. These cars had a high-level of engineering and manufacturing design, it wasn’t a sleek or slick car and it wasn’t meant to be. This particular car is a Model III, the last of its type, and it looks like it’s in good condition overall and the body panels and floors looks really solid.
Unfortunately, the original 9.2 hp Wisconsin engine isn’t included as this car now has an OMC engine in the rear where the ‘Sconnie should be. That hurts the value, in my opinion. This one will most likely need a rebuild, according to the seller. But, the whole car needs work so what’s one more thing on your to-do list? The founders of King Midget invented their own style of transmission and as you can see it’s somewhat related to what we know from the snowmobile industry. Or, almost an early version of the CVT, in a way.
There is no power equipment here and you’ll never have to wonder if your “A/C needs charged”! A 12-volt system was added in 1961 but some owners may have changed their earlier models over by now. This one has a radio but it definitely doesn’t look like a factory original one. They also offered an electric wiper and washer in the later cars. The Model I was a single-seater but the Model II and III were two-seaters so you could take one of your friends along for the ride; the slow, conspicuous ride. There’s no hiding or fitting in with your surroundings when you’re driving a King Midget.
It’s hard to believe that this car was designed for actual use on actual roads. In fact, you could still license it and use it as a daily-driver today, but you’d be braver than I am. I would absolutely love to have one of these someday, I think they’re super cool and they are a big part of the history of the US auto industry, on a small scale. Do you have enough room in your garage for a King Midget?When I first set eyes on Mahmood Farooqui’s book, A Requiem For Pakistan, I had just returned from Pakistan, where I met people who spoke with love and awe of the subject of this book. Novelist and poet Intizar Husain had died a few months ago. The Pakistan I saw was vibrant, then why “requiem", I asked. The answer came to me as I reached the last page of the book; both the protagonists of the book were speaking to me. Husain writes, “Every affliction that falls from the sky and every turbulence that arises from earth comes asking for (the) address of Pakistan and having arrived here takes us into its arms."
The book is not about one but two journeys, that of Husain and Farooqui; it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. “I keep inserting my story and words into this account of Intizar’s life in the hope that I too may exalt my status," Farooqui writes.
Two persons have inspired the narrative: Husain, its raison d’être, and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, a literary giant who is Farooqui’s lifelong inspiration. It was under his tutelage, 20 years ago, that Farooqui set off on the path of Dastangoi, when it was a little-known vocabulary. Husain and Farooqui are the archetypal daastaangos and this is where the pleasure of the book lies. The book uses poetry, interspersing Farooqui’s own favourites with those of Husain. “I don’t translate," Farooqui writes. “Let the words speak for themselves." This is how daastaans are presented, they teach listeners to fend for themselves and flow with word-sound.
A Requiem For Pakistan—The World Of Intizar Husain: By Mahmood Farooqui, Yoda Press, 282 pages, Rs552.
Husain narrates stories from Alif Laila, Betaal Pachisi and the Indian Jatakas. Farooqui narrates the intricacies of Tilism-e-Hoshruba. Both retell Sufi stories and both deplore the vulgarization of the Sufi concept in pop culture.
Husain’s is a 93-year-old journey. He was born in Dibai, a nondescript qasba in Bulandshahr, which is idealized in his book Basti as Rupnagar. Here, the hawking calls of Mithanlal halwai’s gujias (sweets) and besan halwa are delivered in poems:
Musalmano na ghabrao shafa’at barmala hogi
Parho kalma Mohammad ka khareedo halwa besan ka
(Stop worrying, Muslims, your entreaty will be heeded
Recite the kalma of the Prophet and eat besan halwa)
At home, Husain was tutored in the scriptures by his father, in Indo-Muslim folklore by the women of the household, and in the Hindu Puranas and Shastras by a panditji. Muharram is commemorated as a local pageant; his first lesson in poetry is Azadari (mourning) during Ashura. The nostalgia for qasba life is Husain’s, but equally Farooqui’s. Their parallel journey extends to music as well. From Muharram dirges to wedding songs to dohas to hawker’s calls to recitations of the legend of Alha Udal, it gently saturates their world. Life is wrapped around vaidji, who is as essential to existence as the staunch Hindu baniya whose Muslim customers swear by his scrupulous honesty. Farooqui’s comment beautifully sums up this social fabric when he says, “Ganga Jamni tehzeeb, the most hackneyed phrase of depleted Indian secularism, is not so easily written off."
Next is Meerut College, where Husain comes under the influence of his Urdu lecturer Mohammad Husain Askari. It is at his behest that he goes to Pakistan. “The demise of the postal service during those months meant that Askari Sahib had to radio a message, ‘Send Intizar.’ And I went."
Those early days in Pakistan are spent in the company of poets and writers. We learn of his friendship with Nasir Kazmi, loitering with him on the streets, hanging around in coffee houses. These are awaragardi times. His friendship with Muneer Niyazi is in part due to their mutual longing for “the paradise" they had left behind.
Jungalon mein koi peechhe se bulaye to Munir
Mudh ke raste mein kabhi uski taraf mat dekho
(We all know deep in our hearts the genesis of this longing.)
The section on Progressives is contextualized in a summer in Chatgam (Bangladesh), where Husain spent his holidays in the library, reading endlessly. Farooqui writes here of two big voices which broke from traditionalists like Jigar Moradabadi, Hafeez Jalandhari, Asghar Gondvi, Seemab Akbarabadi; these were the voices of Rabindranath Tagore and Allama Iqbal. I missed any reference here to Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali, who broke from the traditionalists in the mid-1800s.
Like others of his generation, Husain is the voice of Partition. Farooqui, child of the next generation, suffered Partition through his elders. Like Husain, Farooqui mourns for the massive rupture which ultimately resulted in the creation of three separate entities.
“Partition cleft India in two halves. Then in 1971 these two halves became three. Both India and Bangladesh have found some kind of wholeness or wholesomeness but Pakistan is still floundering." The next words echo the dirge that we heard from our mothers. “No one would have thought that Partition would mean irrevocable borders. And free movement to and fro would become impossible. A decision taken in panic or light-heartedly would transform not just individual and family lives but fates of entire mohallas, cities and provinces… Ah the follies that lead to revolutions in human fate." Farooqui’s evolved skills in translation, which result from being on top of two languages, capture the wantonness of Partition. “There was a swarm of uprooted hordes and in that flood there was a lot of flotsam and jetsam…that is how this twig ended up floating here."
On his canvas Farooqui gathers people who have known incarceration. Antonio Gramsci, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Maulana Azad, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. These, like the author, are men whose creativity remained free despite prison walls. Whether it is Siberia, Ahmednagar, Rawalpindi or Paris, these men streamed out of their barred windows and created literature. That is what Farooqui has also created—literature in English which is about the world of Urdu, and anchored in Husain.
In the entire book, there are no more than three references to Farooqui’s present incarceration. The last one resonated the most with me because it could be about anyone’s life, which is after all a prison cell, with the sword of death hanging overhead. Husain writes about Shahrzad, the intrepid storyteller of Alif Laila over whose head it also hung. Farooqui writes: “I too have written this with a sword hanging over my head. I may soon be sent to jail for seven years for a crime I did not commit. But then in prison even the guilty become innocent.... We are all sinners anyway, whether in or out of captivity."
Ahista barg-e-gul befashan bar mazaar e ma
(Gently, gently sprinkle rose petals on my grave)
It is a book which teaches, elevates and teases; read it for pleasure, read it for pain, two sides of the same reality in the lives of Husain and Farooqui.
Syeda Hameed is an author and an activist.Episode Two of Telltale's The Walking Dead adventure series, subtitled Starved For Help, released a few weeks back, and the critics have been eating it up ever since. As is becoming increasingly popular, Telltale released an "Accolades" trailer featuring tons of scores and fresh quotes from the press regarding the game to confirm that, hey, if you haven't bought into this whole The Walking Dead thing yet, you probably should.
Note before hitting Play that the below trailer contains a few mild spoilers for Episode Two, so if you haven't played Starved For Help yet, you might want to clear that hurdle before proceeding. Most of the content in the trailer is derived from the first third of the game, though, so if you've gotten that far and have proceeded into the forest or onto the farm, you should be fine.This is the Tolkien poster I had on my bedroom
wall as a boy. I can’t recall the artist’s name****. The
drawing is nice, but the characters are nothing
like I imagined them. Still, it was before the days of
Alan Lee, and this was the best I could get…
I finished reading The Lord of the Rings to Sam recently. At eight, he’s probably a little young for it, but I thought he should experience it before over-exposure to similar imagery via other books, movies, Warhammer etc. renders it all a bit meh. (When I was a lad The Lord of the Rings seemed to be the only book that really delivered dwarfs and orcs and misty mountains; now they’re everywhere.) In particular, I wanted him to know the books before he saw the movies.
I’ve written elsewhere of some of my doubts about The Lord of the Rings – in particular, its distinct whiff of white supremacy (it’s a far more racist book than, say, King Solomon’s Mines, which I suspect you won’t find in many school libraries these days, and whose plot and action The Lord of the Rings echoes in several places)*. But re-reading it I found that a lot of the things I thought were going to annoy me were actually not half as bad as I recalled (the bloomin’ elves, whom I’d remembered as insufferable goody-goodies, actually have an edge of danger and strangeness about them) and that the things I liked about were often even better than I’d thought.
Matthew Bailey, writing on my Facebook page a few weeks back, suggested that The Lord of the Rings might have trouble finding a publisher these days, and I have a nasty feeling that he may be right, because Tolkien clearly had no interest in playing by the rules of adventure or fantasy stories – if, indeed, such rules really existed when he wrote it. It’s true that the book is very long and has a very peculiar structure; slow to start, often looping back several weeks to pick up on what all the different characters have been doing, and frequently stopping to deliver what I believe sci-fi anoraks call ‘info-dumps’. The characters are subtle, careful, moving, but to readers raised on the rather crude, touchy-feely stuff that gets praised as good characterisation by modern book-groups and the alumni of ‘Creative Writing’ courses they probably don’t seem like characters at all. But all these things, I feel, are strengths, not weaknesses: by ignoring so many of the usual techniques of this sort of novel Tolkien gives us the feeling that we are not reading a novel at all; it feels like real history, or at least a genuine myth.
The Lord of the Rings might not be the best fantasy ever written (though I can’t think off-hand of a better one) but I do believe it’s the best fantasy world ever created, which is quite an achievement when you think of the thousands of such worlds which have followed in its wake. Since I basically build worlds for a living (and I’m starting work on a new one at the moment) I thought it might be useful to consider what it is that separates Prof T’s creation from those of his many imitators.
These aren’t my original copies.
I read those till they fell apart.
The Devil in the Details
One clear reason why Middle Earth still tops the made-up worlds chart is its detail. Tolkien seems to have an intimate knowledge of every last inch of the landscape; each tree-root and tussock, each twist of every road. His lengthy descriptions bore some readers, and I confess I skipped a few of them while reading aloud, but for anyone with an attention span longer than Sam’s they are a delight; rich word-pictures of the British landscape filtered through a mind steeped in history and legend. Like my other favourite childhood author, Rosemary Sutcliff, Tolkien wasn’t a great hill-walker or explorer of wild places – as far as I know some strolls on the Marlborough Downs and an annual trip to Bournemouth were more his cup of tea – but by some alchemy of the imagination he makes you believe that he knows these places. Who can describe dawn in a forest or the mist lifting off a mountain better? And he’s forever telling us what his characters can see; what mountains or plains they look out over from this hill or that; where this river comes from; what lands it flows through on its way to the sea. This is a tale told by a map-maker.
The same obsessive detailing applies to the history of Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings isn’t just one adventure with a bit of patched-together backstory slung in to make it work. It’s part of a whole structure of stories, a vast myth-cycle in which the characters are steeped and which the reader dimly perceives. We may not be quite sure who Durin, Elendil and the rest of the legendary figures the characters talk and sing of were, but their names, and the scraps of their stories which dot the text, give us the impression of great depths of time and history underlying the events we are reading about. (Of course, Prof Tolkien had worked out all these older stories in some detail; he never published them, and presumably never thought them worth publishing. Anybody who has struggled through The Silmarillion or the other volumes that have appeared since his death may well agree.)
The Naming of Names
They don’t make covers like this any more –
thank crikey.
Tolkien was, of course, a professor of philology, the study of languages, and this gives him a clear world-building advantage over those of us who aren’t. One of the reasons I’ve chosen to set my own fantasies on the far-future earth rather than in a wholly invented world is because I don’t like made-up names; they almost always sound fake, and I far prefer to be able to use existing names and words. George Lucas’s original Star Wars films were another great influence in my childhood years, and I remain fond of them, but listen to the names – Luke Skywalker, Owen and Beru Lars, Biggs, Tatooine, Tarkin, Han Solo… There’s nothing wrong with them individually, particularly in the context of a movie, where they whip past almost without you noticing, but collectively they sound like what they are – a collection of found words and nonsense sounds slung together because G Lucas thinks they sound right**. That’s presumably how most fantasy writers operate (it’s certainly the route I went down with alien names in Larklight) and there’s nothing wrong with it, but Tolkien’s names are in a different class: they spring, like real ones, out of their parent languages; whole languages which he had invented, and whose rules and grammar he understood.
Not only that, there are loads of them; far more names than the story actually requires. Reading the book aloud really made me notice how many of the characters and places don’t just have one name but two or three; the Mines of Moria are also called The Dwarrowdelf and Khazad Dum; rivers and mountains have names given to them by men, but also older names in elvish or dwarfish. And we are for ever being told more names: when Gandalf (AKA Mithrandir) rides with Pippin from Rohan to Minas Tirith at the start of The Return of the King |
due to the failure of departments to provide timely waiver approval."
Cline blamed the administration for causing higher rates for "thousands" of Oklahoma residents.
"The lack of timely waiver approval will prevent thousands of Oklahomans from realizing the benefits of significantly lower insurance premiums in 2018."
President Trump has frequently threatened to end key ObamaCare payments and let the program "implode."
The Oklahoma letter emerged Friday after Price resigned as Trump's HHS chief following reports that his use of military flights and private jets cost more than $1 million since May.Wanderlei Silva is likely facing a suspension from the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC) after evading a drug test in June. But that isn’t stopping him from calling out every possible big name he can.
Silva has expressed his desire to fight Vitor Belfort, Chael Sonnen and even Luke Rockhold. His latest target? Fellow legend Dan Henderson.
"It’s not news that I want to face Vitor Belfort or Chael Sonnen," Silva told Brazilian media outlet lancenet.com (h/t Bloody Elbow). "But Dan Henderson is another guy that I want to fight, it’s a viable possibility. We’re 1-1 tied and it would be nice to have a tiebreaker of our score. In my last fight at PRIDE, I lost my belt to him and I couldn’t have a rematch because we left. If this fight happens, I’ll ask him to bring the belt so the winner can have it after the fight."
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Silva beat Henderson by unanimous decision at PRIDE 12 in 2000. Henderson then knocked him out at PRIDE 33 in 2007 in a middleweight title fight. Of all the guys Silva has called out, Henderson might actually make the most sense, given that Sonnen has been suspended by the NAC for two years and Belfort meets Chris Weidman for the UFC middleweight title in December.
Plus, Henderson seems to be into the idea, too, accepting the challenge on Twitter.
I'm good with it, what do you guys think? RT @luis_coutinho: @wandfc wants trilogy against (cont) http://t.co/QkRK0K9XlP — Dan Henderson (@danhendo) August 6, 2014
Silva said he doesn’t care where the fight takes place, but he would like a soccer stadium in Brazil. If you ask us, Japan would make a lot of sense.
"The UFC are promoting a lot of cards and there are a lot of fights that people even don’t know that will happen," Silva said. "But Wanderlei Silva vs. Dan Henderson would sell very well. A bout between champions has to be considered a big show."
Sure, maybe as a FOX Sports 1 or Fight Pass main event, but the Silva-Henderson trilogy fight probably couldn’t headline a pay-per-view in 2014 or 2015. It would absolutely garner some interest, though.
Of course, the chances of it happening are likely slim. Silva could be facing a lengthy suspension. Who knows if Henderson, 43, would still be fighting by the time he returns?
Silva’s next fight is with the NAC. Then, we’ll see what happens.DNA nanotechnology is one of the most exciting branches of nanotechnologies, especially because it uses the ability of natural DNA strains to self assembly. Prof. Alexander Heckel and his doctoral student Thorsten Schmidt of Goethe University set out with exactly that thought in mind when they created two DNA rings with the size of only 18 nanometers and interlock like two links in a chain. Schmidt, who got married when he was working on these rings stated that they may very well be the smallest wedding rings in the world.
Aside from being awesomely cool, the rings are extremely important from a scientific point of view as well. They represent a milestone in nanotechnology, not fixed formations, but can be freely pivotable, which makes them perfect for being integrated in a machinery; but that is still far away.
“We still have a long way to go before DNA structures such as the catenan can be used in everyday items,” says Prof Alexander Heckel, “but structures of DNA can, in the near future, be used to arrange and study proteins or other molecules that are too small for a direct manipulation, by means of auto-organization.” This way, DNA nano-architectures could become a versatile tool for the nanometer world, to which access is difficult.
Catenan, refers to the structure, from the Latin word “catena”, which means chain. In order to get an idea about the size of these rings, it would take about 4000 of them to achieve the diameter of a human hair. All I can say is I wish Prof. Schmidt all the best in his marriage, as well as in his research!
Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!A few weeks ago, after the Harvey Weinstein revelations left many reeling, one article on sexual harassment connected gender violence to, of all things, Zionism. In a piece on the blog Feministing called “#MeToo: Gender Violence Does Not Exist Without White Supremacy”, Mahroh Jahangiri argued that “gender-based violence does not exist without other systems of violence, especially those built to uphold white supremacy (such as racism, colonialism, Zionism, militarism).”
Jahangiri’s claim elides an important piece of history: that Zionism is, in part, a response to systems of violence targeting Jews, systems predicated upon identity and bigotry. But what’s more pernicious is her casual, almost throwaway association of Zionism with white supremacy, racism and gender violence.
Unfortunately, this spurious point of view is not on the fringe. Knowingly or unknowingly, Jahangiri’s comment resides at the nexus of decades-old anti-Zionist propaganda, Arab anti-Israel maneuvering and present-day Israel-hostile activism. And it reveals just how commonplace and pervasive egregious attacks on Zionism have become.
The idea that Zionism is synonymous with racism is actually rooted in Soviet Cold War tactics. In his book Disinformation, Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, the former deputy chief of the Romanian intelligence service, writes of the KGB disinformation campaign designed to bolster the USSR’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world by disseminating anti-Semitic ideas, fomenting existing enmities through attacks on Israel and Zionism. As part of their campaign, the Soviets madeThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion widely available across a receptive Arab world in the 1960s and 70s.
“By 1972, [the] disinformation machinery was working around the clock to persuade the Islamic world that Israel and the United States intended to transform the rest of the world into a Zionist fiefdom,” writes Pacepa. The aim was to “whip up their illiterate, oppressed mobs to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against Israel and America would flow naturally from the Muslims’ anti-Semitic fervor.”
The Russian campaign to denounce Zionism took a giant step onto the international stage in 1964, the same year in which they helped found the PLO, which promptly passed a charter the language of which will seem all too familiar. “Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims,” reads a telling Article 19.
The attacks on Zionism as a racist ideology fully came to light at the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, where over 3000 NGOs including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International adopted a resolution that declared “the practices of Zionism as racist practices which propagate the racial domination of one group over another”, in part “through colonial expansionism” and with an “institutionalized racism and Apartheid regime.”
Feministing’s Jahangiri may as well have been plagiarizing.
But Jahangiri is not alone. The language introduced by the Soviets equating Zionism with racism has become completely mainstream. When Ali Abunimah and over 100 Palestinian activists sought to distance themselves in 2012 from Greta Berlin, a leader of the “Free Gaza” movement, who was criticized for publishing overt anti-Semitism, they put out a statement seeking to demonstrate their opposition to anti-Semitism. But they did so by equating Zionism with racism, proclaiming that the struggle for Palestinian rights “is one opposed to all forms of racism and bigotry, including, but not limited to, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Zionism, and other forms of bigotry.”
If Zionism is racism, attacking Zionism becomes a noble endeavor. This worldview equates attacking Zionism with rejecting anti-Semitism – an absurdity when you consider that anti-Semitism is the very cause of the rise of modern political Zionism.
Nevertheless, this self-serving perspective is well-established among the leftist intelligentsia, from Jahangiri and Abunimah’s throwaway insults of Zionism to Judith Butler and Jeremy Corbyn’s support of anti-Semitic groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends.”
What began as a Soviet project of disinformation has steadily become mainstream in leftist circles. But unlike those manipulated by the Soviets, today’s Israel critics will latch on to any cultural trend as an excuse to mention Zionism. Gun control an issue in the U.S.? Why not look to Israel for the blame? Did Harvey Weinstein rape some women? Blame Zionism. Really anything goes.
The latest and most severe example of the appropriation of social issues to attack Israel and its supporters came after the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a group of white supremacists took to the streets and eventually killed a woman. As the public began to realize that the far-right had some wind in its sails, leftist activists began to claim that white supremacy, a movement that admires the Nazis, was a partner of Israel.
Within weeks, a Tufts student publication described the university’s Hillel as “an organization that supports a white supremacist state.” At UIUC, the Students for Justice in Palestine announced on Facebook that there’s an “unholy union of American fascists, white supremacists, and Zionists.”
It is into this context that Jahangiri dropped her new Feministing article. Now, Zionism and its ills are related to a series of sexual assaults by a movie producer.
There is something deeply cynical in attacking a movement created to protect Jews from egregious hostility with language and ideas generated by a totalitarian Communist regime with a history of anti-Jewish violence; the cynicism is only compounded by the fact that these ideas were promulgated by authoritarian Arab states and bodies where Jews were historically second class citizens.
These countries and groups continue to undermine and violate the human rights of their own citizens as well as citizens of other countries. And, when progressive feminists, woke academics, “justice” and “peace” organizations, and human-rights NGOs promote this very language, they are turning against the very ideas and people for which they claim to be fighting. And they are promoting hatred and bigotry against Jews.
Comparisons of Zionism to egregious movements such as Nazism and white supremacy serve to dehumanize and demonize Jews. The inescapable message, demonstrated in terror attacks, wars against Israel, international diplomacy and now leftist activism, is that Zionists have no right to defend themselves, and that Zionist lives are forfeit.
Daniel Kohn lives and writes in San Diego.
This story "How the left got sold on the idea that Zionism is racism" was written by Daniel Kohn.“HARD cases”, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1904, “make bad law”. But a ruling this week by the Supreme Court shows that cases featuring a tricky set of facts can, when the majority gets a little creative, make good law. In Heffernan v City of Paterson, New Jersey, the justices ruled 6-2 that a police officer who did a good deed for his ailing mother had a First Amendment right not to be demoted for appearing to engage in political speech when in fact he wasn’t expressing himself at all.
A decade ago, Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective in Paterson’s police department, entertained a request from his bedridden mother to pick her up a yard sign supporting Lawrence Spagnola, her preferred candidate for mayor. (She had already been displaying a Spagnola sign in her front yard, but someone had stolen it.) Several of Mr Heffernan’s colleagues saw him procuring the sign at a Spagnola campaign site, and word quickly spread through the police department. Mr Heffernan’s boss and the chief of police were both supporting the incumbent mayor, Jose Torres, and looked askance on Mr Heffernan’s apparent support for his opponent. The next day, the chief of police told Mr Heffernan his recently won promotion to detective would be reversed, and he’d be back in his old job on walking patrol. The 20-year veteran cop’s good deed would be repaid with a demotion.
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If Mr Heffernan had been picking up a sign for himself, or if he had asserted his personal support for the candidacy of Mr Spagnola (who happened to be his friend), his claim would have been vindicated without a visit to the Supreme Court. But Mr Heffernan insisted he had no involvement and no interest in the mayoral race and was acting merely as his mother’s agent in picking up the campaign material. Two lower courts said this fact disqualified him from protection under the First Amendment. No “First Amendment conduct” is entailed in the mechanical act of delivering a sign to a family member, the district court said. And the Third Circuit court of appeals agreed that “a free-speech retaliation claim” is valid “only where the adverse action at issue was prompted by an employee’s actual, rather than perceived, exercise of constitutional rights.”
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for himself and five colleagues in reversing the Third Circuit and upholding the constitutional rights of the dutiful son. “The government acted upon a constitutionally harmful policy”, Justice Breyer announced, “whether Mr Heffernan did or did not in fact engage in political activity.” The Paterson police department’s motive “‘abridge[s] the freedom of speech’ of employees aware of the policy” and Mr Heffernan “was directly harmed, namely, demoted, through application of that policy.” To anchor this reasonable but somewhat counterintuitive ruling, the majority turned to Waters v Churchill, a 1994 case in which a hospital thought one of its nurses was merely gossipping when she was actually discussing hospital policy. In sacking her for insubordination, the court ruled, the employer did not violate the nurse’s constitutional rights because it reasonably believed her speech did not fall under the First Amendment umbrella. In Waters, Justice Breyer wrote, “the employer reasonably but mistakenly thought that the employee had not engaged in protected speech”. Heffernan presents an obverse set of facts: “the employer mistakenly thought that the employee had engaged in protected speech”. So if what mattered in Waters is “the employer’s motive...why is the same not true” in Heffernan? “In the law”, the decision concluded, “what is sauce for the goose is normally sauce for the gander.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, noting that ‘“what is sauce for the goose’ is not “sauce for the gander”...when the goose speaks and the gander does not”. The police department’s “attempt” to violate Mr Heffernan’s right to speak or assemble “never ripened into an actual violation of [his] constitutional rights because, unbeknownst to the city, Mr Heffernan did not support Spagnola’s campaign.” It “may be callous” to demote a “dutiful son who aids his elderly, bedridden mother”, Justice Thomas wrote, “but it is not unconstitutional”.
In the majority’s eyes, letting the police officials off the hook for violating Mr Heffernan’s freedom of speech merely because a misperception fuelled their retaliation would have a chilling effect on public employees weighing whether to assert themselves politically. A ruling for the City of Paterson would “discourag[e] employees—both the employee discharged (or demoted) and his or her colleagues—from engaging in protected activities”. Whether based on facts or a flub, “the discharge of one tells the others that they engage in protected activity at their peril”.
Mr Heffernan’s monetary damages for his demotion await further legal proceedings. The majority opinion noted that “there may be a different and neutral policy prohibiting police officers from overt involvement in any political campaign” and that some evidence suggests that Mr Heffernan’s dismissal may have stemmed from such a non-ideological basis. “Whether that policy existed, whether Mr Heffernan’s supervisors were indeed following it, and whether it complies with constitutional standards” are all questions the lower courts will take up. But in revisiting Mr Heffernan’s claim, those courts are bound by the Supreme Court’s ruling that apparently political speech is as protected under the constitution as actual political advocacy. That’s a significant development extending a long line of cases that have broadened the zone of expression protected by the First Amendment.Author’s note: Please, for the love of the Hylian Goddesses, read the criteria below before commenting with Elena or Storm.
There’s a huge debate going on right now about the number of female protagonists in video gaming as opposed to the male. It’s a good discussion that is having a noticeable effect. Ubisoft was castigated by fans in 2014 for not including a female assassin option in Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s four-player co-opt, especially after they responded making a female character skin was too much additional work and other game developers openly mocked them for the excuse on Twitter. Now the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is slated to have a female co-lead character, Evie Frye. Progress, right?
That said, my buddy and exceptional Houston artist Isaiah Broussard recently mused on Facebook, “How many black female playable characters can you actually name?” Excluding games that let you customize skin color, licensed games like X-Men titles that include characters that already exist and fighting games where playability is a factor equally shared by all the characters usually the numbers are surprisingly dismal. I count only 14 total across the entire history of gaming, and that’s using a tremendous amount of wiggling in the counting. Only 14 black women have ever been put in the hands of a player, and only two of them before the year 2000. That is just sad.
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Who do we have?
There’s Sheva Alomar from Resident Evil 5, easily everyone’s go-to lady of color when it comes to kicking ass. She’s great, but the spearchucking, hut-dwelling Zulus in the game do sort of poison the positivity. Side note: You’ll notice throughout this that black women seem to do better in zombie games, meaning we have to destroy the world and overrun it with monsters before we’ll let black women be the heroes a lot of the time.
You get to play as Shinobu in No More Heroes 2 for a couple of levels. Not perfect, but not bad either. Dead Island has Purna and Left 4 Dead has Rochelle, both worthy entries in the aforementioned zombie-killing black girl trope.
There was Aveline de Grandpre in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. She was the example brought up a lot last year during the Unity controversy, and a lot of people pointed out that as a portable title not using the distinctive gameplay of the Assassin’s Creed console entries, she really wasn’t so much an Assassin’s Creed protagonist as she was an Assassin’s Creed character in another game based on Assassin’s Creed. Still, de Grandpre was pretty badass.
EXPAND Broken Age
There’s a great little indie game out, Broken Age, that has an adorable black girl named Vella as the protagonist. Nillin from Remember Me was also half-black, strong and quite memorable. Leave it to Dragon Age: Inquisition, who gave us the first openly LGBT character on the game box (Yes, Ellie from The Last of Us is gay, but we didn’t find that out until the Left Behind DLC), to do well with the diversity quotient by having Vivienne. Evolve had Maggie as one of your hunter options, a powerful trapper with a 400-pound trapjaw companion.
Historically, the first true black female playable character comes from a fairly obscure PC and PlayStation 1 title, Urban Chaos. D’arci Stern seems to be the trailblazer in this regard, though most people don’t even remember the game. Urban Chaos came out around the same time as Hunter: The Reckoning, which contained the character Samantha Alexander. Samantha is slightly cheating, though — as is Clementine from The Walking Dead — in that they are original characters, but from licensed properties.
Jade from Beyond Good and Evil is considered by many fans to be black, even making a list of significant black characters in a Wired article. However, her race is very ambiguously portrayed and she could just as easily be Asian, Pacific Islander, a mixture of all or none. The public relations manager for the game, Tyrone Miller, has stated that it takes place on an alien world and that Jade is of no established ethnicity.
Finally, there’s Fran from Final Fantasy XII. As far as games that get sexual equality right, XII is the best in the franchise, with three men and three women. Fran is the only woman of color, but she’s also a Viera, a member of a rabbit-like race. Because of that, her skin color seems more like exotic flavoring than that of a human of African descent, but I’m including her anyway because dammit, I like Fran.
Only five of the women on that list can truly be called the main protagonists and not partner characters, guests or just part of a team. Five black women across all of gaming, and the oldest of the bunch is D’arci Sterns. Even with descriptions, the entire roster fits in a 1,000-word article. Things are obviously getting better, but feminism in gaming is still failing black women at a rate higher than white women.
In fact, look at two of the biggest games in recent years, The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite. In the latter black woman Daisy Fitzroy becomes a violent antagonist that turns on Booker. In the former, Marlene also betrays Joel in the end, forcing him to kill her. Even Ellie’s friend Riley gets bitten, tries to kill Ellie and Ellie has to put her down. Three high profile black women in popular Triple A games, and all three of them turn traitor in some way so they can be killed with a quiet conscience by a white hero.
I am truly glad that the need for more female leads has taken front and center over the past several years, but I encourage developers to think about this list I’ve made and consider what kind of attention they are paying to women of color as well. Feminism that is not inter-sectional is not truly feminism at all.
Jef has a new book about robot sharks, "A Senseless Eating Machine" out now in Lurking in the Deep. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.Aston Villa midfielder Idrissa Gana Gueye wants to stay in the Premier League despite continued interest from Marseille.
The 26-year-old has a release clause set at £7.1million and Marseille see him as a key recruit as they plan a summer rebuild.
They wanted to sign him from Lille last summer only to be pipped by big-spending Villa and have continued to keep in contact since January.
Idrissa Gana Gueye was a rare success during a desperately disappointing season at Aston Villa
Gueye is represented by Mark McKay of ExcelFoot, who helped West Ham sign Dimitri Payet from Marseille, and wants to find another club in the Premier League following Villa's relegation.
Despite, Villa's disappointing season Gueye returned some impressive individual statistics particularly with interceptions and tackles, comparing favourably with Leicester City's N'Golo Kante.
Villa plan fresh talks with Roberto Di Matteo in the next 24 hours after David Moyes ruled himself out of the running for the managerial vacancy.
The Aston Villa midfielder wants to stay in the Premier League despite interest from Marseille
Nigel Pearson, the preferred candidate of outgoing chairman Steve Hollis, is still in contention but prospective new owner Dr Tony Xia has been impressed by Di Matteo.
The search for a permanent successor to Remi Garde, who departed in March, could widen still with Roberto Martinez also under consideration. Pin Pinterest ⋆ Rec Recommend this Post 9
Long before the explosion of specialized MMA gyms across this country there was a racquetball court in Bettendorf, Iowa that made do. It’s still there, and it’s called, somewhat generously, Ultimate Fitness, which by the mid-1990s was really just a beat-up wrestling mat, a single heavy bag, some speed bags, and a weight room. The building sits in a non-descript part of town, across from an Econo Lodge and near a gas station that sells red rubberbaked hot dogs. All around this sad building is religion, convenience and mid-America resignation. It’s the kind of nowhere you’d expect to find just about anywhere. But somehow that converted racquetball court became a factory for world champion mixed martial artists by the early-aughts. Somewhere along the way Bettendorf became synonymous with industrial wrestlers with veins in their necks as thick as cables (Matt Hughes), with evil menaces in dervish form (Jens Pulver), with towering corn-fed lumberjacks of bumbling momentum (Tim Sylvia) and unnerving, icy bastards (Pat Miletich). It became an MMA hotbed (Monte Cox), a harnessing of spring-ready violence (Robbie Lawler), an iconic embodiment of its surroundings (Jeremy Horn). It turns out warriors do not emerge from the bellowing belly of hell, but from a forgotten plot of commerce where nothing looks possible. And the warriors at Miletich Fighting Systems, as it was called, were some of the winningest MMA has known in its young history. There were other good fight clubs during its heyday -- such as the Lion’s Den and Chute Boxe -- but Miletich’s was also a thing of geography. It emerged from the shadows of Iowa’s own Dan Gable, and carried the same pestle. Its fighters were one with what it represented. John Deere, the agricultural epitome of America, is a mile away in Moline. The Rock Island Arsenal, which supplies the U.S. military with ammunition, sits just off the banks in the Mississippi. Caterpillar Inc. at one time had a plant in town. There are silos every direction, ironworks, bridges, augers on the ice, toil. The symmetry between man and place was poetic -- and that particular stretch of eastern blue-collar Iowa, patriot proud and steely, was narrated perfectly by its fighters. "Throughout all the talks about how tough the gym was, nobody really ever focused on that fact," Pulver says. "I think we got in there and it was a work ethic. I think that’s what made us, especially in that ‘era,’ so tough. The fact that we just went at each other every day. We pushed each other." Photo courtesy of Monte Cox Photo courtesy of Monte Cox Pushed each other through the thickets and into UFC titles. Matt Hughes held UFC welterweight title between 2001-2004, and again from 2004-2006. Tim Sylvia was the heavyweight champion in 2003-04, and again from 2006-07. Jens Pulver, the notorious "Lil Evil," between 2001-02. Miletich, the meanest free mason ever invented, was the welterweight champion between 1998-2001, which in those days was considered lightweight. All of them Bettendorf men, who ended up managed -- and hurtled into the spotlight -- by Monte Cox, a newspaper man who seized an opportunity. Miletich manufactured fighters; Cox perpetuated them. It was the best one-two punch in MMA then, and maybe the best that ever will be. But as the sport has grown, and the UFC has burst the seams of its niche, Bettendorf has shrank back to its actual size. Its champions got older, competition got better, the belts switched waists. For the last eight years, there hasn’t been a big-time champion in the Quad Cities. The great camps have migrated to Albuquerque and San Jose and Boca Raton. The game has all but moved on from the farmland on the Iowa-Illinois border. All but one, really -- there’s still a single Bettendorf holdover who has the whole thing in his blood. Robbie Lawler was just a teenager when he first showed up on Golden Valley Drive and tried himself against the monsters at Miletich’s gym. Though he does his primary training in Florida with American Top Team these days, he still calls Bettendorf home. He faded along the way with the others. But somehow, in 2014, he’s back, and he has a chance to bring the belt home. Though Pulver, Sylvia and Horn are still active, Lawler’s the last of one of MMA’s storied lineages. And it is a lineage. Without Miletich, there’d have been no Monte Cox. Without Cox, there’d certainly have been no Robbie Lawler. And Lawler, who fights at UFC 171 in Dallas against Johny Hendricks for the vacated welterweight title, was just a kid when all this ass-kicking got going.
The Beginnings
In the salad days of No Holds Barred fighting in the mid-1990s, Miletich -- an Iowan who wrestled in his youth to stay in shape for football, and began cagefighting to help aid his ailing mother -- rented Ultimate Fitness for $700 a month. He taught classes in karate, kickboxing, grappling, the original medley of taboos that went into NHB. "And after all that, I’d mop the floors," he says. "Times were a bit rough back then, but when you're hungry, you're hungry." At that time, Cox, who promoted boxing matches on the side, was the sports editor of the Quad City Times. As a decent boxer in his day who "beat the guys I was supposed to beat," he caught wind that the local fighter Miletich would be fighting in a NHB tournament in Chicago. UFC 5 had just gone down, and the "no rules, no weight class" spectacle was still very much embraced as a way of selling tickets. The idea that somebody might die was no small allure; gawkers would happily pay for the privilege of seeing it. So he called Miletich to inquire. "He called me up one day out of the blue and his words were, ‘Hey Pat, this is Monte Cox from the Quad City Times. I'm a sports writer and editor, and I wanted to ask you a few questions about this training you’re doing in Chicago. What is this... some sort of glorified Toughman Contest?’" "I said, ‘Come to the gym, spend an hour and learn a bit about the sport before you write anything about it. If you don't understand it, you're going to write something bad. It's not going to come out right.’ He goes, ‘All right, that's fair.’" Cox already had the fight game in his blood. As a regional boxer, at one point he was scheduled to meet George Foreman in the ring, a fight that today he is happy never materialized. He graduated from Ball State with a journalism degree and spent many years at the Muncie Evening Press, so his two worlds collided when he paid a visit to Miletich’s gym. "I go and they show me the wrestling, the boxing, and then the jiu-jitsu, which to me was like voodoo," Cox says. "I thought it was awesome. I said, I got to watch you compete, I’m not going to write anything, but can I tag along?" This is when the whole thing started. Cox accompanied Miletich to Chicago, and sat ringside at St. Andrews Gym on Addison Street near Wrigley Field for the original Battle of the Masters. He ended up writing a big feature in the Times. "Miletich runs through these three big guys in a minute each," he says. "I was like, how cool is this? We have to do a show in the Quad Cities. I was doing boxing, where I was putting on shows and then I’d fight on the card. We had Hector ‘Macho’ Camacho come in to The Mark [in Moline], did six thousand for that, and that was my last fight." That was in December of 1995. By January of 1996, Cox promoted his first MMA event called the Quad City Ultimate, featuring none other than the local vanguard, Pat Miletich. "There all kinds of stories with that first show," Cox says. "One guy showed up and, when we were announcing the fights, he got cold feet and ran out the back." "We did that show... and made $150,000, and I decided I ain’t much a newspaper guy anymore." The event still did gangbusters. Miletich’s gym alone sold $80,000 worth of tickets for the show, as by this time he was already an area intrigue, in part aided by the coverage he got from Cox in the paper. Cox’s newly unveiled Ultimate Promotions was off to a fast start. The money was fast to follow. "We did that show, which drew eight thousand people, and made $150,000, and I decided I ain’t much a newspaper guy anymore," Cox says. "I did a boxing show, I made $80,000. So I made a quarter-of-a-million dollars in two shows, a month apart. At that point, when at the newspaper they said ‘good morning,’ I said, ‘what the fuck did you say? I’ll quit!’" A short time later he did leave the world of journalism, and entered the wild west of MMA as a promoter. Next would be the Quad City Ultimate 2 in May, which ended up pitting Jeremy Horn against Mark Hanssen in the finals. Then he went to Des Moines and did Extreme Challenge, which became his flagship promotion. Eighteen years later, Extreme Challenge is on its 163rd show -- the longest running promotion under the same owner. "I’ve been shut down, picketed, treated like a carny," Cox says. "It was not easy. People these days bitch about it being ‘so hard.’ Try pedaling the thing when people think it’s human cockfighting and people are dying and there are no refs, and you keep saying no, this is actually a sport. Nobody wanted to listen. You couldn’t get sponsors." But Cox, with Miletich and Jeremy Horn in town, was seeing big things on the horizon, and with a newspaper background, he knew how to attract attention -- a trait that would serve him well as he segued into management of fighters. "I have picketed my own event," he says. "I have all kinds of tricks. But in Michigan, at Battle Creek we had Dan Severn and a bunch of guys fighting, we sold 1,000 tickets and they just weren’t moving. I couldn’t get the papers involved. So I decided to picket my own event. I had three of my own people who made up our own signs and went out there. "I called the TV station and complained, ‘Listen, we’re picketing tonight -- this is not something we want in our community, this has to go!’ Of course, I sent out my press releases that same day, so they all had my number. They could call me for comment, and I answered the calls and said, ‘No no no, they’re crazy. This is a legitimate sport.’ And every TV station, every newspaper, showed up down at the picket, and I sold 3,500 seats."
Pat Miletich punches Shonie Carter during their bout at UFC 32 on June 29, 2001. (Photo by Zuffa LLC via Getty Images) Pat Miletich punches Shonie Carter during their bout at UFC 32 on June 29, 2001. (Photo by Zuffa LLC via Getty Images) Horn and Miletich, meanwhile, were growing into local legends. After winning the inaugural Quad City Ultimate, Miletich returned to Chicago and won the second Battle of the Masters. Cox began managing him after that. He won nine times in 1996, and six more in 1997. Horn fought a dozen times in that span, too. "Pat hated the world," Cox says. "He was such a mean bastard. He was so determined, and I’d never met a more confident person going into a fight. His attitude was, I’m going to fuck him up. Normally he did. It was amazing." By 1998, Miletich was a UFC champion. He fought the heavyweight Severn to a draw in Moline at the Old Style-sponsored Extreme Challenge 20, giving up 70 pounds. Jens Pulver showed up to Bettendorf not long thereafter, having met Miletich in an airport when Pulver fought Alfie Alcarez at UFC 22. "I think Monte invited him to Iowa," Miletich says. "And I was all for it. I said, ‘I’d love to have that kid in Iowa, he’s fricking hardcore.’"
And Miletich, who scouted talent as well as he fought, first laid eyes on Matt Hughes while refereeing a fight of his. Dan Severn and Pat Miletich (Photo courtesy of Monte Cox) Dan Severn and Pat Miletich (Photo courtesy of Monte Cox) "He nearly killed the guy that night," Miletich says. "And I told Matt afterwards, ‘Dude, if you come to Iowa I guarantee I'll make you a world champ.’ And one day out of the blue he called me and said he was coming. I’ll never forget our first workout, either. That day I had bronchitis, and it was like I was breathing through a straw. But we went at it. "I got him in like 40 submissions and I couldn't finish any of them, he was so strong. I actually put him in a guillotine, lifted him off the sheet, and ran him into the wall. He went limp and was unconscious for a second. I let go of the choke. He slumped down to his knees, woke up, and fricking power-doubled me all the way across the room, slammed me on my back, and kept going. "Afterwards I said |
the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ state.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Hitchens and Owen Jones discuss Jeremy Corbyn’s surge in popularity.
This was no brief dalliance: Hitchens was a member for many years, leaving in his mid-20s. He now looks back at his political affiliation as akin to being infected with a disease. Trotskyism has never assumed power in any country – outside the eclectic collection of Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Bolivia, it has never really won mass support – but it did provide the intellectual training ground for a surprising number of rightwingers.
Company owned by Alan Milburn had £663,000 profit increase in 2013-14 Read more
In the United States, neoconservatism – a brand of rightwingery that Hitchens passionately rejects but with which his brother, the fellow ex-Trotskyist Christopher, flirted – was developed by many ex-Trots. Some of them were “red-diaper babies”, those born to leftists who had often fled to the US from tyranny.
One such was Irving Kristol, perhaps the intellectual founder of the neocons, who defined his movement as liberals who had “been mugged by reality”. Others were followers of Max Shachtman, who dramatically shifted to the right. Some were Democrats who felt they had not left the left, but rather the left had abandoned them: Jeane Kirkpatrick was a US socialist who ended up as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN and an apologist for pro-American dictatorships. Then there was James Burnham, a revolutionary associate of Leon Trotsky’s, who became a conservative writer and was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Reagan.
There are countless examples in Britain too. Alan Milburn helped found New Labour, and now champions private healthcare firms: back in the day, he was a Trotskyist activist at a radical bookshop called Days of Hope (better known as Haze of Dope, for reasons you can probably guess). Peter Mandelson, prince of darkness, fan of Putin and champion of big business, was once in the Young Communist League.
The Tory MP Eric Pickles is known for hammering local authorities – disproportionately in poorer areas – but he was once a communist too. There are softer examples: Melanie Phillips might now think Obama is closely linked “to people with a history of thuggish, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics”, but she was once the liberal-left social services correspondent of this newspaper.
It is often put to me that this is my inevitable trajectory. The leftist naivety of my earlier years will ultimately give way to hardened, real-world rightwingery, so the story goes. Those who leave the left are often those who end up detesting it more: becoming a convert often means being more zealous than existing believers.
It is held that the one thing that remains constant is the fanaticism, even if the specific beliefs are subject to change. This mischievous prediction on the right is often matched on the left. Aware of the precedents I list above, the left is often suspicious of those tiny few with a mainstream platform. It can be seen as a sign of careerism and self-aggrandisement: any political disagreement evidence of bad faith.
Swimming against the tide is exhausting. If you acquiesce, you are lauded as ‘mature’
Some on the free-market right were ideologically committed long before it was fashionable, and can claim to be pioneers. Others hailed from the left and shifted rightwards to varying degrees. You can see how this trajectory can happen. For the first few decades after the second world war, it seemed as though the left was on the advance. Back then it was the ardent supporters of the free market who were the fringe elements apparently damned by the onward march of history. Since the late 1970s, that process has reversed.
Swimming against a strong tide is exhausting. Life is easier if you acquiesce: you are lauded as “grownup”, “mature”, “nuanced”. If you reject the status quo and work in the mainstream media or politics, you are inevitably mocked. Yes, there is currently growing discontent with the free-market order across the western world, that occasionally bubbles to the surface; but any advances are uneven, subject to reverses or at risk of being swatted like insects by global capitalism.
Not all lefties turn right with age. Far from it | Letters Read more
To remain rooted in a movement and the struggles and campaigns of people fighting for social justice is probably the best insurance policy. To join others who dissent from the status quo would also help, breaking our isolation. The political winds will one day undoubtedly shift, and what now seems radical will become mainstream. Let’s hope so, anyway. Otherwise the left is just training up the rightwing firebrands of the future. A frightening thought.Mix the flaked oats and flaked wheat with 1 lb of lager malt and mash in for 15 minutes at 150° F (65.5° C), then raise to a boil and maintain for 10 minutes. Have the other grains at protein rest, and raise to mash at 154° F (68° C) when you add the boiling unmalted grain to the main mash. Continue for 30-40 minutes, then mash out at 170° F (77° F), and maintain at least 165° F (74° C) during spargeing to keep the starch liquefied.
Collect enough run off to have 5 gallons of wort after a 90 minute boil. Bring the wort to a boil and add.5 oz (14 g) of Northern Brewer hops. After 60 minutes, add.25 oz (7 g) of Styrian Golding hops and.5 oz (14 g) of Northern Brewer hops. After 15 more minutes add.5 oz (14 g) of Styrian Golding hops. At the end of the boil, add the zest of 1 tangerine, 1 oz (28 g) coriander, and.5 tsp (2 g) ground star anise. Cool the wort and aerate it a proper amount then pitch your yeast. The beer will reach maturation in 2 to 4 months.The calculation for six weeks of spring training over 22 years is approximately 61,490 spring swings, putting the running total at 94,820. (Jeter suggested that swings in the on-deck circle and swings without a ball not be counted.)
The bulk of Jeter’s swings have come on game days. Typically, he takes about 30 in a batting cage, then 30 more during on-field batting practice. To the 2,734 games in which he had played through Saturday, add 200 games when he did not play but still took batting practice, or when he swung in Tampa while rehabilitating an injury, and that brings the total to 176,040.
“It’s peaceful when you’re feeling good,” he said about batting practice. “When that happens, most of the time it’s just a matter of getting loose. When you’re not going well, the cage is usually where you work on things.”
Running total: 270,860.
All that practice has led to one of the more recognizable and repeated swings in baseball. Jeter, who bats right-handed, steps into the batter’s box with his right foot and digs in ever so slightly, as if snuffing out a cigarette butt. He brings the left foot forward and reaches out to the plate with his bat in his left hand, adjusts any padding he may have on his arm, fiddles with the brim of his helmet, then holds up his right hand behind him — part signal to the umpire to wait, part idiosyncratic routine.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
This morning, fans worldwide were saddened to learn that Alan Rickman has died after a battle with cancer. The British actor was 69, the same age at which we lost David Bowie earlier this week.
Whatever your preferred genre of movie, there is an Alan Rickman classic for you. Be it Die Hard, Love Actually, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Sense and Sensibility, or the Harry Potter franchise, the one-time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company did it all.
Rickman immortalized characters like Severus Snape and Hans Gruber, but I have no doubt which entry on his extensive résumé I'm most thankful for: The 1999 sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest.
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Have you seen it? If not, watch it today (it's on Netflix, so you have no excuse). The movie follows the cast of an eponymous TV show, a long-shelved sci-fi cult favorite that bears more than a passing resemblance to Star Trek. A friendly alien race—mistakenly believing the Galaxy Quest episodes they've seen to be non-fiction "historical documents"—beam the washed-up actors aboard their spaceship to save them when the future of their species is in peril.
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Co-starring Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Tony Shalhoub, Galaxy Quest is close to perfect. The heart of the movie is Rickman's Alexander Dane, a serious Shakespearean actor who's been thanklessly typecast since playing the Galaxy Quest crew's resident scientist, Dr. Lazarus, a Spock-esque alien with a prosthetic headpiece and a clunky catchphrase.
In contrast to Jason Nesmith, Allen's attention-craving take on William Shatner, Dane is far more doubtful about the unusual circumstances in which he and his former castmates have found themselves. As a general rule, life is unfair to this man, as when their alien hosts prepare food for the actors based on their supposed origins: Nesmith enjoys a human-appropriate steak, while Dane is served a squirming bowl of insects.
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This is an incredibly funny movie, but watching Dane overcome his resentment and self-pity to embrace his capacity for heroism—particularly as he becomes a mentor for a young alien, Quellek (Patrick Breen)—is what makes an incredibly touching one, too.
Serving equal parts comedy and pathos, Rickman's full range of talents is on display here: Galaxy Quest is truly one of his best performances. And by Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, he shall be remembered.
Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion's Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.What’s more fun than play veggies ready for slicing?
Besides a barrel of monkeys, which actually just sound dirty and loud to me but to each his own I guess… where was I… oh yeah veggies.
Here as promised is the felt carrot tutorial. You can do this with any felt food you’d like you’ll just need to modify the pattern by cutting it into smaller pieces and creating a Hook and Loop or Velcro inside. American Felt and Craft now stocks 16 diffrent colors to match with nearly anything you can dream up.
Keep in mind that most quality Velcro (aka hook and loop) is very strong so for the sake of your pieces posterity I would recommend “cutting” pieces apart with a plastic, wooden, or even felt knife rather than pulling on them. The little blue knife from Ikea pictured above is perfect for this.
For this project you will need:
1 sheet Sweet Potato, or orange colored felt (will make 2 carrots)
1 sheet Fresh Cut Grass or dark green felt (will make 2 carrots)
Stuffing, I used 100% wool legacy stuffing but any stuffing will do
1 6 inch strip of colored hook and loop in Fresh Squeezed. (will make 2 carrots with quite a bit left over.)
Thread to match orange colored felt.
If you need help with stitches please refer to Putting it all together
Step 1 cut pieces from templates, below;
Cut 1 carrot top from fresh cut grass felt.
Cut everything else from Sweet Potato color
Step 2.
Roll stem up stem piece and stitch up as shown, stitching can be done with any color thread, it won’t show.
Step 3
Cut Hook and Loop (aka Velcro) into small circles, obviously you won’t be using this color.
Step 4.
Match up rounds you have cut out, you should have two of each place scratchy side (hook) onto one of the pieces and soft side (loop) to matching piece, stitch into place as shown. Make sure the right pieces fit together, it will be hard to correct later.
Step 5. Sew up sides of rings using a running stitch as shown below, turn inside out so seam doesn’t show
Step 6.
Sew bottom to slice A, the dot represents Hook and Loop (Velcro).
Depending on how far in you made your seam on each carrot ring the bottom and top circles may need to be trimmed a bit to fit properly.
Step 7
Set up like a cup and gather stitch around and lightly stuff.
Step 8.
Place stem into carrot and pull gather stitches tightly, pass needle through the stem a few times to hold it into place, the top is done.
Step 9
Sew tops and bottoms on to remaining rings as specified above. Stick Hook and Loop (Velcro) sides together and Viola! A felt carrot!
OPTIONAL: To create, carrot “dents” make a large running stitch in side of finished slice, Hiding knot in the seam. Come up through top seam, pull tightly and knot. Repeat as desired.
Please let us know if you like the felt carrot pattern. We would love to see finished pictures!
Enjoy and please remember this pattern is for personal use only!
~AndieNEW DELHI: The CBI has registered three FIRs against unknown officials of the civil aviation ministry and private persons for alleged irregularities in UPA government’s purchase of 111 aircraft for Air India and Indian Airlines at a cost of Rs 70,000 crore, leasing of a large number of aircraft by AI without due consideration, and surrendering of the debt-ridden carrier’s profit-making routes and schedules to benefit private players.In addition, the agency has launched a preliminary enquiry (PE) into the 2007 merger of the two public carriers, IA and AI, to ascertain whether the matter needs to be probed further by registering an FIR. The merger followed the decision to place huge orders with Boeing and Airbus, a decision which the agency alleged cost the exchequer “tens of thousands of crores”.CBI had been directed by Supreme Court to probe the decisions based on a PIL filed by activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan. It said that in its three FIRs and one PE, it has booked unknown officials of the civil aviation ministry, Air India and unknown private persons for criminal conspiracy, cheating and under the prevention of corruption Act.About the purchase of 111 planes, CBI officials said the original proposal was to buy a total of 28 planes for Air India and Indian Airlines. But the government finally decided to buy 68 for Air India from Boeing, and another 43 for Indian Airlines from Airbus.The twin decisions triggered a controversy, with the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) terming the decision to purchase planes through debt a “recipe for disaster”, noting that the decision was taken when the airlines were “in a crisis”. The federal auditor also criticised the decision to lease planes, saying they were leased from private operators even while the process to acquire new planes was underway.The CAG criticised the merger as ill-timed and said that the financial case for merger was not “adequately validated”.CBI said the FIRs were based on the preliminary inquiries it conducted in the light of the SC’s directive and the findings of the CAG and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, which was also critical of the decisions. “The acquisition was done to benefit private companies,” CBI alleged in its FIR into the acquisition of planes.“The entire acquisition (for both Air India and Indian Airlines) was to be funded through debt (to be repaid through revenue generation), except for a relatively small equity infusion of Rs 325 crore for Indian Airlines. This was a recipe for disaster and should have raised alarm signals in ministry of civil aviation, Public Investment Board and the Planning Commission", the CAG report had stated.It further said: “This increase in numbers does not withstand audit scrutiny, considering the market requirements obtaining then or forecast for the future, as also the commercial viability projected to justify the acquisition. The acquisition appears to be supply-driven."CBI’s second FIR has been registered to probe what it called “irregular leasing of large number of aircraft by Air India without due consideration, proper route study and marketing or price strategy”. The decision benefited private carriers, the CBI allegedThe third FIR has been lodged to investigate AI for giving up profit making routes and timings in favour of national and international private airlines, which again led to a huge loss to the national carrier but came as a boon to private operators.Sources said the PE into the decision to merge the two airlines – the process for which started on March 16, 2006 – would focus on those who were running the civil aviation ministry at the time. Subsequently, a presentation was made to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on March 22, 2006, in which the chairman and managing directors of Indian Airlines and Air India, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the civil aviation secretary were also present.The move to merge AI and IA was initiated in 2006 by the civil aviation ministry under Praful Patel and was cleared by a group of ministers which included Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram, before being formally approved by the Manmohan Singh Cabinet.Last week, a VICE News crew traveled to the Rostov Region in Russia, which is on the border of Ukraine, to investigate Moscow's involvement in the conflict. We visit a hospital where injured rebel fighters were brought by Russian forces to be treated for their injuries, and speak to them about their take on the current crises in Eastern Ukraine. Recently, Russia has engaged in a campaign of sending over humanitarian convoys over to Ukraine by day. But under the darkness of night, it is rumored that Russia has been sending weaponized columns over the border to aid the rebels.
Follow Simon Ostrovsky on Twitter: @simonostrovsky
Watch all of VICE News' coverage of the conflict in Ukraine here.
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Like VICE News on FacebookThe Laws Of War, Belligerent Reprisal And Gandhian Nonviolence
By Eric Bailey
09 October, 2013
Torture Magazine
Norman Finkelstein is an American scholar, political activist, and author. He is an expert on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, the politics of the Holocaust, and the life and beliefs of Mahatma Gandhi. He earned his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University and has held teaching positions at a number of different universities. Since speaking out against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Finkelstein has been a vocal critic of Israeli and American military policies, especially as they apply to Palestine. He agreed to talk with Eric Bailey from the Torture Magazine on August 2, 2013.
Bailey: As a human rights magazine, one of our common themes is the targeting of civilians in conflict zones, but there is some disagreement about what defines a civilian or what constitutes targeting them.
International Humanitarian Law defines a civilian as anyone who is not a member of a nation's armed forces, but, despite the name, this isn't accepted everywhere. It's also disputed how International Humanitarian Law treats non-government militant groups and this dispute has allowed some countries to deny captured militants of their rights as prisoners of war. Some countries also extend civilian status to military personnel who are not on active duty.
As it applies to the Arab-Israeli Wars, about which you have considerable expertise, the last few decades have largely involved fighting between the Israeli military and various non-government militias in Palestine and Lebanon, and all parties seem to define civilians differently. Israelis sometimes treat children throwing rocks as if they were actual guerrillas and sentence them to life in prison, while Palestinian militants claimed that a nightclub, popular with off duty Israeli soldiers, was a legitimate military target for a suicide bombing during the Second Intifada.
Both for conflicts involving Israel and for warfare in general, do you have any recommendation for how to address these differences in how civilians and legitimate military targets are defined?
Finkelstein: Well, I'm going to give a relatively simple answer to a long question. These become highly technical issues and you can read through the scholarly literature on the subject and you end up nearly losing your mind trying to figure out what is and what isn't permissible and how one does and does not define civilians and combatants.
So in that situation, what do you do? I'm going to answer you in a matter of practicality: When you look through the human rights supports, (and here I'll speak in my own domain of expertise, namely the Israel-Palestine Conflict) in fact, notwithstanding the dizzying amount of space that is expended trying to work out these definitions, in fact there is very little disagreement even between Israel and its critics on these definitions. Where they disagree is on the facts. Were there civilians in this mosque or were there also combatants? Were there or weren't there arms being stored in this school? These come down to factual questions in most instances.
I have read through the human rights literature on both sides. I've heard what groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'Tselem, Al-Haq allege, and I have read Israel's responses, which are always very extensive. If you look at the allegations versus the rejoinders, there is very little debate on the technical, definitional side. Where there is debate is on the factual side.
For example, in the case of the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish vessel that was part of the Freedom Flotilla that tried to enter Gaza, at the end of the day Israel killed nine of the passengers. There wasn't really any debate about whether they were or weren't civilians. What they debated were things like whether the passengers had weapons, who initiated the hostilities, and so on and so forth. So in most instances, I don't see that there is much need to argue over the definitions. The only place where the issue of definitions has really come up is for the question of targeted assassinations and whether they are legal under international law. That one area aside, my impression is that, although there are all these complex definitional attempts by human rights organizations, I really don't find it, as a matter of practicality, to be a major issue. The issue is the facts.
Bailey: Speaking of matters of practicality, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions regarding something you said in a 2011 interview with the Palestinian Chronicle. In response to being asked to unequivocally condemn attacks against Israeli civilians, you said, It is impossible to justify terrorism, which is the targeting of civilians to achieve a political goal. But it is also difficult to make categorical statements of the kind you suggest. I do believe that Hezbollah has the right to target Israeli civilians if Israel persists in targeting civilians until Israel ceases its terrorist acts.
This comment seems to advocate the long held view that reciprocity for attacking civilians can serve as a deterrent and actually save lives. Am I interpreting you correctly and do you still stand behind what you said?
Finkelstein: Well, there are several issues there. First of all, just for the sake of clarity, let me refer you to the technical term, which under International Law is Belligerent Reprisals. This is when a country or armed group has the right to engage in what are called reprisals in the face of attacks against their civilians, allegedly in order to stop their opponent's violations of International Law.
Now this whole issue came up during the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, made a speech in which he said, If you don't stop targeting our civilians, then we're going to start targeting yours until and unless you stop targeting our own. Well, Human Rights Watch, in one of its several reports on the 2006 War, condemned Hezbollah and Nasrallah in particular for making that threat and said that it was illegal under International Law. And there were several human rights sources cited in their report.
I proceeded to check what these sources themselves said on the legality of Belligerent Reprisals. I checked two sources - the ones that Human Rights Watch cited in its report. These are the Standard Customary International Humanitarian Law, Volume One: Rules, which is put out by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a book written by a fellow by the name of A.P.V. Rogers, called Law on the Battlefield. I checked both cited references and both of those sources state clearly that, under International Law, Belligerent Reprisals are not yet illegal. So I made the obvious point that according to Human Rights Watch's own sources they can't condemn Hezbollah for violating International Law when their own sources show evidence to the contrary. I might add that the two main opponents to banning Belligerent Reprisals are the United States and the U.K. Both the U.S. and the U.K. have stated that Belligerent Reprisals are not violations of International Law.
So now let's proceed to the second question. I have given you what I understand to be the law, but now there is a second aspect to the question, namely my personal opinion. My own personal opinion is this: as a matter of vindictiveness or the eye for an eye theory of justice, Belligerent Reprisals cannot be justified. I am as vindictive as the next person. I tend towards the Old Testament, moral judgment, never to forgive, never to forget, an eye for an eye, but I recognize that as a moral issue, it's wrong. It's one thing, what my impulses tell me, but it's another thing, what my moral and ethical code says, and it is clearly wrong as a moral issue.
But then there is a third side of the question, and that's whether it actually works. Because if in fact you do attach value to every human life and Israelis, with their high tech weaponry, are treating Lebanon like they're shooting fish in a barrel, and they're targeting hospitals, ambulances, civilian infrastructure, and killing massive numbers of civilians, then there is an argument to be made for the use of Belligerent Reprisals to stop these attacks. Consider the case of the 2006 Lebanon War where there were 1,200 Lebanese people killed and over 1,000 of them were civilians, while on the Israeli side, 160 people were killed and 120 of them were combatants. The ratios are completely reversed in both absolute and relative numbers. Absolutely, you have over 1,000 civilians killed versus 40. Relatively speaking, the victims of Israel's attacks are overwhelmingly civilian, while the victims of Hezbollah's attacks are overwhelmingly combatants.
So can you actually deter your adversary from targeting civilians by targeting their civilians? Consider again the explicit statement Nasrallah made during the 2006 War. Based on past experience, it was entirely valid because there were past occasions where Israel attacked Lebanon, such as Operation Accountability 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, and in each case Israel violated the implicit terms of the cease-fire by targeting civilians. At that point, when Israel started targeting civilians, Hezbollah then started targeting Israeli civilians and it escalated into a war until a new cease-fire was signed. So if it actually does work to deter attacks on civilians and you do believe in the equality of human life, as I do, then I think there is an argument to be made. I'm not saying that I endorse the argument, but I would be lying if I denied that there was an argument to be made, and not based on an Old Testament eye for an eye kind of logic, but on the basis of the equality of human life.
Bailey: Can you think of any historical examples of a conflict where Belligerent Reprisals actually resulted in a cessation or reduction of attacks on civilians?
Finkelstein: My answer is a simple no. I'm not aware of any such example. I prefaced my previous answer with the word if. If it actually works to decrease civilian casualties then I could see an argument for it.
Bailey: Continuing with the example of the 34 Day War and the similar 2008 War in Gaza, these conflicts demonstrated considerable disagreement about what constitutes the targeting of civilians. Hezbollah used rocket fire to effectively blockade Northern Israel, while Israel used its military to blockade Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and all parties have called their foes monsters for having done so.
Israel, Hezbollah, and Palestinian militant groups have all accused their opponents of targeting civilian cities and towns, of striking humanitarian infrastructure such as hospitals and water treatment plants, and of using indiscriminate weapons. Israel has been condemned for its use of cluster bombs, while Hezbollah and Palestinian groups like Hamas have been condemned for their use of thousands of unguided and inaccurate rockets to target Israeli urban centers, as well as their use of landmines, which have a similarly deadly post-war reputation to cluster bombs.
Israel continuously argued that most of their attacks on Lebanese and Palestinian urban areas were because militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas were using their own civilians as human shields. However, there are also pictures of Israeli children visiting Israeli artillery batteries and writing some less than loving sentiments for Hezbollah on Israeli artillery shells. Israeli artillery units were also hit by rockets during the war and had such an event happened when these children were present, certainly both sides would blame the other.
So what do you make of all this? Are they all right? Are they all wrong? It seems like traditional military tactics of cutting off the enemy's supply lines, firing upon the enemy wherever he is, and taking up defensive positions in and around towns and cities are all now being condemned as crimes against humanity, but is that reasonable?
Finkelstein: No, I don't think that we have to throw our hands in the air in despair and say, Who knows who is telling the truth? In the case of Gaza there were about 200 or more human rights reports that came out on that massacre. There was a voluminous amount of human rights reporting that came out of that assault on Gaza, or what Amnesty International called 22 Days of Death and Destruction. So what are the basic facts about what happened? I will list them and then you can judge for yourself by looking at the human rights reports, because what I am about to say now, to my knowledge, is undisputed.
First, there was an Israeli blockade of Gaza. Second, the blockade was producing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Third, there was a cease-fire in effect, beginning in June 2008. Fourth, one of the terms of the cease-fire was that Israel would gradually lift the blockade. Fifth, Israel did not abide by the terms of the cease-fire and did not gradually lift the blockade. Sixth, on the Israeli side, they acknowledged that Hamas was careful to observe the cease-fire. Though Hamas met its terms for the cease-fire, Israel did not meet its fundamental term to gradually lift the illegal blockade of Gaza. Then, on November 4, 2008, Election Day in the United States, when everybody's attention was riveted on the historical election, Israel invaded Gaza and killed six militants, knowing full well that the killings broke the cease-fire and would evoke a Hamas rocket assault on Israel. That is, in fact, exactly what happened. Throughout Hamas' retaliation and subsequent war, Hamas was willing to negotiate a new cease-fire if Israel would abide by the terms it had already agreed to in June of 2008 of gradually lifting the blockade of Gaza. Israel refused and invaded.
On the Israeli side, there were thirteen casualties (three civilians and ten combatants) and of the ten combatant casualties, four were killed by friendly fire. On the Palestinian side, 1,400 people were killed and up to 1,200 of those killed were civilians and approximately 360 of those were children. In terms of the destruction of infrastructure, on the Israeli side, just one house was almost destroyed. On the Palestinian side, about 6,000 homes were destroyed, not to mention the entire infrastructure of Gaza, which was reduced to rubble. By the end of the attack, Israel had left behind 600,000 tons of rubble.
In the face of those facts, which to my knowledge nobody disputes, it's hard for me to understand how any rational person could throw their hands up in despair and say Who knows where the truth is? It's quite clear what happened in Gaza. It was a massacre. That to me is a remarkably simple and straightforward description of what happened. It was a protracted massacre over 22 days, but a massacre nonetheless. As one Israeli soldier put it, when he was asked what it was like to be fighting in Gaza, he said it was like a child with a magnifying glass, burning up ants. Well, that doesn't sound to me like a very complex moral question.
Bailey: No it doesn't, but that does bring up an issue that every major power seems to have faced since the 1980s in that whenever an advanced military power like the United States, Russia, or Israel go to war, it is against a foe that is so technologically inferior that the conflict seems to inevitably have extremely lopsided casualties, whether it be in regard to combatants or civilians. Do you think that having a more powerful military or having access to superior military technology creates a greater burden of responsibility on one party over another to protect civilians?
Finkelstein: Well, there are two separate issues. One issue is the pretext for going to war. I have to again exercise a degree of linguistic caution. There was no war in Gaza. There was a massacre in Gaza. Remember, a child with a magnifying glass burning up ants is not, to me, a description of a war. So first of all, was there any justification for Israel to attack Gaza? The answer is no, there was none. They had no pretext, no grounds, no alibi. It was a pure, unadulterated, unmitigated act of aggression against the people of Gaza. But that still leaves the second question. How do you assess the morality of bringing to bear a massive arsenal of high-tech weaponry against an armed force which is basically lobbing fire crackers at you? That is basically all the Hamas rockets amount to. Here, in my opinion, the Laws of War are absolutely ridiculous. They use standards of proportionality and precision, which effectively make every weapon used by the lesser power illegal. So what does that mean concretely?
There is a term in International Humanitarian Law called indiscriminateness. That is, if you use an indiscriminate weapon, (a weapon that can't discriminate between civilians and combatants) its mere use means you have committed a war crime, even if it hits a military target, because the weapon itself is indiscriminate. Well, what does it mean to say a weapon is indiscriminate? How do you judge whether a weapon is discriminate or indiscriminate? The answer is very simple: they use the standard of the most sophisticated technology.
So let's say I have a piece of technology that is able to hit its target with 100% accuracy, just for argument's sake. That then becomes the standard for discriminateness. In that case, if you have weapons that only have a 60% rate of accuracy, it becomes, by law, indiscriminate, and you're committing a war crime even if you hit a military target. So what happens is that the International Humanitarian Law immediately makes illegal any kind of resistance to a technologically superior power. That's crazy! If you don't have enough money or American aid to purchase the most sophisticated technology, you can't resist at all.
Bailey: That would certainly put any resistance group in a bind.
Finkelstein: That's correct! When Human Rights Watch put that question in one of its reports (I think it was the report on the 2006 War because they said that all of Hezbollah's missiles were indiscriminate) they said that the militants can go to the border and fire with their rifles. Oh that's really fair!
Bailey: I also want to get your insight on some of these issues from the perspective of your study of Gandhi. It's interesting to contrast your statements in support of the rights of the Palestinians, Lebanese, etc. to defend themselves with deadly force with your study of Gandhi's views of courageous nonviolence and self sacrifice. Can you talk a little bit about what Gandhi actually believed in regards to nonviolence? Also, can you clarify your own opinion in regard to this subject?
Finkelstein: Well, the first point to make is that Gandhi himself would support the right of the Palestinians and Lebanese to use armed force to resist foreign invaders. The problem is that people talk about Gandhi, cite Gandhi, and refer to Gandhi as a source for inspiration, but without understanding Gandhi. Even scholars do this. Just the other day, I read an article by an up-and-coming Gandhi scholar, who is Indian and has a prominent academic position, and as I was reading his article I just thought to myself, This man has clearly not read a single work of Gandhi and hasn't a clue what he is talking about.
But let's get to the issue that you raised. Gandhi, of course, was an advocate for nonviolence. About that, there can be no doubt. And Gandhi understood himself to be a principled advocate of nonviolence. However, it is an error to assume that being a principled advocate of nonviolence means one is a categorical opponent of violence. The two are not the same. Gandhi made many exceptions (I don't think he would have used the word exception. I think he would have used the term distinctions.) in trying to convey what he means by nonviolence.
Number one, Gandhi's view was that if you are faced with an adversary who has overwhelmingly superior force and power on his side, then if you resort to force against what Gandhi describes as impossible odds, he says that, in his mind, that's not violence. It's a kind of attempt to die with dignity. In the Collected Works of Gandhi you can find several examples. I'll give two, which your readers will immediately understand.
The first example he gives is of a woman who resists a rapist by biting him, pinching him, kicking him a woman who uses violence to resist an assault on her person by a rapist. Gandhi says that the bites, the pinches, the kicks, in the end aren't violence. It's the |
mount a terrorist attack.
His first conviction was in November 1983 for criminal damage and his last conviction was in December 2003 for possession of a knife.
Anyone with any information about Masood can call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline 0800 789 321.Having dropped Daphne and the Hummer off, Marshall and Marvin are now on a bus to the Farhampton Inn. Marvin, however, is cranky, so Marshall does the only thing that will get him to sleep - something that Lily discovered worked recently - which is to read him poems in rhyme. But Marshall left Marvin's rhyming book in the Hummer, leaving Marshall to come up with rhyming stories of his own, with the help and often exasperation of his fellow passengers. As one rhyme works, something happens on the bus to awaken Marvin again crying. The stories that Marshall tells Marvin, however inappropriate, are: "Mosby at the Bat", where Ted tries to figure out if a dinner he is having with a Physics professor named Lisa is a business dinner or a date; "Robin Takes the Cake", where Robin steals and eats a wedding cake and the reason why; and "Barney Stinson: Player King of New York City", where Barney, while contemplating hitting on a woman in the bar, explains why, against Lily's assertions to the... Written by HuggoAs our test script grows we face several issues. One is that most humans cannot count more than 10. So when the number of test-units passes that number we will constantly make mistakes of the number of tests and soon will will give it up, using a solution such as no_plan.
Even if you are a borg, and you can count more than 10 tests, you will still be fed-up with the constant need to scroll up to the top of your tests script to update the test count and then find the place where you were adding the test which can be anywhere in the script.
There is also the issue of test separation. A test script usually consists several rounds of the following iteration:
create the environment
do something
check the results
clean up the environment
If for some reason we don't clean up the environment then the following test-cases might be impacted by the earlier test-cases. In some cases this is really bad and can either hide an error or fail unnecessarily. In either case it is not really good.
Using subtests is an easy way to improve the situation regarding all of the above.
subtest
A subtest looks like this:
subtest negatives => sub { plan tests => 2; is sum(-1, -1), -2, '-1, -1'; is sum(-1, -1, -1), -3, '-1, -1, -1'; };
subtest is basically a function that gets two parameters. A test name ('negatives' in the above case), and an anonymous function (a reference to a subroutine). As we use the fat-comma between the two parameters, the name of the subtest, if it is a simple string, can be a bareword. Don't forget that this is a statement that happens to end with curly braces, so you have to add a semi-colon ; at the end.
Inside the subtest, you can do anything you do in the main body of the test. In particular each subtest will count as one test in the script regardless of the number of tests inside, and each subtest has its own internal test counting with its own internal plan. So in order to keep the test-count up-to-date for the whole test, you only need to count the number of subtests. To keep the test count of each subtest correct, you only need to count the tests inside the subtest which will be much easier that for the whole script. It is likely that each subtest will fit in a single screen.
This solves both the incorrect test-counting and the constant scrolling.
As each subtest is a function it also creates its own scope. If creating the environment is declaring a variable and assigning a value to it then the "cleaning up the environment" is letting the variable go out of scope. This is exactly what happens at the end of each subtest.
Caveat
In the usual circumstances letting a variable go out of scope is enough for destroying its content but there are a few cases when this does not help.
If the variable was holding a singleton object, that means the object will live on even when the external variable holding the object goes out of scope. We will get the same instance next time we ask for such an object. (Within a process.)
Certain types of bugs - nasty memory leaks created by circular references - will cause things to stick around even after we destroy the variable leading to them. This too can impact our test.
There might be other things in the environment that were created in a subtest and will stay around. For example shell environment variables, files, databases, in general anything external to Perl.
If we are not careful even Perl internal variables. That's why we usually use local to localize any change we make to these variables. Those change won't survive the end of the subtest.New project management articles published on the web during the week of March 13 – 19. And this week’s video: Julia Galef uses the metaphor of soldiers and scouts to help explain why we think we’re right—even what we’re wrong. Just 12 minutes, safe for work.
Must read!
Elizabeth Harrin lists five common failure modes for planning and executing our project schedules, and what we should be doing instead. Bookmark this page!
Harry Hall proposes having the team write their own Constitution, or list of shared values, to drive unity and make expected behaviors explicit. Includes another short video.
Tamás Török presents a software development practitioner’s guide to code quality, as processes and tools. Brief, comprehensive, actionable, and an apropos panel from XKCD.
Established Methods
Mike Clayton posts another video in his Project Management in Under 5 series: this one explains the RACI chart and compares it to the linear responsibility chart. Under 5 minutes, safe for work.
William Davis introduces his free Excel template, Statistical PERT. I’ll post a detailed review here in a few days.
Glen Alleman reminds us that the customer values process and governance, and thus their notion of value at risk includes those things, even if you think they’re overhead.
Nick Pisano makes the case that cost, schedule, and technical achievement are insufficient metrics—we should incorporate sociological and psychological factors.
Barry Hodge explains how his company takes a project from proposal to Go document, to execution.
Andrew Conrad lists the top five paying industries for those project managers holding the PMP.
Agile Methods
Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly round-up of Agile topics, from the nature of coaching to user stories to the limits of product manager authority.
Johanna Rothman posts an extensive series on becoming an Agile Leader. Here are parts 2, 3, and 4.
Chris Matts continues his series reflecting on the difference between executive and practitioner visions of Agile methods, in terms of dragon slayers and farmers.
Ben Linders summarizes “The Great Scrum Master,” by Zuzana Šochová, in 15 tweets.
Romy Misra interviews former Microsoft product manager Erik Kennedy on techniques for effectively working with visual designers.
Alok Kumar and Suganthi Subramanian recount their experience in applying Scum to data warehousing environments.
Applied Leadership
Tim Clark, the author of “Leading with Character and Competence,” tells the story of the dog who only bites occasionally. Like the boss who is only a tyrant when he’s upset.
Leigh Espy reviews “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” by Robert Cialdini. The review was certainly influential—I added it to my Kindle.
Gina Abudi begins a series that presents a case study in getting buy-in for a large project.
Claire Karjalainen convenes a panel of women in technology to address the question: how can the leadership team empower the women in your company?
Technology, Techniques, and Human Behavior
Grace Windsor summarizes some of the common cognitive biases that impact our decision making.
Justin Talbot-Zorn and Leigh Marz report that the busier you are, the more you need quiet time.
Coert Visser considers the question: if the Dunning-Kruger effect makes the incompetent feel confident, is confidence indicative of incompetence?
Working and the Workplace
Lisette Sutherland extracts dialogs from prior interviews that address how to effectively provide feedback on virtual teams. Just 25 minutes, safe for work.
Naomi Caietti reviews the key strategies for leading virtual teams, based on the work of Penn Pullan and Evi Prokopi.
Suzanne Lucas reports on the growing trend of “forced praise” in the workplace, from apps like HeyTaco and Growbot to simple excess niceness. It’s not all good.
Enjoy!
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Like this: Like Loading...A Canadian health insurance firm has agreed to cover medical cannabis for a university student who uses the drug to help with severe headaches.
The development is a small step for the legitimacy of medical marijuana in the world of health insurance and could convince other firms in Canada – where MMJ is legal federally – to consider covering cannabis.
If that happens, more patients will sign up for medical marijuana programs, thereby increasing the market for cannabis businesses.
Jonathan Zaid, a student at the University of Waterloo and executive director of Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana, lobbied to get his medical cannabis costs covered under his college’s health plan, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Zaid was turned down, so he then put his request to his university’s student union, which administers the plan.
He backed up his arguments by presenting information on medical cannabis provided via the licensed Canadian MMJ producer Bedrocan, according to the Huffington Post.
After eight months of discussions, the student union and the insurance provider – Sun Life – agreed that Zaid’s medical cannabis costs should indeed be covered.
“Currently medical marijuana is not considered an eligible benefit in our standard drugs plans,” Sun Life said in statement issued to the Huffington Post. “We do consider, and where possible, accommodate requests for exceptions if directed by the plan sponsors.”
In the past few months, Sun Life has reportedly reimbursed Zaid to the tune of $2,000 for medical cannabis and a vaporizer.Department 94 is unlike any other courtroom in Los Angeles. Most courts are quiet, orderly affairs. Parties show up on time and speak when spoken to. Department 94 is different — one part game show, one part DMV on a Monday morning.
Located on the seventh floor of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown L.A., the chamber is the entry point for every single eviction case in the city.
Rents in Los Angeles have climbed by 25 percent since 2000, according to a UCLA study, while households' median incomes have actually declined. That's left L.A. among the least (if not the very least) affordable cities in which to live in the United States. According to Zillow, a person making the metro area's median income of $59,000 must pay 48 percent of his or her paycheck to cover median rent, which is currently an eye-popping $2,392.
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Related Stories Eviction Defense Attorney Accused of Ties to Controversial Landlord
With margins like that, it's easy to fall behind. Some 64,000 to 73,000 people are evicted in L.A. each year — a population equal to that of Redondo Beach. But before the sheriff shows up at their door with a padlock, they're called here, to "unlawful detainer" (legalese for eviction) court. Every day, more than 50 cases move through Department 94.
Each morning begins with a long monologue by Commissioner Robert Harrison — he's not a judge, but he isn't entirely un-judgelike, a kindly sort who looks a bit like Daniel Stern in a graying Abraham Lincoln beard — explaining the rules of the court.
"No live or dead insects please," Harrison calls out with a broad smile. "Please dispose of them in the restroom."
A Spanish translator stands in the middle of the room, talking under him. All the while people file in and out; the bailiff orders people to sit down, take off their hats and turn off their cellphones; and lawyers wander in search of their clients. Many attorneys represent four, five, six clients a day, and they've often never even met before today.
Confusion reigns.
After explaining the rules, the commissioner reads the names of the property owners and tenants in each case. The parties then go up two flights to the court's cafeteria, where they're encouraged to hammer out a settlement and keep things from going to trial.
If Department 94 is the cattle call, the cafeteria is the meat market. Tenants and landlords sit awkwardly while lawyers shuttle up and down the escalators and elevators between multiple clients, often missing one another by minutes.
The lawyers all know one another — they've been telling bad jokes and bickering for years.
For example: Gary Hoffman, a patrician-looking landlord's attorney who has been in the business for three decades, timidly approaches Deepika Sharma, a tenant's attorney with Public Counsel, a pro bono firm. He smiles. She scowls.
"Is it yes or no, Gary?" she says.
He hesitates, then says, "It's close."
"I'm not taking anything less than what I gave you" earlier, she says. Hoffman slinks away.
"He asked me twice if my softer co-worker is coming in," Sharma says when Hoffman is out of earshot. "I said, 'No, you have me.'?"
"I hate seeing her," Hoffman says later. "She doesn't know what negotiation means."
In the end, most cases settle for either a "pay-and-stay," where the tenant pays the back rent, often with some sort of payment plan, or a "no-dough-and-go," where the tenant is given, say, 30 days to leave, and all back rent is forgiven.
"In today's environment, '30 and a waiver' is wonderful," says Stephany Yablow, one of the landlord attorneys. "Sixty and a waiver is fine, too."
Department 94, nearly all of the gray-haired landlords' attorneys agree, is not what it used to be. A new crop of attorneys has arrived on scene over the last decade to defend tenants. They're aggressive. They use every trick in the book to slow down cases, draining money from landlords, forcing them into less favorable settlements.
The landlords sometimes are forced to pay tenants a move-out fee.
"How do you think it is for us, to try and explain that to our clients?" Hoffman asks incredulously. "?'The court system has gone crazy.' That's what I say to them."
It's a new day for landlords trying to evict tenants, and many of them blame one man in all of the sprawling city: Daniel Bramzon.
Landlord attorney Ray Kermani says Danny Bramzon once essentially asked him to “step outside.” Photo by Ted Soqui
Among eviction attorneys, Danny Bramzon's courtroom swagger is legendary. He loves to trash-talk the opposition: "I can't wait to fucking grill [your client] on the stand, I'm gonna take so much pleasure in it," or "You're going to be so embarrassed when you lose this case."
Ray Kermani, one of the few younger landlord attorneys on the scene, says Bramzon once said to him something to the effect of, "Why don't we step outside?"
"He likes to get in people's heads and likes to say things like that," Kermani says. "It was very unprofessional."
"He's very slimy," agrees Kermani's partner, Mohamad Ahmad. "He'll call me a lying piece of shit." Although, Ahmad allows, "Since he had a child, he's kind of calmed down."
"If we're so wrong, why do we win so many cases?" Bramzon asks, sitting in the bar at downtown's Wokcano on a Tuesday evening. He's drinking an extra-dirty martini with extra olives, and every so often he pulls out a small canister of Binaca mouth spray from his breast pocket and takes a spritz. "Why do we win more cases than any nonprofit organization? Why do we obtain more money than any nonprofit organization? Why are we the most feared nonprofit organization?!"
In place of a necktie, Bramzon wears a large necklace with a ceramic, M-shaped medallion, depicting a serpent and a pyramid, a traditional icon of pre-Columbian Mexico. Bramzon is from Miami, but his dad is from Mexico, and Danny lived there for a few years as a kid. His mother is Jewish and from Philadelphia — "Philly," Bramzon says. There are times he uses his Philly accent and times he uses his Mexican accent. Underneath his shirt, Bramzon wears a gold Star of David.Final Fantasy XV day one patch to add further enhancements
Final Fantasy XV is the latest title to receive a day one patch, a practice not uncommon on the current generation of consoles. According to a series of tweets, Square Enix is set to detail what fans can expect when they boot up the game on November 29.
Come Monday, November 21, Square Enix will talk about “further enhancements and upgrades” the development team added to the game following its gold master. They stress that yes, the game went gold, but the development team wanted to keep working on adding extra features – all of which will be talked about at length next week.
According to Square Enix, these extra features will be available as an automatic download at launch. Recent leaks suggest the patch takes up around 7.24GB on PS4.A 99-year-old woman set a 100m sprint record at the Gay Games this week, becoming the first person woman in her age category to go the distance in an internationally-certified race.
A 99-year-old woman set a 100m sprint record at the Gay Games this week, becoming the first person woman in her age category to go the distance in an internationally-certified race.
Ida Keeling, from New York, completed the race in 59.8 seconds at the ninth Gay Games, which were held in Ohio last week.
“I’m running from old age and arthritis,” Keeling told the local Akron Beacon Journal before the race. “Believe me!”
Explaining her routine now, she added: "I try to do everything for about an hour unless I'm tired, because I'm no spring chicken, honey. That's why I like the sprint -- I go as fast as I can and get it over with and feel good about myself."
Keeling came last in the race, but finished to a huge cheer from spectators. USA Track & Field, which represents US athletes and tracks spring records, does not yet have an entry for any group older than 90-94.
Ida has set records when she ran a 60m race in 2011, when she was 95, and again two years later.
Keeling took up running when she was 67, in part as refuge from the sadness of losing her two sons in separate drug-related killings. She started the sport at the urging of her daughter, Shelley Keeling, who is now her coach.
Ida and Shelley had also planned to run a 400m relay earlier in the week, but opted not to after bad weather left the track wet.
The Gay Games were held between August 9 and August 16, and saw around 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender athletes from more than 60 countries compete in Cleveland and Akron, in Ohio.
Online EditorsThe oil price collapse has wreaked havoc across the Alberta economy. Since it began many individuals have expressed their opinion that the end of the hydrocarbon era is upon us and that we need to diversify the provincial economy away from oil. Undoubtedly the government should seek to diversify its income; however it is premature to be writing off oil as an industry.
It is true that oil demand per unit of GDP has been falling across the OECD for decades and it is also dropping on a per capita basis. However the majority of the world’s population lives outside the OECD and as their standard of living rises, so too will their oil consumption. There is an irrefutable link there that is a generation or more away from breaking.
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 and the world was consuming roughly 73 million barrels of oil per day. When it came in to force in early 2005 global consumption had reached more than 84 million barrels per day. As the Paris Accord was signed late last year the world was consuming more than 94 million barrels of day. The EIA and other agencies forecast that oil demand will continue to grow by more than 1 million barrels per day for each of the next five years and well beyond.
In addition to the growth in demand, producers must also replace volumes that have been lost to natural declines. This may be as much as 5 million barrels of oil per day every year. That means many billions will need to be invested. It will largely be invested where it receives the highest risk-adjusted rates of return.
The transition away from an oil fueled economy is not happening at the rate most people have been led to believe. In 2008 Presidential candidate Obama pledged to have more than 1,000,000 electric vehicles on the road of the United States by 2015. The actual number was much closer to 400,000. Perhaps not surprisingly sales of electric and hybrid electric vehicles have fallen in the past year and amount to less than 1% of all the cars sold in the U.S. That is not the kind of progress that indicates the end of the hydrocarbon era is upon us.
The public needs to get real. During this week automobile manufacturers will turn out tens of thousands of cars that operate on gasoline. These vehicles will have operating lives of more than 20 years. At the same time Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier will turn out new aircraft running on aviation fuel that will have operating lives of more than 40 years. Military vehicles, long haul trucks, trains, ships and other transportation means are being manufactured every day and all will operate on oil derived fuels. The momentum for hydrocarbons is such that demand will grow for at least another 20 years and if it stops growing, it will slowly decline over many more decades and perhaps in to the next century.
Despite all of the angst, all of the protests and all of the money spent subsidizing alternative forms of energy, demand for oil continues to grow. This is because the energy density, the transportability and the industrial versatility of this non-renewable energy source has no equal as of today.
My career has afforded me the opportunity to visit North Africa, the Persian Gulf, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico and just about every jurisdiction that produces commercial volumes of oil. Alberta does not take a back seat to any of them when it comes to the professionalism of its operators and genuine care and concern for the environment. The world would benefit from more Alberta oil, not less.
To the opponents of Alberta oil and pipelines, if global demand continues rising where would you rather the world source the heavy oil it will need for the next 50 plus years?
David A. McLellan is the Senior Economist & Business Strategist at Packers Plus Energy Services (USA)0 Suspect arrested after 3-year-old boy killed in apparent road rage incident, police say
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A 3-year-old boy died Saturday night after his grandmother discovered he had been shot in an apparent road rage incident, police in Arkansas said. KARK reported Thursday that the U.S. Marshals say the Little Rock Police Department have arrested a suspect.
>> Read more trending stories
The boy’s grandmother told authorities that someone fired into the car she was driving Saturday night, but that she didn’t realize her grandson was injured until she parked at a JCPenney store in west Little Rock, KTHV reported.
Investigators believe that the shooting happened in southwest Little Rock, around Warren Drive and Mablevale Cut Off Road. It was reported around 6:25 p.m. local time at the JCPenney, about 10 miles away, KARK reported.
Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner told the news station that authorities don’t believe the shooter knew the 3-year-old boy or his grandmother.
“I certainly have no information to say that anyone in this family has done anything to cause this young person (to lose his) life,” Buckner told KARK. “This is about as (frustrated) as you can be as a public safety official, or just a plain citizen.”
We can confirm that the child has died. Homicide detectives are conducting the investigation. This is 40th homicide this year. — Little Rock Police (@LRpolice) December 18, 2016 Police said the suspect remained at large early Sunday. NBC News reported that the city of Little Rock announced a $20,000 reward Sunday. On Tuesday, the FBI announced a $20,000 reward. The Little Rock Police Department arrested suspect Greg Holmes with assistance from the U.S. Marshals.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.New Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi will travel to Australia without the aid of a Tardis as he and co-star Jenna Coleman go on a world tour to promote the sci-fi TV show.
They are to visit five continents in the space of 12 days, calling in at seven cities, including Sydney, ahead of the launch of the new series, Capaldi's first as The Doctor.
New Doctor Who Peter Capaldi is on his way to Sydney. Credit:BBC
The pair will be accompanied by the BBC1 program's executive producer Steven Moffatt when they head out on their world tour jaunt in August for publicity and fan events.
The tour begins in the UK, visiting Cardiff on August 7, moving on to London and winding up in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil on August 19. Along the route it will call in to South Korea, Australia, the US and Mexico.Back in the ‘90s, Clip Art took over Word and PowerPoint files thanks to the thousands of office workers and students who used the images as a way to "improve" their documents. These days there are a large number of free images available on the web, and Microsoft is recognizing this by killing off its Clip Art portal in recent versions Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. "The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop," explains Microsoft’s Doug Thomas. "Usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines."
While most references to Clip Art disappeared with Office 2013, users were able to insert the old-school images into documents using an Office.com Clip Art option. That is now being replaced by Bing Images, with Microsoft filtering images to ensure they’re based on the Creative Commons licensing system for personal or commercial use. Most of the new images are much more modern, instead of the illustrated remnants of the past. Clip Art might be facing the same Office-related demise as the great Clippy assistant, but let the images below remind you of the good old times before the modern-era takeover.Turkey will not permit its citizens to fight ISIS militants alongside Kurds in the Syrian town of Kobane, a Turkish newspaper reported its prime minister as saying Wednesday.
“We don’t want our citizens to fight in Syria and we are trying to stop those who illegally cross the border,” Hurriyet Daily News quoted Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu as telling the media during a press conference at the Interior Ministry Oct. 15.
While Davutoglu expressed his “sorrow” for Turkish Kurdish citizens who were killed fighting ISIS in Kurdish-dominated Kobane, he added that his country’s citizens were not allowed to cross the border into Syria.
“If any Syrian wants to go to Syria for fighting, the border gates are open for them, but even they themselves do not want to go,” he said, adding that around 300 members of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) had laid down their arms in Syria and taken refuge in Turkey.
He added: “Just a small group of them wanted to cross the border to fight the ISIS militants, whereas the majority wanted to stay safely in Turkey.
“What can we do? Do we force them to go back?”
Click here to read a story about the Netherlands allowing motorbike gang members to join fight against ISIS in Syria.
Last week, at least 18 people were killed in pro-Kurdish protests in southeast Turkey. The protesters were rallying against Ankara’s perceived lack of action to protect the Kurdish population in Kobane.
Meanwhile, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arınç told reporters on Wednesday that nearly 1,000 people in Kobane are fighting ISIS, but “no civilians are left in Kobane. All of them are in Turkey.”
Arınç also accused the Kurds of using Kobane as a “pretext” to create an “uprising” in Turkey.
He warned the Kurds that the government would respond “severely” to any such attempt, adding “we’ll collapse their world around them.”
ISIS being pushed back
A Kurdish official in Kobane said Thursday that U.S.-led airstrikes have successfully pushed back Islamic State insurgents from parts of the besieged Syrian town, Agence France-Presse reported.
“The international coalition has fought ISIS more effectively during the last few days,” Nassen told AFP by telephone.
“Before they (ISIS) were in control of 30 percent of Kobane and now they control less than 20 percent thanks to the international coalition,” he said.
Nassen said Kurdish forces were “flushing out” ISIS fighters from the eastern and southeastern parts of the town on the border with Turkey, calling for more military assistance.
“We need more airstrikes, as well as weaponry and ammunition to fight them on the ground,” he said.
(With AFP)
Last Update: Thursday, 16 October 2014 KSA 12:29 - GMT 09:29Motorway is my first full chiptune album.
Instead of mixing formats, or simply putting together a compilation of songs I’ve already released, I decided to work on a pack of “new” tracks, with a couple of the old “classics” thrown in there.
I chose to write in the.xm format, and decided to use ModPlug tracker to make these songs; this was the first program I used to make music on a computer, and so I felt like my debut release should naturally be made using this program. Most of the tracks contain my traditional blend of jazz harmonies, funk and chiptune elements.
A lot of big changes have happened this year, both in my life and in the world. The biggest one for me was leaving home to go to university. In that respect, I feel like “Motorway” is an appropriate title. Heading towards a new destination.ExxonMobil has launched a full-throttled "bully" campaign against the graduate students who recently unmasked its scandalous climate change cover-up threatening to pull funds from the university that helped bring to light its dangerous and "most consequential" lies.
In a letter (pdf) addressed to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and obtained by Politico, the oil giant's vice president of Public and Government Affairs accuses a team of investigative journalism students of violating the school's research policy by "suppressing" or "manipulating" information to produce "deliberately misleading reports" about ExxonMobil's climate change research.
"The reports, produced by a team headed by Susanne Rust, an instructor at the Columbia Journalism School, cherry-picked—and distorted—statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions about the risk of climate change were reached decades ago by company researchers," wrote Exxon's Kenneth Cohen in the letter, dated November 20.
The lengthy letter then proceeds to dissect the allegedly "false narrative" that "ExxonMobil 'knew' the risks of climate change in the 1980s, chose to ignore or suppress that knowledge, stopped or curtailed ongoing climate research and shifted to a policy of funding climate change denial."
Those findings—which were published early October in the Los Angeles Times, mirroring a separate but similar investigation by Inside Climate News—have set off a storm of outrage over what "Exxon knew." The New York Attorney General has even launched a formal inquiry as a result of the allegations.
In the letter, Cohen concludes with a request for an opportunity to discuss "at far greater length our grievances, and the possible remedies available to us." He signs off with what one reporter describes as "something that looks mighty like a veiled threat to revoke funding from the university."
Cohen writes: "ExxonMobil has had numerous and productive relationships with Columbia University for many years, whether through research programs, interactions with the business school or recruiting of graduates for employment with our company. The interactions detailed above are not typical of the high standards and ethical behavior we have come to expect from your institution."
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According to Politico's Elana Schor and Hadas Gold, who published the letter Monday, "Through its foundation, Exxon gave $219,229 to Columbia in 2014 as part of a matching gift program for educational institutions, as well as $9,000 in direct grants. The company also gave $25,000 last year to the markets program at the university's Center on Global Energy Policy."
Press freedom advocates, environmentalists, and even presidential contenders were swift in their condemnation of Exxon following the release of the letter.
"Exxon’s outrageous move to intimidate journalists and academics from doing their jobs is more of the same from a company that has been bullying the public and our elected officials for decades," David Turnbull, campaigns director for Oil Change International, told Common Dreams.
"We’ve often wondered if Exxon actually hates our children because they so consistently stand in the way of safeguarding their future; it turns out they apparently hate good journalism as well," Turnbull adds. "What’s worse is that our government is still handing billions of dollars each year to the oil industry by way of subsidies. This is an industry that is out of control, wreaking havoc on our climate and public discourse, and it’s time for our public support of them to end."
U.S. Senator and White House hopeful Bernie Sanders wrote on Twitter Tuesday, "It's absurd that massive corporations can legally intimidate journalists who dare question them."
Meanwhile, Columbia's Bollinger tasked Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, with handling the response to the letter, which Coll said he's preparing to publish on the school website "in the next couple of days."The West has been so busy creating safe spaces in universities, we forgot about kindergarten.
The left loves to talk about society’s so-called sexualization of women, but they won’t dare discuss one dirty little secret:
Their sexualization of children.
The truth is: The left uses popular culture to normalize the sexualization of children and push pedophilia. The latest example of their perverted push comes in a new “comedy” show on FOX, called "The Mick".
The show features a six year old boy (who is apparently transgender) wearing bondage gag.
After backlash, FOX is now removing all video evidence of this show's sick scenes from the internet.
I tell you why the so many on the Regressive Left defend the sexualization of children, and why we must push back.
PS: Check out my weekly show “On the Hunt", only available to Premium Members of TheRebel.media.
You also get access to programs by Ezra Levant, Lauren Southern, Gavin McInnes and Tiffany Gabbay.
We've got THREE different membership levels, too. Sign up HERE!10:12h EDT
Sergio Ramos mantiene al Real Madrid, no solo en el liderato sino también en la lucha por la Liga. Los goles del central de Camas (lleva siete tantos en la presente edición de LaLiga Santander) han supuesto nueve puntos para el equipo de Zidane. Sin ellos, el Real Madrid estaría clasificado tercero, a nueve puntos del Barcelona, a cuatro de Sevilla y con solo uno de ventaja sobre el Atlético y tres sobre el Villarreal.
Héroe en Lisboa y vital en la Undécima, Ramos comenzó la temporada abriendo el camino a un nuevo título para el Real Madrid: suyo fue el tanto que forzó la prórroga contra el Sevilla en la Supercopa de Europa. En Liga se estrenó pronto (3ª jornada), contra Osasuna. Ha sido su único gol anecdótico de esta Liga. Todos los que han venido después le han dado puntos al Real Madrid.
Hizo el empate contra el Villarreal en la primera vuelta (después de provocar el penalti que adelantó al Submarino Amarillo), estuvo seis partidos por lesión y Sergio Ramos regresó dando tres puntos a su equipo para marcharse líderes al Mundial de Clubes: el empate en el Camp Nou y el tanto en el descuento que supuso la victoria contra el Deportivo.
Ya en el nuevo año, fue el completo artífice de la victoria (2-1) contra el Málaga: los dos goles llevaron su firma. Y en Nápoles dio tranquilidad al Real Madrid (dos goles para sentenciar la eliminatoria, aunque la UEFA dio el segundo a Mertens en propia puerta) y calentó la testa para dar anoche un nuevo triunfo a su equipo y recuperar el liderato. El mismo que el Madrid vería muy lejos sin la cabeza de Ramos.
Sólo los goles de Cristiano Ronaldo han contribuido más que los de Ramos. Los 19 tantos del portugués han supuesto 10 puntos. Les sigue Morata: 8 goles, 8 puntos. Los de Benzema han supuesto sólo tres, los mismos que los de Bale.
Los goles de Sergio Ramos esta temporada Competición Partido Res. Goles Supercopa de Europa Real Madrid-Sevilla 3-2 1 LaLiga Santander Real Madrid-Osasuna 5-2 1 LaLiga Santander Real Madrid-Villarreal 1-1 1 LaLiga Santander Barcelona-Real Madrid 1-1 1 LaLiga Santander Real Madrid-Deportivo 3-2 1 Copa del Rey Sevilla-Real Madrid 3-3 1 LaLiga Santander Real Madrid-Málaga 2-1 2 Champions League Nápoles-Real Madrid 1-3 1* LaLiga Santander Real Madrid-Betis 2-1 1 *La UEFA otorgó el segundo gol a Mertens en propia puerta.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters |
2001 through December 2001 that made any mention of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks.
Regarding Jersey City, which Trump mentioned specifically, we found two uncorroborated and unsourced mentions. Neither begins to approach the scale Trump described.
The Associated Press, on Sept. 17, 2001, described “rumors of rooftop celebrations of the attack by Muslims” in Jersey City. But the same report said those rumors were “unfounded.”
The Washington Post, on Sept. 18, 2001, published an article that claimed “law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”
The Post story includes no source for this information, and we found no evidence that any of these allegations ever stuck.
A more rampant rumor of Muslim or Arab-Americans cheering the attacks centered around nearby Paterson, New Jersey. But that turned out to be just a rumor, spawned by chain emails and perpetuated by shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show.
The Star-Ledger described that as the rumors spread, “Paterson police rushed to South Main Street, the center of the city's Middle Eastern community.”
There’s no conclusive evidence that New Jersey residents celebrated the attacks, and there’s no evidence whatsoever of any demonstrations where “thousands and thousands of people” cheered. Nor is there any evidence Trump saw these events play out in any way, be it on TV or in person. We reached out to Trump’s campaign but didn’t hear back.
U.S. Refugee Claim
A conservative pundit tried to put the debate over whether the United States should accept refugees from Syria into perspective on Fox News Sunday.
“America’s an extraordinarily compassionate nation,” said Heritage Action for America CEO Michael Needham. “We accept 50 percent. … In 2013, we accepted 67 percent of the world’s refugees. Compassion doesn’t require being stupid, however.”
PunditFact examined Needham’s claim that the United States accepted two-thirds of the world’s refugees in 2013. That claim rates Mostly False.
A spokesperson for Heritage Action referred us to a State Department report. According to the report, 67 percent of refugees referred for resettlement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees were resettled in the United States.
But resettled is a more specific and narrow description, experts told us.
Resettlement means that after fleeing their country of origin and residing in another country, a refugee was relocated to a third country. For 48,000 of those 71,000 refugees in 2013, the United States was that third country.
Looking at a more complete picture changes the outlook considerably. The world’s refugees now total 14.4 million under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, up from 11.7 million refugees in 2013.
Needham’s phrasing makes it sound like we have 8 million refugees in the country. But that’s not the case.
In reality, about 264,000 refugees or 2.3 percent resided in the United States in 2013.
The United States doesn’t really have to deal with the 99 percent of refugees directly, because “we have the advantage of geography,” said Lavinia Limón, the president of the advocacy group, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
Most countries offering asylum for refugees neighbor war-torn states like Syria. As we noted in a previous fact-check, Turkey shelters the greatest number of refugees within its borders (1.6 million) with Pakistan and Lebanon not too far behind.
Aaron Sharockman contributed this report. Read the full fact-checks at PunditFact.com.Debut of Black Signals, a live recorded mix of minimal techno, glitch, drum & bass, synthwave, and more.
Stream and download at Radio Free Satan.
Full tracklist at Mixcloud and below the cut.
URBAN ḞUTURIST ǢSTHETICS
1 Capsize Ctrl by Dryft
2 Long Way Down by Zola Jesus
3 Mouchette by oOoOO
4 Bad Boy Blues by Cross My Heart Hope To Die
5 Invisible Handcuffs by (ghost)
6 Life Magazine (Prurient Remix) by Cold Cave
7 Bejeweled Body by Function : Vatican Shadow
8 Let the Sky Burn (Silent Servant Remix) by Youth Code
9 Obedient Automaton by JK Flesh
10 A Devil Lay Here by Zomby
11 Fabric of Space by 1991
12 Metamorphosis by Adam Singer
13 Old Tea by Howse
14 Salvage by WIFE
15 Venter by Ben FrostSPAIN’S former fascist leader General Franco will finally be officially recognised as a dictator.
The Royal Academy of history will recognise the Franco regime as a dictatorship for the first time after decades of campaigning by relatives of his victims.
The director of the academy announced that the official biography of the fascist general will be altered so that he will be labelled as a ‘dictator’.
The current edition of El Generalisimo, published in 2011, describes how Franco ruled as an ‘authoritarian, but not totalitarian’.
When published, the biography – written by professor Luis Suarez – sparked outrage.
Over the past five years, campaigners have lobbied for it to be amended and to include the atrocities carried out under Franco’s rule.
Although specific amendments were not mentioned, Carmen Iglesias, the new director of the academy said that the digital version of the biography would shortly be amended to describe Franco as a ‘dictator’.By Barbara Starr
The e-mail showed up in my inbox from an Air Force tech sergeant asking I not use his name because he doesn’t have the military’s permission for what he’s done.
What he’s done is say to the politicians of all stripes: “I don’t want it.”
The young airman has begun a website for military members to donate their paychecks to help others during the government shutdown.
“I am very frustrated with the government shutdown, and its impact on the very people we are fighting for, and more specifically, our most vulnerable Americans. I was equally as frustrated to see Congress choose to fund my paycheck while my brothers and sisters go without. I don't want it,” he said
The site http://www.keepmypaycheck.org/ allows anyone, military, and civilians to donate money, or their pay as part of a message to Congress that the military doesn’t want special treatment, he said.
Congress approved pay for active duty troops even with the shutdown, but some 400,000 Defense Department civilians have been sent home with no pay.
Who's keeping paycheck? Senate | House
The donations will go to Feeding America, one of the largest charities in the nation for helping feed those in need—some 25 million Americans a year.
“Service members fight to protect and promote a more perfect union; this isn't it. And until Congress restores funding, we will step in and donate our paychecks along with our lives to protect the country we love,” he said.
On the website which went active Thursday night he adds, “We serve our country out of a sense of duty. And we will share in our country's hardships. So until Congress chooses to restore funding for programs that allow the families we fight for to survive at home, we are donating our paychecks to the poorest among us, those most impacted by the shutdown.”
He hopes to raise $50,000.
Congress approved legislation earlier this week to ensure that troops would be paid during the shutdown.BLEARY-EYED commuters from Sydney’s boom areas are being forced to park so far away from their local railway station that some are catching an Uber back to their car.
Furious commuters have accused the government of poor planning — citing a severe shortage of car parking spaces at stations along the northwest growth corridor amid a period of unprecedented house-building and development in the area.
And although another 218,000 new homes will spring up in the region over the next decade, Transport for NSW will provide a mere 8000 new commuter car parking spaces along the Sydney train network.
media_camera “Sometimes I have had to park so far away that I get an Uber and it has cost me about $30,” one commuter says.
Federal Labor MP Michelle Rowland — whose marginal seat of Greenway includes some of Sydney’s newest suburbs, where a further 33,000 new homes will be built over the next decade to cater for 250,000 new residents — said that commuter parking was the hot-button topic.
“It is one of the single biggest issues for people in my area … I have seen how quick the station carparks fill up in the morning,” Ms Rowland said.
Commuter and father-of-two Wayne Gatt, 32, from Schofields, said just finding a park and then walking to the station added 40 minutes to his daily commute, leaving him less time to spend with his family. “I cannot walk (from home) to the station because they have not finished the street leading from the estate to the station (so) I … drive the long way around,” he said.
MORE PROJECT SYDNEY:
KEEPING OUR SOARING POPULATION MOVING
A SPORTING CHANCE FOR WEST TOURISM
media_camera A commuter runs for a train at Schofields. media_camera Commuter Sandrika Pather gets an Uber to her park.
As The Daily Telegraph saw one man run several hundred metres along the road to try to make it to his train on time, after being forced to park some distance from Schofields station, fellow commuter Sandrika Pather, 25, from The Ponds said: “Sometimes I have had to park so far away that I get an Uber and it has cost me about $30.
“My friends and I call it Wolf Creek station because it is so dark at night when you get off the train and there is no lighting and no footpaths (to get back to your car),” Ms Pather added.
Lauren Churchill quizzes Premier Gladys Berejiklian at the Project Sydney Youth Forum 2:53 18-year-old Lauren Churchill quizzes Premier Gladys Berejiklian at the Project Sydney Youth Forum on the government's plans for TAFE Lauren Churchill quizzes Premier Gladys Berejiklian at the Project Sydney Youth Forum
>> WANT WORK EXPERIENCE? CLICK HERE <<
>> PROJECT SYDNEY ACTION PLAN <<
Transport Minister Andrew Constance said: “Since we came to government, I’m proud to say we’ve delivered an extra 6000 car parking spots. The Sydney Metro mega project will (deliver) 4000 extra car spots for customers in the northwest... giving those living in one of our biggest growth precincts the option of driving to a first-class public transport service.”
Ms Rowland claimed the new metro station carparks will be full from day one.
“Already traffic getting into areas where the stations will be, such as the Northwest Business Park, is diabolical,” she said.
A FAMILY’S TALE OF TWO COMMUTES
Annabel Hennessy
LIKE a growing number of families, Kay and Edward Fisher have struggled with the long daily commute, particularly after leaving Sydney for the Central Coast four years ago to beat crippling house prices.
While Ms Fisher now works from home — she can pop her coffee cup in the kitchen sink at 9.14am and be in her office downstairs at 9.15am — her husband clocks up 140km and three hours of driving each day to get to and from his job on the WestConnex project, based at Five Dock.
“When I first moved here I commuted to Sydney but it got too hard with the kids,” Ms Fisher said.
Mr Fisher said that commuting “had its good and bad days” but it was worth it for the family’s lifestyle in an affordable house. “In our crew most of us are commuters, we’ve also got guys who travel 1½ hours from Wollongong,” he said.
media_camera Kay Fisher with her husband Edward and children Madison, 3, and Nash, 2. Picture: Sue Graham
KAY FISHER:
Occupation: Digital marketing manager
Commute: Works from home
Working + commute time: 9.15am to 3pm
EDWARD FISHER:
Occupation: WestConnex tunnel operator
Commute: 73km
Working + commute time: 4.30am to 7.30pmSNSeigifried Profile Joined April 2013 United States 1636 Posts Last Edited: 2015-04-25 19:42:06 #1
Invites:
Jaedong
MC
Hydra
Solar
sOs
Bunny
ShoWTimE
BlinG
Qualifers:
San
Heart
uThermal
Sacsri
HyuN
TRUE
Patience
Symbol
They also announced the casters and analysts for the broadcast.
Host:
Richard Lewis
Lead Interviewer:
BanKs
Casters:
Khaldor JoRoSar Ret
Analysts:
TBD
Source : Gfinity just released the list of the eight players invited to participate in the first step of the $10,000 Spring Masters tournament that will be played from 1st to 3rd May.They also announced the casters and analysts for the broadcast.Richard Lewis DeMusliM TBDSource : http://www.gfinity.net/news/details/starcraft-ii-spring-masters-ii-casters Rise Esports
Circumstance Profile Blog Joined March 2014 United States 11012 Posts #2 I like that Gfinity always has known players as part of their casting and analysis teams. The world is better when every background has a chance.
Nakajin Profile Blog Joined September 2014 Canada 3667 Posts #3 $O$ for the win!
grogburg Profile Blog Joined December 2014 United States 329 Posts #4 On April 24 2015 09:58 Nakajin wrote:
$O$ for the win!
I think you mentally added a zero to that prize pool.
Gogo Bunny! I think you mentally added a zero to that prize pool.Gogo Bunny! <3 BaseTradeTV <3
WTCO Profile Joined September 2013 United States 569 Posts #5 Jaedong invited to another tournament? :/ I know he's popular but surely there were better players that could have been invited.
Ramiz1989 Profile Joined July 2012 7590 Posts #6 On April 24 2015 10:14 WTCO wrote:
Jaedong invited to another tournament? :/ I know he's popular but surely there were better players that could have been invited.
I agree with you about that, but on the other hand there are also better players than MC, Showtime, Solar etc. We also don't know if some players declined the invitation so it is pretty pointless to complain about it. I agree with you about that, but on the other hand there are also better players than MC, Showtime, Solar etc. We also don't know if some players declined the invitation so it is pretty pointless to complain about it. "I've been to hell and back, and back to hell…and back. This time, I've brought Hell back with me."
Dodgin Profile Blog Joined July 2011 Canada 38849 Posts #7 sOs gonna win
andoRRR Profile Joined September 2013 Germany 36 Posts #8 On April 24 2015 10:14 WTCO wrote:
Jaedong invited to another tournament? :/ I know he's popular but surely there were better players that could have been invited.
I think it's more his name than anything. The name Jaedong draws viewers, regardless of his form or successes in the last months. Same thing with MC. I think it's more his name than anything. The name Jaedong draws viewers, regardless of his form or successes in the last months. Same thing with MC.
Larkin Profile Blog Joined January 2012 United Kingdom 7149 Posts #9 On April 24 2015 10:14 WTCO wrote:
Jaedong invited to another tournament? :/ I know he's popular but surely there were better players that could have been invited.
By that logic every single one of the invites could/should have been replaced with someone better. By that logic every single one of the invites could/should have been replaced with someone better. https://www.twitch.tv/ttalarkin - streams random stuff, high level teamleague, maybe even heroleague
Alluton Profile Joined February 2015 Finland 113 Posts #10 On April 24 2015 11:02 Larkin wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 24 2015 10:14 WTCO wrote:
Jaedong invited to another tournament? :/ I know he's popular but surely there were better players that could have been invited.
By that logic every single one of the invites could/should have been replaced with someone better. By that logic every single one of the invites could/should have been replaced with someone better.
Nope. sOs is simply the best.
Nope. sOs is simply the best.
EmoryToss17 Profile Joined September 2014 United States 10 Posts #11 Excited to have Richard Lewis hosting another SC event. He was one of the highlights of DH: Moscow.
Advantageous Profile Blog Joined May 2012 China 1129 Posts #12 Jaedong?!!?!!?!?!?!!!! "Because I am BossToss" -MC ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ raise your dongers ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ I'm sure that all of my fellow class mates viewed me as the Adonis of the Class of 2015 already. -Xenocider, EG, ieF 2013 Champion.
Gropy Profile Joined July 2011 Denmark 5 Posts #13 No Nathanias? He was a great addition last time! haha funny huh? keep joking.
Highspeedfreak Profile Joined October 2013 Sweden 40 Posts #14 On April 24 2015 16:34 Gropy wrote:
No Nathanias? He was a great addition last time!
Well, he's not in europe anymore, is he?
Would really like to see him there though. Well, he's not in europe anymore, is he?Would really like to see him there though. "Lets be honest. Cannons make you a better gamer." -Day[9]
SuperHofmann Profile Joined September 2013 Italy 1740 Posts #15 Let's go Symbol Vasacast always in my <3
stardog Profile Joined August 2011 529 Posts #16 no that there's anything wrong with that. A shame Serral isn't in it, the sole foreign raising talent. Bunny is the obligatory foreign inviteno that there's anything wrong with that. A shame Serral isn't in it, the sole foreign raising talent.
dextrin303 Profile Joined May 2011 Sweden 317 Posts #17 Wait, last champion doesn't get invite?
Alluton Profile Joined February 2015 Finland 113 Posts #18 There is TBD in the invites still and Parting plays in GSL 29th.
Dav1oN Profile Joined January 2012 Ukraine 2803 Posts #19 still that's rly good! Actually, Khaldor casting sc2 wonders me the moststill that's rly good! 1xBet
BEARDiaguz Profile Blog Joined June 2009 Australia 2352 Posts #20 Surprised to see Parting hasn't got an invite but considering how much travel he's done lately I can understand it.
Wish there were more terrans though
@stardog, bunny had a strong showing at WCS and only narrowly didn't make it to finals. He deserves that invite I should think. Progamer Australian Zerg user follow @iaguzSC2
1 2 3 Next AllWe are pleased to announce the Second Annual ChiLo City Grudge Match Netrunner Tournament, taking place at BluegrassMagic Game Shop, 5629 Outer Loop, Louisville, Kentucky, on January 24, 2015!
$10 per player. To accomodate players traveling the day of the tournament, Registration will begin at 10 a.m. and the Tournament will begin at 11 a.m.
We had a fantastically fun and successful tournament last year so, after extensive discussions with many of the Netrunner players in our region, we are instituting a few changes we feel will improve the overall experience for everyone.
For purposes of this tournament, Astroscript Pilot Program is errata’ed to read “Limit one per deck.”
The double elimination format for the elimination rounds will not be used. Instead, a best-of-3 match will be played during elimination rounds, with the higher seeded player choosing their side for the third game if it is necessary.
We are also excited about a number of other improvements we have been working on to streamline the overall tournament such as adaptations that make tie-breakers more fair. These details–as well as information on prize support–will be posted here as they are confirmed.
Please check “Join” on the Facebook event if you plan to attend so that our FLGS can plan. Questions and complaints can be directed to: ChicagolandNetrunner@gmail.com.A new prototype green friendly sports car set to be unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show in March will offer a variety of features to make it even more eco-focused than a previous model introduced last year by the same manufacturer. The Lampo2 is its name and, among other things, it boasts a very quick charge time for its electric motor and impressive performance numbers like five seconds to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h, 200 km/h of max. speed and a range of over 200 km.
The Lampo2, as presented by Swiss manufacturer Protoscar, can reportedly charge enough in up to 10 minutes to travel a range of up to 100 km. This is just one of four charging modes this electric vehicle can support, with the other three including your typical overnight charge in one’s garage. The super fast charge mode requires use of the interface for DC fast charging, said to be able to transmit a maximum power of 80 kW.
The Lampo2, which will be used for “practical demonstrations and testing,” will be evaluated by its maker for some type of possible small scale production (at least as a model to work off of). Features of this electric car include “two electric motors (allowing it to operate as a four-wheel drive with variabletorque between front and rear axle for optimal handling, safety and efficiency) with a totaloutput of 260 kW (equivalent to 350 HP), 600 Nm (50% more than its predecessor!) and over 30 kWh of Lithium-Ion battery capacity.”
Protoscar [via EcoFriend]On February 20, the de facto republic of Nagorno Karabakh will hold a referendum on a new constitution that would change the form of government from semi-presidential to a fully presidential. It would also, as a result, allow incumbent president Bako Sahakyan to retain his post beyond the current limit of two five-year terms.
There appears to be sufficient public support for the new constitution. Most local political groups have endorsed it, with 20 of 33 members of parliament voting in favor. Proponents of the change emphasize the security imperatives governing the transition, in particular after last April's heavy fighting with Azerbaijan. According to its advocates, a fully presidential system is better suited to managing the continuing military stand-off with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has taken similar steps in recent years, eliminating presidential term limits and, last year, extending each term from five to seven years, effectively reducing the frequency of electoral distractions.
The change in Karabakh also calls for presidential and parliamentary elections to be held concurrently every five years. Since the local parliament was last elected in 2015, that would mean a three-year transition period, during which the president would be chosen by the parliament, until the new system kicked in. Few doubt that the parliament would elect Sahakyan to the post or that he could seek re-election in 2020.
Unlike past Karabakh leaders, Sahakyan has kept a low profile throughout his presidency. While he has genuine local support for addressing some of the many economic and social issues in Karabakh, as well as for his personal modesty, critics say this comes at the cost of excessive political loyalty to Armenia’s leadership. Unlike his predecessors, Sahakyan rarely represents Karabakh abroad and never publicly disagrees with Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan on controversial subjects, such as negotiations with Azerbaijan.
No wonder, then, that Sargsyan would want Sahakyan to continue in office. Both the current Karabakh constitution adopted in 2006 and constitutional draft under consideration were reportedly prepared by Hrair Tovmasyan, Armenia’s former justice minister and current parliament staff director. (By coincidence or not, Tovmasian’s latest draft prepared last year bears strong resemblance to the constitutional proposal expected to be adopted this spring in Turkey.)
The constitutional change in Karabakh has so far elicited few reactions among Armenia’s political class. But Sahakyan’s retention of the presidency can become a precedent for Sargsyan after the latter's own second term ends in 2018. In Armenia, with its transition to a parliamentary system, this could mean Sargsyan becoming prime minister or simply remaining the leader of the ruling party and managing affairs behind the scenes, as Bidzina Ivanishvili is widely believed to be doing in Georgia.
Developments in Karabakh fit with broader illiberal trends worldwide, but they also seem to underscore another tendency prevalent in the post-Soviet conflict areas. Having effectively separated and seeking recognition of the status quo, leaders of the unrecognized republics – consciously or not – tend to follow precedents set by the states they broke away from. Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, like Moldova and Georgia and unlike their main sponsor Russia, have now all gone through series of leadership transitions via elections.
Karabakh officials like to point out their differences with Azerbaijan, pointing in particular to the latter's father-to-son succession and cult of personality politics. However, by bypassing constitutional term limits, they are now in effect following precedents set throughout the former USSR, Azerbaijan’s among them.CLOSE Potential presidential candidate Jeb Bush discussed the shrinking middle class, immigration and education reform, and his feelings about his father and brother during a speech before members of the Detroit Economic Club. (Feb. 4) AP
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush speaks at a Detroit Economic Club meeting in Detroit on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2015. The Detroit event is the first in a series of stops that Bush's team is calling his "Right to Rise" tour. (Photo: Paul Sancya, AP)
DETROIT — Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is contemplating a run for president, came to Detroit on Wednesday to offer his vision of opportunity for the millions of Americans living on the edge of poverty.
"How do we recapture the prosperity and opportunity that once defined cities like Detroit," he asked a crowd of about 600 people at the Detroit Economic Club luncheon. "How do we restore America's faith in the moral promise of our great nation that any child born today can reach further than their parents? This is an urgent issue: Far too many Americans live on the edge of economic ruin."
In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama called it Middle Class Economics. In Detroit, the third Bush to contemplate running for president of the United States — behind his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and his brother former president George W. Bush — called his plan, the Right to Rise.
"Today, Americans across the country are frustrated. They see only a small portion of the population riding the economy's up escalator," he said. "It's true enough that we've seen some recent and welcome good news on the economy. But it's very little, and it's come very late."
And Detroit was an apt place for Bush to deliver those remarks.
While the nation and Michigan have been recovering from a severe recession, Detroit has lagged behind. The city emerged from bankruptcy in December and unemployment rates remain stubbornly high at 12.2%.
"Roughly two out of three American households live paycheck to paycheck. Any unexpected expense can push them into financial ruin. We have a record number of Americans on food stamps and living in poverty," Bush said.
"So the central question we face here in Detroit and across America is this: Can we restore that dream — that moral promise — that each generation can do better?"
It was a speech designed to boost his presidential aspirations in a spot that was Mitt Romney country for the last two election cycles. Romney, the son of former Michigan governor George Romney, won both votes and critical financial support from the state where he was born. Michigan residents contributed $9.1 million to Romney in 2012, far exceeding the $5.7 million given to Obama for his re-election efforts and the next closest Republican, Ron Paul, with $311,211, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Let’s go where ideas will matter most, where failures of liberal policies are obvious. You we’ll create a whole bunch of new conservatives. — Kathy Gray (@michpoligal) February 4, 2015
When Romney dropped out of the 2016 presidential contest last week, it left the wealthy Republican donors in the state looking for a new person to back.
"Detroit is a traditional launching pad for a presidential aspirant," said political consultant Paul Welday. "We have some pretty strong fundraisers here, and a lot of people who don't mind spending money to support their favorite candidate."
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said Bush is a "top-tier, top-shelf candidate," but he hasn't decided yet who to support, even though he was the statewide coordinator for the campaign of George H.W. Bush.
"I think Jeb gets it and that's a major reason why he's attractive to lots of people in Michigan. It's a big deal he's in Detroit," Schuette said, noting he counted New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as other top-tier GOP candidates.
His visit was already drawing criticism from Democrats and the liberal American Bridge 21st Century, which said in a news release that his message in Detroit was both ironic and insulting, "considering Bush flatly opposed the auto bailout."
And Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., another possible 2016 presidential candidate, said it's good that Bush followed his lead and came to Detroit.
"Senator Paul visited Detroit twice over the last two years. While there, he introduced specific proposals and helped to open the first GOP office in Detroit," said Sergio Gor, spokesman for RANDPAC, Paul's political action committee. "We hope Gov. Bush continues to emulate Sen. Paul by detailing his proposals and reaching out to help the party. Sen. Paul will continue to lead the way in expanding the Republican party by bringing real solutions to American cities like Detroit."
In addition to his focus on prosperity versus poverty, Bush talked about immigration, running for president in the shadow of his presidential family and the continuing controversy over vaccinating children.
"I love my dad, he's the greatest man alive and anyone who disagrees, we can go outside. And I love my brother," Bush said. "But know for a fact, that if I'm gong to be successful, I'm going to have to do it on my own."
He also said the immigration debate has to pivot to an economic argument where guest worker programs should be expanded, investors and dreamers are welcome in the country and the border is enforced.
"Immigration should be the lowest hanging fruit," he said.
Love my dad, brother, but I know for a fact, that if I’m gong to be successful, I’m going to have to do it on my own. says @JebBush — Kathy Gray (@michpoligal) February 4, 2015
He's looking forward to a presidential primary season that's turned into kind of a "Wild West" system that could devolve into mud slinging and back biting.
"If I go beyond the consideration, I hope I have the discipline to not turn back and get into the food fights," he said.
Toward that end, Bush said he'll detail his Right to Rise platform in the coming months. But it will include: a commitment to family with a focus on encouraging children raised in two-parent families; economic growth of 4% a year; reforms of policies geared toward keeping people in poverty; closing the education gap; and reforming government to give less money to Washington, D.C., and more to state and local governments.
"Instead of a safety net, they've built a spider web that traps people in perpetual dependency," Bush said.
Bush also took some shots at both liberals and the media, as well as corrupt prior administrations in Detroit that thwarted businesses from thriving and even lost money on writing parking tickets.
"I know some in the media think conservatives don't care about the cities," he said. "But they are wrong. We believe that every American in every community has a right to pursue happiness. They have a right to rise.
"So I say: Let's go where our ideas can matter most. Where the failures of liberal government are most obvious. Let's deliver real conservative success."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1CZkqNqIf Fresno State played in the American Athletic Conference or Conference USA – the two other FBS leagues that don’t stage their football championship games at neutral sites – the Bulldogs wouldn’t be boarding a plane this week.
Because the conference championship would be settled right here in Fresno, at a re-energized Bulldog Stadium, instead of in Boise, Idaho, on that hideously hued field.
Of course Fresno State doesn’t play in the AAC or C-USA. The Bulldogs play in the Mountain West, which marches to the beat of its own drummer. Often with a cheap-sounding snare drum.
Fresno State may have smothered Boise State on a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon before an appreciative assembly of 31,526, but on Sunday morning we learned the 28-17 victory didn’t count for as much as it should.
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OFFICIAL: @BroncoSportsFB to host @FresnoStateFB in the 2017 #MWFB Championship Game on Saturday, December 2. Get your tickets now through either institutional box office!
Details: https://t.co/ESra8Xp0gu pic.twitter.com/Ks8wpTvpoN — Mountain West (@MountainWest) November 26, 2017
That’s because four computer polls (Anderson & Hester, Billingsley, Colley Matrix and Wolfe) churned the numbers and decided the Bulldogs’ résumé wasn’t as strong as the Broncos’.
The computers gave Boise State an average position of 30.25 while relegating Fresno State to an average of 34.25. Meaning the Broncos get to host the conference championship – even though the two teams finished the regular season with identical records (9-3 overall, 7-1 MW) and the Bulldogs were victorious in an actual, honest-to-goodness contest of football.
Head-to-head results don’t mean anything to an algorithm, which is understandable. Computers don’t know winning from losing. But the MW’s athletic directors do. They’re the ones to blame for this lame criteria.
SHARE COPY LINK Fresno State beat Boise State 28-17, re-energizing Bulldog Stadium once again. The Red Wave chanted and cheered. Players danced afterward. And in the end, Fresno State players hoisted the milk can trophy that's awarded to the winner between the tw
Again, the AAC doesn’t do it this way. Central Florida is hosting Memphis in the AAC championship because it has the better overall conference record (8-0 vs. 7-1). But if those records were equal, head-to-head would be the next tiebreaker.
Nor does C-USA. Just like in the AAC, Florida Atlantic is hosting North Texas in the C-USA championship because of its superior conference record (8-0 vs. 7-1). But again, if those records were equal, head-to-head would be the next tiebreaker.
Not so in the MW, which uses the College Football Playoff rankings to determine the host site. If neither division champion is included in the CFP top 25, the composite computer rankings come next.
Computer polls are symbols of a bygone era, an age epitomized by an acronym (BCS) that drips off the tongue like poison.
Computer polls are symbols of a bygone era, an age epitomized by an acronym (BCS) that drips off the tongue like poison. Even the CFP has ditched them. So why does the MW cling to these relics of the past instead of giving more weight to head-to-head results?
MW commissioner Craig Thompson didn’t have a very good answer. At least not one that would placate Fresno State fans.
“You can’t base it on a single game,” Thompson said. “I know head to head means a ton, and it should. But it’s the full body of work. It’s all eight (conference) games and how they did against the entire schedule.”
Fresno State coach Jeff Tedford gets congratulated following the Bulldogs’ 28-17 victory over Boise State on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017. GARY KAZANJIAN Associated Press
Here’s what Thompson didn’t say: In years when the MW has a team with a good chance of making a New Year’s Six bowl game, awarding the host site to the team with the highest CFP ranking helps “protect” that team against an upset. Which would likely cost the conference a huge payday.
And, believe me, no MW athletic director wants that.
The MW didn’t wait for Tuesday’s new CFP rankings, or the unlikely chance Fresno State would crack the top 25. (The Broncos were No. 23 last week.) Instead, the conference office went straight to the computers.
Gotta help the host team sell tickets – and Boise State has been selling them for more than a week, just in case.
If Jeff Tedford is irked by having to fly to the Mountain Time Zone for the MW championship, he isn’t letting on.
When asked following Saturday’s game if he would lobby the CFP committee or anyone listening that Fresno State should host, Tedford didn’t choose to start politicking.
“I’m not a lobbyist,” he replied. “I don’t know how to lobby. It’s out of our control. We’ve done what we can do. We didn’t go into this game thinking if we can win this game, we’ll get home-field advantage.
“I don’t even know how all that works. We’ll just play where they tell us to play.”
I’m not a lobbyist. I don’t know how to lobby.... We’ll just play where they tell us to play. |
Let me tell you, when Benji runs out on Eden Park for the Auckland Blues, if that's the way it's to be, it will be packed.
"They are talking about a two-year deal and we are comfortable about that. It's not about the money. Whether it's $500,000 or $600,000 he will make the decision for his football career. Ultimately it's about the opportunity. He wants to play 15s for the All Blacks. Whether the sevens comes into the mix is yet to be determined. It's a whole new desire and motivation for him.
"The whole presentation was extremely professional. It was nothing but to be admired. Sir John Kirwan is a very impressive man. What he is trying to do with that club in terms of values and expectations... it's a little bit like Sir Alex Ferguson 25 years ago."
A major barrier to Marshall's move to Auckland was thought to be his wife, Zoe, their preference to live in Sydney and her work as a television presenter/journalist.
"That's why we brought his wife this time, so she could look around," Tauber said. "She loved it. She's been to Parnell, Mission Bay. We are trying to make her comfortable about lifestyle, where she could live, what she could do. There are huge opportunities for her in Auckland which she can manage and create work."
The Blues are understood to have knocked back a possible stint in Japanese rugby at the end of 2014. And, despite Marshall saying this week he wanted to sign off his league career by playing in this year's World Cup, Tauber suggested that may be a risk not worth taking.
"I doubt it," Tauber said of Marshall playing in the league World Cup. "The Blues preseason starts late-November. The World Cup is October/November with the final coming into the early part of December. The risk of injury when he's already committed to a rugby union club, they'd have to indemnify him - I just think it's all too hard."
Kirwan indicated he was more open to the idea but his preference is for Marshall to have a break before next year's Super Rugby season.
The former All Blacks wing was reluctant to discuss what position Marshall might play but it is understood he could feature at fullback, second five-eighth or first-five.
"If next week goes well and they decide to sign with us then we'll need to put the Blues first but also take into consideration what Benji wants to do. I'm good mates with [Kiwis coach] Stephen Kearney so I'm sure something can be worked out. My biggest concern for him would be resting up to start what would be a huge preseason and a total life change for him."
- Fairfax Media
CommentsEveryone understands that our (and the world's) economy is underperforming. While U.S. unemployment is down, people are finding jobs that underpay and/or don't provide enough hours. Regular people just don't have enough to get by -- never mind enough to drive consumer economies. The lack of pay causes a drop in consumer demand, which leads to economic malaise.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it clearly: "The only cure for the world's malaise is an increase in aggregate demand."
So how do you increase demand in an economy? With jobs that pay well. How do you get jobs to pay well? Of course, raise the minimum wage, but another way is to make sure there are plenty of jobs. When there are so many open jobs in an economy that employers start having trouble finding people to work for them, they start to offer better pay.
How do you make sure there are enough jobs in an economy? The way that has again and again proven to work is through the government hiring people to do work that needs to be done.
The Great Malaise
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in "The Great Malaise Continues":
The world faces a deficiency of aggregate demand, brought on by a combination of growing inequality and a mindless wave of fiscal austerity. Those at the top spend far less than those at the bottom, so that as money moves up, demand goes down. And countries like Germany that consistently maintain external surpluses are contributing significantly to the key problem of insufficient global demand. At the same time, the U.S. suffers from a milder form of the fiscal austerity prevailing in Europe. Indeed, some 500,000 fewer people are employed by the public sector in the U.S. than before the crisis. With normal expansion in government employment since 2008, there would have been two million more.... There are huge unmet global needs that could spur growth. Infrastructure alone could absorb trillions of dollars in investment, not only true in the developing world, but also in the U.S., which has underinvested in its core infrastructure for decades. Furthermore, the entire world needs to retrofit itself to face the reality of global warming.
Infrastructure: Work That Needs To Be Done
Everyone understands that our country's infrastructure is falling down on the job - literally falling down in too many instances. Roads full of holes. Bridges that are structurally unsound. If you are watching the news lately you are seeing failing and inadequate levees, contributing to terrible flooding.
The Americans Society of Civil Engineers' (ASCE) most recent "Infrastructure Report Card" gives our infrastructure a D+ and says we need to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020 just to bring it up to standard. Never mind the high-speed rail and other modernizations that would help us compete in a 21st-century economy.
This is work that has to be done - at a time when our economy needs to find jobs for people to do.
Even the usually anti-government Business Roundtable says in their report, "The Case For Investing In America's Transportation Infrastructure," that "$3 in economic activity is created by every $1 invested in infrastructure." But, "Today, public investment in transportation infrastructure accounts for just 1.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) -- a reduction from peak investment levels of 2.2 percent in the 1960s."
From the Business Roundtable report:
The Roundtable report shows that the Reagan tax cuts and resulting cutbacks in investment have had their effect. Federal spending accounted for 38 percent of total public investment before Reagan, it's less than 25 percent today. Cash-strapped state and local governments struggle to make up the rest.
The Bush tax cuts and had a similar effect. The Congressional budget Office (CBO) report, "Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure, 1956 to 2014" states, "Adjusted for inflation, federal purchases have fallen by about 19 percent since 2003, while purchases by states and localities have fallen by about 5 percent." This is occurring even as "prices of materials and other inputs rose more quickly than nominal spending", so the bang-for-buck of this spending is even lower than these figures imply. ("[P]rices in the economy as a whole rose at less than half of the rate of prices of infrastructure-related materials from 2003 to 2014".)
Presidential Candidates' Infrastructure Proposals
December's post, "How The Clinton and Sanders Infrastructure Plans Measure Up," looked at the infrastructure plans from candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The ASCE "Report Card" says the need is $3.6 trillion by 2020. Only $2 trillion of that has been budgeted, leaving a $1.6 trillion hole.
Clinton proposes spending $250 billion dollars over five years with an additional one-time $25 billion to seed a national infrastructure bank. The bank will provide loans to states and cities that will require tolls, fees or special tax levies to pay off. The proposed spending is not broken down by priority.
Sanders proposes closing the hole by spending $1 trillion over five years, with the remaining $600 billion to be accounted for by state and local spending. His detailed proposal breaks down the spending into various priority areas. The December post, "The Sanders Corporate Tax Reform Plan," details how he will raise the money to pay for this.
Donald Trump has pledged to fix the country's infrastructure, providing millions of jobs, but has not yet provided a detailed proposal. He tweeted, "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me - roads, airports, bridges. I know how to build, pols only know how to talk!"
His book, 'Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again' (excerpt) outlines the seriousness of the country's infrastructure spending shortfall and says, "When you talk about building, you had better talk about Trump."
"A few years ago, Moody's, the financial investment agency, calculated that every $1 of federal money invested in improving the infrastructure for highways and public schools would generate $1.44 back to the economy. The Congressional Budget Office said that infrastructure investments have one of the strongest direct economic impacts. You know why that is? Jobs. These projects put people to work--not just the people doing the work but also the manufacturers, the suppliers, the designers, and, yes, even the lawyers. The Senate Budget Committee estimates that rebuilding America will create 13 million jobs.
Ted Cruz' has not offered specific infrastructure proposals but the Clinton campaign claims that as a senator he has voted to "slash" infrastructure spending.
Marco Rubio has also been accused by Clinton of voting to slash infrastructure spending. Rubio's campaign website proposes to end federal infrastructure spending and have the states pick up the slack.
In fact Republican senators repeatedly filibustered bills to spend on infrastructure. Cruz and Rubio both voted against the most recent infrastructure bill, which did pass.
Construction remains one of the weakest sectors in the jobs recovery, with unemployment rates in the sector close to seven percent. Altogether, there are close to eight million people counted as unemployed, but only about 5.4 million job openings. With a big, bold investment in infrastructure, we can move the economy to full employment, raise wages and put our economy -- and our day-to-day lives -- on a more firm foundation.
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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary and/or for the Progress Breakfast.Epictetus, Discourses Collected by Arrian, 2.21: On Inconsistency
“People admit some of their own faults easily, but not others. No one, for example, will agree that he is foolish or ignorant, but in complete contrast you will hear everyone saying that “I wish I were as lucky as I am prudent.” And they also easily accept that they are frightened when they say “I am rather timid, I agree, but you will not discover me to be a fool.” Someone will not admit he is powerless, completely unjust, envious or a busybody, but most will confess they feel pity.
What is the cause of this? The most powerful is inconsistency and a confusion of thought in matters concerning right and wrong, different faults to which different men will not admit whenever they sense they might be shameful. Being timid, for example, is something people believe is a mark of prudence; and pity is the same. But stupidity, well, men think that is a slave’s quality. Men will also never confess to sins against the common good.
In the case of most mistakes, men are comfortable with confessing to them because they believe that there is something involuntary in them, as in the case of timidity or pity. And if anyone does admit that he is powerless in his action, he offers lust as an explanation, proposing he should be pardoned as an involuntary actor.”
κα′. Περὶ ἀνομολογίας.
Τῶν περὶ αὑτοὺς κακῶν τὰ μὲν ῥᾳδίως ὁμολογοῦσιν ἄνθρωποι, τὰ δ’ οὐ ῥᾳδίως. οὐδεὶς οὖν ὁμολογήσει ὅτι ἄφρων ἐστὶν ἢ ἀνόητος, ἀλλὰ πᾶν τοὐναντίον πάντων
ἀκούσεις λεγόντων ‘ὤφελον ὡς φρένας ἔχω οὕτως καὶ τύχην εἶχον’. δειλοὺς δὲ ῥᾳδίως ἑαυτοὺς ὁμολογοῦσι καὶ λέγουσιν ‘ἐγὼ δειλότερός εἰμι, ὁμολογῶ· τὰ δ’ ἄλλ’
οὐχ εὑρήσεις με μωρὸν ἄνθρωπον’. ἀκρατῆ οὐ ῥᾳδίως ὁμολογήσει τις, ἄδικον οὐδ’ ὅλως, φθονερὸν οὐ πάνυ ἢ περίεργον, ἐλεήμονα οἱ πλεῖστοι. τί οὖν τὸ αἴτιον; τὸ
μὲν κυριώτατον ἀνομολογία καὶ ταραχὴ ἐν τοῖς περὶ ἀγαθῶν καὶ κακῶν, ἄλλοις δ’ ἄλλα αἴτια καὶ σχεδὸν ὅσα ἂν αἰσχρὰ φαντάζωνται, ταῦτα οὐ πάνυ ὁμολογοῦσι· τὸ δὲ δειλὸν εἶναι εὐγνώμονος ἤθους φαντάζονται καὶ τὸ ἐλεήμονα, τὸ δ’ ἠλίθιον εἶναι παντελῶς ἀνδραπόδου· καὶ τὰ περὶ κοινωνίαν δὲ πλημμελήματα οὐ πάνυ προσίενται. ἐπὶ δὲ τῶν πλείστων ἁμαρτημάτων κατὰ τοῦτο μάλιστα φέρονται ἐπὶ τὸ ὁμολογεῖν αὐτά, ὅτι φαντάζονταί τι ἐν αὐτοῖς εἶναι ἀκούσιον καθάπερ ἐν τῷ δειλῷ καὶ ἐλεήμονι. κἂν ἀκρατῆ που παρομολογῇ τις αὑτόν, ἔρωτα προσέθηκεν, ὥστε συγγνωσθῆναι ὡς ἐπ’ ἀκουσίῳ.Moshe Kahlon, the former Likud minister and the up-and-comer of the next general elections, said Friday he was not opposed to territorial concessions if they were to bring about a peace accord with Palestinians, and said he would not miss such an opportunity if it were feasible.
Speaking to young Israelis in a Q&A at a Tel Aviv pub, Kahlon described himself as “center, a little right” in his political views, and said the current government was exhibiting “helplessness” on the diplomatic front.
Kahlon, a former communications minister popular for reforming the Israeli communications field, increasing competition and greatly lowering cellphone call prices, left the Likud before the last elections in 2013. This week he announced he would form a new party to run in the next elections on March 17.
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His as-yet unnamed party has been polled in recent days as winning between 10-13 seats in the next Knesset, a number that could rise higher still if Kahlon frames himself as the new face of the Israeli center.
Kahlon’s rumored tenuous relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been cited as a major reason for his decision to leave Likud. In his statements Friday, Kahlon made some barbed allusions to his former party and its leader.
“I come from Likud. The real Likud knows how to make peace, to give up territory, and on the other hand is conservative and responsible,” Kahlon told pub goers. “My world view is that of the real Likud that truly came and safeguarded the Land of Israel. When it needed to make peace with the greatest Arab nation (Egypt) it did so, and when it needed to compromise, it compromised.”
Kahlon’s statements appeared to signify a change in his position. In the past, he was on record as an opponent of Palestinian statehood and the dismantling of settlements.
Despite his apparent misgivings with Netanyahu and his party, Kahlon said he would not at this point rule out forming a coalition with any party following the elections.
“I will join anyone who will enable my agenda,” he said. “I won’t rule out anyone. In my opinion he who invalidates is himself invalid.”
Kahlon has been said to be weighing a partnership with recently sacked finance minister Yair Lapid and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman to counter Netanyahu’s reported alliance with Economy Minister Naftali Bennett.
According to a Channel 10 report on Wednesday, Kahlon, Liberman and Lapid have been discussing a potential alliance for weeks, in anticipation of Netanyahu calling for early elections.
While the TV report indicated that the chances were slim to none that the three parties — Yesh Atid, Yisrael Beytenu and the not-yet-named Kahlon faction — would formally and fully join forces, it said that the three could cooperate in other ways, including presenting a united front on whom to recommend for the premiership following the elections, and agreeing to not target each other during the campaign in the run-up to March 17.
What the three have in common is a desire to see someone other than Netanyahu at the helm, the report said.
Former interior minister Gideon Sa’ar has also been reported as a potential challenger to Netanyahu, with several Hebrew media outlets saying he could be weighing a return to politics to try and beat the prime minister in the contest to lead Likud. Likud supporters had urged him to consider the idea, and he had “not rejected it,” Army Radio reported Friday morning. Most political analysts, however, doubt that Sa’ar, who only resigned from his job and quit politics a few weeks ago, will be making a comeback.
Meanwhile Hatnua party leader Tzipi Livni, Israel’s justice minister up until her dismissal this week, said Friday she expected to join forces with Labor in the coming election, as has been reported in the media.
“There will be a joint list, because it is necessary and will create a better result than if each ran separately,” she told Channel 2 News. The main issue to be considered, she added, was not one of ego but of which cooperative effort could gain the most votes in a bid to replace Netanyahu at the country’s helm.
“We need to join forces and create a situation where there a dynamism and hope,” she said. “The moment there is hope of replacing Netanyahu — it’ll happen.”
Livni and Labor chief Isaac Herzog have reportedly discussed the possibility over the past few days. According to Channel 10, Livni would get the number two spot on the list and two more seats for party members Amram Mitzna and Amir Peretz among the top 10.
A Globes poll gave a Labor-Hatnua alliance 24 seats, Channel 10 said.
Some reports have indicated that Kadima party leader Shaul Mofaz will also join the Labor Party.
Jewish Home MK Ayelet Shaked said Friday she would not rule out party leader Naftali Bennett becoming Israel’s next prime minister.
“I think he has what it takes,” she said at a Galilee conference. “You can never know in an election. No one thought Yair Lapid would get 19 seats (in the 2013 elections).” She stressed however that “what is important to us is that there is a strong right-wing bloc.”
Shaked said her party would seek control of the Justice Ministry in a new coalition.
Jewish Home and the Likud are said to have signed a “surplus votes” agreement — to ensure that no votes cast for the two parties would be lost when the Knesset seats are allocated after elections under Israel’s system of pure proportional representation.
Lapid and Livni were sacked as finance minister and justice minister, respectively, on Tuesday, moments before Netanyahu announced that he would move to dissolve the Knesset and go to elections.
On Wednesday, the Knesset voted to dissolve itself and party leaders set new elections for March 17.
Netanyahu alleged that he was forced to end the coalition because Lapid and Livni had attempted a “putsch.” This was denied by both ministers. Lapid said Netanyahu’s allegation was “an absurdity.The question came from Mohammed Yousuf, who was being asked how he might play the young leg-spinner who had been called up as cover during Australia ’s Test series against Pakistan in late-2009. But Yousuf had never heard of Smith. And Smith, ultimately, never played.
Australia’s captain Ricky Ponting enthused about Smith’s potential and exuberance, while confessing that no, he’d never actually faced him. If he had, it might have been ugly. At the time of his first international call-up, Smith had a first-class bowling average of 72.
You know that bit in Back to the Future when Doc Brown asks Marty McFly who the president is in 1985, and Marty tells him it’s Ronald Reagan? “The actor?” Doc Brown retorts, a look of pure incredulity on his face.
Well, anybody who saw Steve Smith in 2009 would get a pretty tasty shock if they could peer five years into the future and see where he is now. Smith is Australia’s Test captain, and against England on Friday morning, in the absence of the suspended George Bailey, he will become Australia’s 22nd one-day international captain. If Michael Clarke’s back injury fails to clear up, there is even a possibility that he will be Australia’s captain for this summer’s Ashes.
More than that, Smith could persuasively claim to be the world’s greatest batsman on current form. Since the start of 2014, he averages a Bradman-esque 83 in Test cricket, second only to Kumar Sangakkara, who has played more matches. Across his whole career, he averages more than Ricky Ponting, Steve Waugh, Allan Border or indeed any other Australian batsman of the modern era.
Smith is only 25. And as such, he also suddenly represents the fragile future of Australian cricket. In a country already looking beyond the Clarke era, Smith is poised to become Australia’s first captain from the post-Twenty20, post-IPL, post-DRS era. This is a seminal moment, and Smith is at its heart.
Steve Smith is fourth in the ICC Test rankings
Yet there is a small chance that if you know Smith at all, your memory of him is somewhat at odds with this. The first impression is always the strongest, and for many English fans it was the sight of Smith during the 2010-11 Ashes, wafting and hewing outside the off-stump, serving up a healthy diet of leg-spinning half-trackers, generally looking like a hamster amongst men. He claimed his role in the team was to raise spirits by telling jokes. Everybody laughed. It was pretty funny.
Even the three Ashes centuries he later scored later were overshadowed by the feats of others. To the unenlightened, Smith remains a bit of an ugly slasher, a cricketing Freddie Krueger. His ascent from scrapheap to pantheon has been a thing of astonishment. And a potential Test captain? “If you had asked me two years ago, I would have said absolutely not,” Ponting said recently.
Which is unfair if somewhat understandable. At the outset of his international career, Smith did not fit the classical mould of an Australian batting great, let alone an Australian captain. He was 5ft 9in and had a reputation for shyness. He jumped around the crease like a frightened owl. He was 20, and looked younger. He was the butt of frequent jokes on social media. Clarke even took to Twitter to try and find him a date for the Allan Border Medal ceremony.
His entire career can thus be interpreted as a struggle to be taken seriously. When he led New South Wales out in the Sheffield Shield final, the stadium announcer called him “Steve O’Keefe”. This was less than a year ago. Even as he approached the pinnacle of the game, Smith was everybody’s gawky younger cousin: an also-ran, a missing Pointless answer, the kid along for the ride.
One DeLorean ride later, all that could be about to change.
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When he first arrived in the Australian side, there were whispers that Smith could be the next Shane Warne. Again: unfair but understandable. Smith was a leg-spin bowler and a brilliant fielder, blonde, slightly stocky and with a similar action. The comparison was embellished by Warne himself, who took Smith under his wing and declared his genius to anyone who would listen. “I think he has got that X-Factor about him,” he wrote in this newspaper in 2010. “He could be something pretty special.”
And Warne was right, although perhaps not in the way he intended. See, the worst-kept secret in cricket was that Smith was not a bowler at all, but a batsman. An outrageously gifted one, too.
Once, Smith was playing in a game for Sydney club Sutherland when he was bowled a no-ball. The next delivery was a free-hit, and for reasons known only to himself, he decided to take guard left-handed, and belted the ball over square leg for six. It wasn’t a switch hit: like Ronnie O’Sullivan, Smith just decided to play left-handed because he could.
Smith’s call-up in the midst of the 2010-11 Ashes was a desperate dice roll. In three Tests, he looked utterly out of his depth: jittery at the crease, prone to waving outside off-stump with a bat as straight as a Tuscan tower. Smith was jettisoned at the end of that series, and not selected again for another two years.
“I started too soon,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “As a batsman, I played too many shots. I didn't have the patience.”
But even as he retreated to the backwater of state cricket, Australia’s selectors never quite took their eye off him. Partly because of his raw talent, but also because they saw something unquantifiable in him that they liked. Maybe it was the way he argued with Ponting over field placings during an ODI against the West Indies. Not many 20-year-olds do that.
Smith and Ricky Ponting have clashed on the pitch
Or maybe it was his utter devotion to the game. When Australia were staying in Barbados during the World Twenty20 in 2010, most of the squad would spend their spare team relaxing by the pool, heading out to a bar, or going jet-skiing. Not Smith, who would invariably be found in his hotel room, curtains drawn, watching the cricket. As much as he could.
Smith was always a phenomenal learner, and a natural leader. Sutherland made him captain at the age of 19. A couple of years ago, he was one of a handful of young players selected by Cricket Australia to go on a leadership course. He led the Sydney Sixers to victory in the 2011-12 Big Bash, even though he was one of the youngest players in the side. Once, veteran spinner Stuart MacGill complained at being told to field at fine leg. “Look mate, I’m the captain, you do what I say,” Smith scolded him. “Now f--- off and get down there.”
With the bat, he focused. “Two years ago, I decided that I wasn’t going to bowl as much, to start work on my batting,” he explained on Thursday. “I thought that was the best way to get back into this Australian side, and I think that decision has helped me. I think I’ve been getting better every day the last 18 months, and hopefully there’s still a lot of improvement left in me.”
Smith immersed himself in batting. He cut out some of the tics and twitches that were unbalancing him at the crease. At the start of 2013, he was recalled for the tour of India. Initially picked as the 17th man, Smith got his chance when Usman Khawaja forgot to do his homework. Australia lost that series 4-0, but Smith was one of the few to emerge with some sort of credit. He has not missed a Test for Australia since.
English conditions and Ashes cricket would surely provide a stiffer test. But although he scored his maiden Test century at The Oval – going from 94 to 100 with a six – it was his defence that drew admiring looks. Smith’s issue had always been leaving the ball, but against England during that elongated double-series, it was exemplary. Smith, a young cricketer who had gone a long way in a hurry, was finally learning the virtue of patience.
Smith takes on the England attack
There is still a hint of a frailty outside Smith’s off stump, but it has been curbed by sheer discipline. He is strong off the stumps, and particularly deft at glancing straight balls past the wicket-keeper for four. That forces bowlers to push the ball wider of the stumps, into the arc of his front-foot slap through cover.
He is a brilliant player of spin, a legacy of childhood hours spent playing in the backyard with a soft, spongy ball that would spin wickedly off the patio slabs. In one-day cricket, he is an ideal middle-order player, adept at picking runs off the spinners and busy enough at the crease to pick gaps and give himself plenty of scoring options.
By the end of the 5-0 whitewash, Smith was a regular in the Australian side. It was a development that few could had predicted. Three young batsmen were introduced to the side in that 2010-11 series: Smith, Phillip Hughes, Usman Khawaja. You would have got pretty long odds on Smith being the one who made it.
The most recent series against India proved to be his crowning glory. Thrust into the captaincy in the absence of Clarke, Smith destroyed the Indian attack, breaking the record for the most runs ever scored in a four-Test series. Along the way, he reached 2,000 Test runs, at a faster rate than Clarke, Ponting or Border. As he approaches his 30th Test, these are the names that we should probably be comparing him to.
Being the Australian cricket captain is more than a job. It is an office. Its bearers face a level of scrutiny that few athletes in Britain would recognise. And yet unlike his predecessor, Smith is showing remarkably little taste for the limelight. On a weekend off, you are as likely to see him enjoying a quiet schooner in his local pub, the Clovelly Hotel, or in the public enclosure at Royal Randwick keeping taps on one of the four racehorses he co-owns.
Shy, polite, diffident, with a strong work ethic and a dislike of the flash life: is it just me, or is there something distinctly un-Australian about Steven Peter Devereux Smith? Even his name gives it away.
You might say he could be English. And you would be more right than you bargained for.
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Steve Smith could have played for England but chose not to, and the man we all have to blame for that is Tony Ward. Ward is a friend of the Smith family who lives in Sevenoaks in Kent, and one day in spring 2007 he answered his front door to see Smith standing there. After leaving school at 17 before finishing his final exams, Smith flew to England, to Cheshire, to play league cricket. Within days, he realised he had made a terrible mistake. He was homesick. Ward took him in and talked him through his options.
Option one: see out the season with Cheshire. Option two: go home. Option three: stay with him in Kent, and see if he could get a game. Smith chose option three. Ward put him in touch with a local club called Sevenoaks Vine, where Paul Downton is still a member.
As they already had an overseas pro in place, Smith had to work his way up from the second team. In one of his first games, he came in at No 3 and scored 187. He quickly came to the attention of Kent, but it was Surrey who stole in, putting him in the Second XI for a few games and offering him a full-time contract.
Here Smith had a choice to make. With an English mother and Australian father, he could have chosen to play for England. With no guaranteed future back in Australia, the relatively comfortable life of a county cricketer held a certain appeal. “He was really in two minds as to whether he should become English or not,” Ward said in an interview with The Independent. “I actually had to tell him and give him the confidence to believe he could get the Baggy Green.”
So thanks to Ward, it is the Baggy Green rather than the Baggy Blue cap that Smith will wear at Hobart on Friday. And there is a certain irony to that. Smith’s life may have changed irredeemably in the last 18 months. He may no longer be able to blend unnoticed into the crowd. But for English cricket, he will always be the one that slipped away.
Either way, you do not have to be Australian to grasp Smith’s gifts or appreciate his story. He is cricket’s accidental hero, a happy confluence of talent, hard work and opportunity, in that order. Smith may have been brought into the side to tell jokes. It is now time to start taking him very seriously indeed.Donald Trump issued a statement regarding the Orlando terrorist attack and called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the presidential race if she cannot say “the two words ‘Radical Islam.'”
In a press release from the campaign on Sunday, Trump said that “our nation was attacked by a radical Islamic terrorist. It was the worst terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11, and the second of its kind in 6 months. My deepest sympathy and support goes out to the victims, the wounded, and their families.” (RELATED: FBI: Suspect Bragged About Ties To ‘Terrorist Organizations’)
“In his remarks today, President Obama disgracefully refused to even say the words ‘Radical Islam’. For that reason alone, he should step down,” Trump reiterated from an earlier tweet. “If Hillary Clinton, after this attack, still cannot say the two words ‘Radical Islam’ she should get out of this race for the Presidency,” he added. (RELATED: Trump Calls On Obama To Resign For Not Calling Orlando Attack ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ [VIDEO])
“If we do not get tough and smart real fast, we are not going to have a country anymore,” Trump argued. “Because our leaders are weak, I said this was going to happen – and it is only going to get worse. I am trying to save lives and prevent the next terrorist attack. We can’t afford to be politically correct anymore.”
“The terrorist, Omar Mir Saddique Mateen, is the son of an immigrant from Afghanistan who openly published his support for the Afghanistani Taliban and even tried to run for President of Afghanistan. According to Pew, 99% of people in Afghanistan support oppressive Sharia Law,” Trump said. (RELATED: Islamic State Claims Responsibility For Orlando Terror Attack)
“We admit more than 100,000 lifetime migrants from the Middle East each year. Since 9/11, hundreds of migrants and their children have been implicated in terrorism in the United States,” Trump continued.
“Hillary Clinton wants to dramatically increase admissions from the Middle East, bringing in many hundreds of thousands during a first term – and we will have no way to screen them, pay for them, or prevent the second generation from radicalizing,” Trump warned. (RELATED: CNN Warns Of ‘Surge’ Of ISIS Attacks In America During Ramadan [VIDEO])
“We need to protect all Americans, of all backgrounds and all beliefs, from Radical Islamic Terrorism – which has no place in an open and tolerant society. Radical Islam advocates hate for women, gays, Jews, Christians and all Americans. I am going to be a President for all Americans, and I am going to protect and defend all Americans,” Trump said. “We are going to make America safe again and great again for everyone.”
On Monday, Trump is scheduled to speak at New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm’s College about the terrorist attack, immigration, and national security.
Follow Steve on Twitter and FacebookUS shipping giant conspired with internet pharmacies to ship illegal sedatives and painkillers, allege prosecutors
A trial began on Monday 13 June over drug trafficking charges against FedEx, according to US-based ABC News and Associated Press.
FedEx knew that drugs in millions of packages it delivered over a decade were illegally prescribed, but shipped them anyway because it did not want to lose millions of dollars in revenue to rival United Parcel Service (UPS), Assistant US Attorney John Hemann said during his opening statement.
“They faced a choice, and the choice is to stop or go, and time and time again, they went,” Hemann said at the trial in San Francisco.
The government plans to rely on FedEx’s emails to make its case.
FedEx has denied the charges and says it only shipped what it believed were legal drugs from pharmacies licensed by states and registered with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
In her opening statement, FedEx attorney Cristina Arguedas said the company helped investigators crack down on the two pharmacies that prosecutors say were involved in the scheme and that it was never told by the DEA not to ship for a customer.
However, FedEx at one point had been told by the DEA that one of the pharmacies had shipped drugs to a woman who committed suicide.
Arguedas argued that a DEA agent who emailed FedEx in 2006 about the suicide did not want the company to do anything, citing an ongoing investigation of the business.
UPS paid $40 million in 2013 to resolve similar allegations that arose from a long-term government crackdown on internet pharmacies that ship drugs to customers without valid prescriptions.
Prosecutors will argue that in the early 2000s, FedEx began conspiring with two internet pharmacy organisations to ship powerful sleep aids, sedatives, painkillers and other drugs to customers who had not been physically examined by a doctor.
The crux of the government’s case is that FedEx knew the drugs were illegal and headed for dealers and addicts but delivered them anyway.
Company drivers expressed safety concerns that FedEx trucks |
for change.
While heralding the list as an important step forward, Pierre Moscovici, European commissioner for tax, described it as an "insufficient response to the scale of tax evasion worldwide."
Aid agency Oxfam, meanwhile, went a step further, hitting out at the EU for failing to include its own member states on the list.
In a report published ahead of Tuesday's announcement, entitled "Blacklist or Whitewash," Oxfam listed four EU countries it believes would have been on the list had they been assessed under the EU's own criteria — Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Ireland.
Read more: Oxfam urges EU action on 'tax havens'
Aurore Chardonnet, Oxfam's EU policy advisor on inequality and tax, told DW: "This final EU blacklist is a bit disappointing. There are only 17 countries on the list and they are mostly tiny counties or even developing countries."
She lamented that several EU countries considered by Oxfam as "major tax havens" only ended up on the grey list. "It's a bit hard to ask countries to reform outside of the EU when you aren't even able to get your own house in order," she added.Ten years ago when Apple launched the first iPhone, the stock was at $22, and Wall Street considered it overvalued compared to Microsoft. Since then, Apple is up 540% and Microsoft is up 160%. Raymond Meyers says Wall Street made the wrong call on Apple 10 years ago, and it’s making the same mistake with Tesla now.
Raymond has consistently outperformed 75% of U.S. equity mutual fund managers for the last 10, 5, 3, and 1 year periods, in part, by ignoring Wall Street’s numerous recommendations to sell Apple. So far this year he is up over 27%, almost twice the S&P 500’s return and Tesla is now his second largest position.
Ken Kam: Ray, when did you start buying Tesla?
Raymond Meyers: I started buying Tesla in 2012, when it was trading at about $24. There was a lot being said and written at that time about Elon Musk. Elon Musk is as much the face of Tesla as Steve Jobs was the face of Apple. Very few CEOs are as recognizable or as flamboyant.
It wasn't hard to find articles singing his praises, questioning his motivations, and calling him a weirdo. There are still those who say that without federal tax subsidies all of his environmental altruism wouldn't pay the bills.
My soon-to-be son-in-law at the time suggested I buy some, but I wasn't convinced. The company was all about Mr. Musk in the media and it was hard to find real stuff about the company or its products.
Kam: So what made you decide to buy the stock?
Meyers: During a family shopping trip to a mall we saw a Tesla Model S displayed in a showroom. Looking at that car was the decision point to buy stock in the company.
The attention to detail was incredible. Sure, it was made as pretty as possible for display, but it was obvious at first glance that there were no flaws.
Every car has gaps and overlaps and minor imperfections that you don't really notice, because every car has them. The Tesla did not. I've looked at several Teslas since and the same quality was obvious in all of them. I've always believed that quality – fit and finish – sells. Sales means profits. Profits ultimately drive stock prices.
Kam: What were the Wall Street analysts saying at the time?
Meyers: The analysts' reports were eerily similar to reading reports on Apple, Inc. The analysts all agreed that Tesla’s cars (new iPhones) were too expensive and there was no way Tesla (Apple) could satisfy the demand. Sometimes too expensive and no way to meet demand in the same sentence.
Kam: Is there anything in the news that makes you think about selling your position in Tesla?
Meyers: This recent article in The Street claims the stock is going to break out soon. That makes me a little nervous, but not too bad. I still believe that if Tesla can maintain the same attention to detail and build a high quality car, there will be a market for it. There will be solid profit, and the stock price will continue to be strong.
My Take: You can’t beat Wall Street by betting on whether Tesla will beat the Street’s expectations each quarter. Wall Street will always have better access to company management than you, so they will always be first in line when news is disseminated.
But even though individual investors are not the first to get the news, there are those among us who have the best judgment to determine what the news means.
These judgment calls don’t enable them to make quick scores by buying or selling milliseconds before everyone else. Instead, they make money, in part, by buying great stocks when Wall Street sells them off.
Raymond’s fund is not a mutual fund. It is an investment option for clients of our separately managed account program. Here is his track record. For information about investing with Raymond, click here.For all the buzz that Bitcoin has been getting recently, the crypto currency came up sparsely at the 2014 International CES. However, where the topic did emerge, there were some very exciting developments. Before we dive into one of the more interesting Bitcoin-based exhibits, you should probably know a little bit about Bitcoin. Here is an article and explainer video we posted some time back: What is Bitcoin, and How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?
OK, on to CES. One of the more interesting Bitcoin exhibits we saw was that of KryptoKit. One of the largest problems with Bitcoin – and one of the largest barriers for skeptics – lies in the structure and utility of the various wallet systems/software. They are often clunky, and making or receiving a payment often takes an awful lot of copying and pasting. No more.
KryptoKit solves the Bitcoin wallet problem by building it right into Google Chrome with their free browser extension. The result prompted the creators to claim, “It’s [KryptoKit] the easiest and fastest wallet to set up, and the easiest and fastest way to make Bitcoin payments.” What’s more, the extension is incredibly secure:
With KryptoKit, none of your private keys or passwords are sent to any servers; everything is stored client-side on your computer. Therefore, KryptoKit doesn’t know or store any of your passwords or keys, and we don’t have access to your bitcoins.
The launch of KryptoKit is a very exciting development in the Bitcoin world. It will be interesting to see its effect of the number of Bitcoin users. Anyhow, we stopped by the KryptoKit booth at CES and learned a little more about the browser extension:In the latest in our series of interview with experts on electronic cigarettes and/or tobacco harm reduction, Paul Bergen interviews Clive Bates, former director of Action on Smoking and Health.
Clive Bates has had a varied career in the private, public and not-profit sectors. He was the Director of London-based campaigning organisation Action on Smoking and Health from 1997 to 2003. He no longer works professionally in the public health field and specialises in energy and the environment. He has no conflicting interests or affiliations in health organisations, pharmaceutical companies or the tobacco industry, but continues to take a personal interest in public health policy. In this interview, he is speaking strictly in a personal capacity and not for his employers past or present.
Paul: In tobacco-related circles you are perhaps best known for a 2003 document you were first author on while with ASH-UK, European Union Policy on Smokeless Tobacco, which essentially argued for modifying the ban on smokeless tobacco so as to provide a safer nicotine source than cigarettes for smokers. Now, ten years later, ASH seems to teeter between arguing for or against safer alternatives whether snus or e-cigarettes. At the time you were with ASH did you have support within the organization when you were developing that paper or were they just putting up with you?
Clive Bates is the former director of UK anti-smoking charity Action on Smoking and Health.
Clive: The idea of ‘harm reduction’ is always controversial – whether it is needle exchanges for intravenous drug users, contraception for teenagers, or even cycle helmets. There are people who think that promoting anything other than quitting smoking completely is somehow an unacceptable compromise. But this takes no account of real human behaviour and that fact that what matters is what people actually do, not what you want them to do.
There was support within the organization because we argued the case properly and used the best evidence we had at the time, and it is even clearer now. You’ll notice that document is co-authored with some of the leading academics in this field and so the case has both weight of evidence and some authority. There were doubtless some in and around the public health field who were uncomfortable. But then, as now, they just could never make a convincing argument, so they had to put up with me and the others like me who see this issue more pragmatically. ASH remains pretty reasonable on all this if you listen carefully to what they say. The problem lies with the big health charities and European alliances, which just seem to take positions that appeal to their instincts and what they think will be popular.
Paul: There have been a few examples of people who started as active in anti-smoking or clean air initiatives but ended up promoting alternatives for smokers (for instance Michael Siegel, Bill Godshall or David Sweanor) but yours is the only case I know of where an active support of harm reduction originated from within an anti-smoking organization. When you started with ASH, were you already inclined toward harm reduction or did that position evolve over time?
Clive: I was fortunate enough to be the Director of ASH, and it is easier to influence the position of an organization if you are in charge! My views definitely evolved as I came to understand the underlying science better.
My first foray into this arena was looking into ‘low tar’ cigarettes, and whether they really were reducing health risks (nb. The answer is definitely ‘no’). That Low Tar report is still available and mixes science and some of the most tobacco industry documents to paint a picture of companies deliberately and cynically engineering false reassurance in response to the health concerns that were rising at the time. But the interesting underlying scientific premise is that smokers smoke to meet their nicotine needs (so-called nicotine titration) and adjust their behaviour to compensate for, say, vent holes in the filter, in a way that the official cigarette tar and nicotine testing machines do not.
I campaigned to have the tar and nicotine numbers removed from packs in the 2001 tobacco directive because they sent a misleading signal, but alas to no avail. The directive did at least clamp down on branding words like ‘mild’ and ‘low’ (article 7). But once you understand nicotine-seeking as the prime driver of smoking behaviour and that is the tar particles and hot gases in the smoke that are the main causes of disease, you are soon drawn into harm reduction and the idea of clean or cleaner ways of nicotine delivery. I had brilliant teachers on all of this in Martin Jarvis and Ann McNeill. They were part of a London-based group of scientists inspired by the work of the late, great Mike Russell, who pioneered the early understanding of the pharmacology and psychology of nicotine dependence.
Paul: Though one would think that for any group working with tobacco and health that promoting safer alternatives (such as snus or e-cigarettes) should be a logical step this just does not seem to happen. Is there something about the culture of these organizations that make change from within difficult?
I’m incredibly frustrated by some of the health groups. They’ve taken a cavalier attitude to the evidence and ethics of harm reduction, and seem to show no empathy or concern for the people they are supposedly trying to help. It is as if they value their anti-tobacco industry credentials more than doing something about cancer, lung and heart disease. If you swear a fight to the death with Big Tobacco, you will be treated kindly by politicians, the media, funders and the public. But if you care about health, and I mean really care, there are some tougher choices and trade-offs to make about reducing the harm caused by tobacco.
I also think there are some uneasy conflicts too: the European Commission provides funding to some of the Brussels based health lobbyists; Big Pharma is involved to some extent and has mixed motives; and some of the health charities have a funding and research philosophy that is ideological and narrow-minded rather than a genuine scientific quest. There is certainly a lot of group think and lack of internal critical challenge within these groups. Sad to say, I don’t think they even recognize that as a weakness.
Paul: In your most recent writing on tobacco, I see that you reiterate much of what you said ten years ago with the benefit of the evidence of the time since, but you restrict your comments to snus as an alternative. What are your feelings about e-cigarettes as alternatives and in comparison to snus.
Clive: I think the same arguments apply to e-cigarettes, vapour devices, NRT, non-combustible tobacco. They are all vastly less hazardous as a way of consuming nicotine and, unlike smoking, have negligible risks or risks that are not out of line with other lifestyle risks we routinely accept. Which do I prefer? Whichever works for each smoker.
My concern is not whether these alternatives are dangerous – they aren’t. My concern is whether they can quickly gain market share from cigarettes. The challenge from a health point of view is to get as many smokers, especially those over 40 years old and looking like they may be smoking for life, to switch. So I think we need a broad range of alternatives available to suit individual tastes and motivations.
This is an area where market forces could drive strong pro-health innovation as makers of these products seek to win market share from smoking. There will be an instinct to regulate, and in doing so to be excessively restrictive – but we must be so careful. Too much caution or excessive regulation of these alternatives would throttle the market and would in effect amount to protective regulation for the cigarette market. So my message to those health interests who want very strict regulation of new nicotine products is: “beware what you wish for, because if you get what you want, you will be doing the dirty work of the cigarette vendors for them”.
Paul: In the last decade we have seen a strong popular acceptance of e-cigarettes combined with fairly positive media coverage along with the growth of a healthy and competitive e-cigarette industry along with responsible oversight agencies such as ECITA. Both tobacco and pharmaceutical companies have invested heavily in developing and promoting safer alternatives (inhalers and various smokeless variations). In your older writing you supported greater regulation of nicotine alternatives – would you still take that position or do you think that recent developments have provided a good enough solution?
Clive: Actually, I favoured regulation because I thought it was a choice between these products being regulated or being banned, and that some sort of regulatory framework would be needed to win support from legislators and broader public acceptability. I still think that may be the case, and there will be some sort of move to regulate these products. The question is what sort of regulation? One of the papers I am most proud of was written jointly with Ann McNeill and Jonathan Foulds and was a robust attack on the excessive regulation of NRT at the time [abstract, full text].
The basic flaw was that the regulators were assuming that users of NRT would otherwise be abstinent, whereas in the real world they would be more likely to continue smoking. So, for example, it was absurd to warn pregnant women not to use NRT products, because they would only be using it to stop smoking. Once you see the comparator as smoking rather than not using nicotine at all, the purpose of regulation looks very different. So I would look for regulation that increases uptake of alternatives by building confidence in the products.
Good regulation could include:
safety (it doesn’t burn or blind the user)
efficacy (it does deliver a satisfying dose of nicotine)
health claims (the maker can legitimately say it is much safer than smoking)
marketing (it can be promoted as an alternative to smoking)
branding (it can be made attractive to smokers)
approved medical advice (doctors recommend it for die-hard older smokers)
tax (advantageous tax treatment relative to cigarettes)
availability (it can be sold anywhere cigarettes are sold).
There is something appealing about an unregulated market and letting market forces rip with a ‘buyer beware’ philosophy to consumer protection. I respect that view, but I just think that is unlikely to be a runner and is prone to bad news stories, rumours or propaganda draining away confidence in the alternative products.
Paul: It seems as though in the last few years snus has also fared slightly better in press coverage. However despite the indisputable evidence that these alternatives are indeed safer than smoking, we seem to have more extremist rhetoric from the anti-smoking agencies and an even more prohibitionist attitude from most health and political (FCTC, WHO) groups – is there any hope that safer nicotine alternatives will persist and perhaps one day dominate?
Clive: It is hugely frustrating to see so many people whose job is supposedly to protect health going to work and doing exactly the opposite. Prohibitionist rhetoric and practice has never served society well in practice. The WHO Tobacco Free Initiative continues to disappoint and ignore the real-world needs of smokers. Its own advisory committee actually has quite sensible things to say on all this, but these have been ignored or quoted highly selectively in recent WHO papers – see FCTC COP5 papers 12 & 13.
However, I am still optimistic. The truth is the truth, and it will out. Social media make a powerful vector for the truth, challenging the handed-down wisdom of these authorities whilst sharing knowledge and building confidence of smokers below the radar of most health professionals. There are some great centres of unbiased advice now – I particularly like Brad Rodu’s Tobacco Truth, Mike Siegal’s Rest of the story, Carl Phillip’s E-Pology and Anti-THR Lies blog, and some of the forums. These are now creating a kind of pro-health insurgency against the dumb harmful orthodoxy of the big health interests.
Paul: Did working in Sudan alter your perspective on tobacco control in respect to populations where smoking is really the least of their worries? Isn’t it curious that when we are faced with global warming, overpopulation, environmental degradation, that nicotine use continues to capture so much public and political attention?
Clive: Work in Sudan was quite an experience, and there are certainly many problems to face. The other problems mentioned are truly huge, but in terms of global premature death toll, including in developing countries, tobacco is still a world class killer. In some ways, smoking is even worse for those enduring extreme poverty because it compromises their ability to work and to support themselves, and eats into their already inadequate income. Given the harm caused, I don’t think too much political attention is paid to nicotine. In fact, I wish nicotine would attract more political attention, but by that I mean more critical attention to the science of risk and to the ethics of harm reduction. There is no reason why we shouldn’t do more to tackle the burden of disease caused by smoking while taking on the challenges of climate change, food security, poverty and so on. They are not alternatives. Unlike these other great problems, there are some straightforward solutions for smokers: quit if you can; if you can’t quit or don’t want to, switch to a much less risky way of taking nicotine; if you don’t want to do that, you do at least know that viable alternatives are there for you and you are responsible for your choice. Take away the alternatives, and you just have a ‘quit or die’ proposition to dealing with nicotine addiction.
Paul: I see that your blog is back up and running after being inactive for a few years. Can we expect regular commentary on tobacco again?
Clive: I’m not sure – it depends what I do next in my career. I love blogging but my head is mostly filled with thoughts about environment, energy and climate change these days and it’s hard to stay on top of developments in the tobacco field. I put together a blog article on snus out of despair when I heard where things were heading with the new EU tobacco products directive. Many of the health groups in Europe have just been following the line of least resistance with no justification or evidence to support the positions they have taken (you can read my challenge to them in the comments). Even though I don’t work in that field, I have at least taken the trouble to set out a case based on evidence and argument. These issues should be their main concern, yet they have not set out a reasoned argument for what they are pushing for. A Swedish Member of the European Parliament, Christian Engström, has had enough and has written a very good open letter to the anti-snus lobby inviting them to make their case. Let’s see if they do.
Have a question or comment? Please let us know in the comments below.Depends on current states what missions you should except.Some give no influence and some can hurt influence. Not directly but indirectly from what I can tell.If you have a particular scenario or questions I can try swap knowledge with you.Try this. Sit in bulletin board and accept the missions you want that need a USS.Take as many as your cargo hold will carry or more if they are spawning missions like mad.Leave station and supercruise. When in supercruise throttle down to zero. Do it next to the station.Sit and wait with navigation panel open.A USS or Weak/Strong Signal will appear every 1 or 2 minutes max. Usualy only have to wait 30 secs to a min.Turn and face it while still at zero throttle and jump into the instance. EasyRinse and repeat.I still enter strong signals and exit them immediatly. It gets rid of the signal so in theory speed up the next signal to arrive.Just remember to sit idle at zero throttle when in supercruise and use nav panel or you will miss them.If you have a black market in your station you'll chuckle at the ease.It's not a credit grinder but will help your influence big time.Same as trade runs. I think this is the biggest boost of all, along with black market.Try trading with another anarchy faction in the neighbour system.There are clues in your missions as which factions are on your side.(They'll be anarchic/unfettered too).Doing missons and trading with them can hurt the faction your trying to overcome and I think if your 2nd faction you get the influence it looses.IT’S a sad day for lovers of naughty emojis – as Apple have decided to make their peach symbol a bit less fruity.
The new update of iOS, which is about to launch, has various redesigned emojis as well as some new ones.
But the peach emoji now looks less like a bottom and more like and actual peach.
And there are a lot of people out there who are not happy.
The hashtags RIPBootyPeach and RIPpeach emoji are trending as user mourn the passing of the symbol that many used in flirty texts.
One disappointed user tweeted: “RIP to the old peach emoji. Thank you for getting me A LOT of sex. You will be missed when I describe my butt to potential suitors xoxo
Alix tweeted: “noooooo they're changing the peach emoji.”
5 The new symbol is not quite as flirty
In the absence of the booty peach, we can expect text flirting by text to become a lot less subtle - with aubergines, bananas and even the filthy finger symbols becoming the rude emojis of choice.
To make up for this monumental loss, caused the the 10.2 update, Apple have added a facepalm symbol, a shrugging man, bacon and CLOWNS – which may not be the wisest addition in the midst of the Killer Clown Craze.
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It’s not the only update that had upset emoji lovers recently.
Apple recently swapped the gun emoji for a water pistol a bid to stop the glamorisation of firearms, but many were outraged.
emojipedia 5 New Emoji's released for iOS 10.2 including the clowns, squids and bacon.
emojipedia 5 The facepalm emojis are among the new symbolsJan 9, 2017
Automakers Pledge Investments At Detroit Auto Show
Big news from Detroit’s Auto Show—auto manufacturers announced major investments in America’s auto industry.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced it plans to invest $1 billion in US modernizing 2 plants in the US Midwest.It expects this will create 2,000 new jobs.
Chrysler also says it may relocate a Ram track factory from Mexico to Michigan.
Chryslers CEO Sergio Marchionne says this has “been in the works for a long period of time”, implying it had nothing to do with President Elect Donald Trump’s recent shadow-casting over the automobile industry. Nor to do with Trump’s prospective tariff on imports from Mexico.
However, he admits that their Mexican factories would not be economical, were it not for the US market.
If the US market were not to be there, the reasons for [Mexican factories] are on the line.
This comes on the heels of Ford’s announcement of a $700 million upgrade in its Flat Rock, Michigan assembly plant and an additional $700 million for its Louisville, Kentucky plant.
Other Automakers Stepping Up
German automaker Daimler AG, known for its Mercedes-Benz brand, said on Sunday that they planned to invest $1.3 billion in their Alabama SUV plant, according to CEO Dieter Zetsche. Toyota Motor Corp’s CEO Jim Lentz announced plans to invest $10 billion in the US over the next 5 years, and an additional $10 billion over the next 5 years—that’s $20 billion dollars in new investment. Honda announced it will be making its new hybrid vehicle in America, although hasn’t released financial details. Honda also plans to invest in its Georgia transmission plan. Again, no firm numbers.
This is becoming a pattern—perhaps the cycle of offshoring that’s cost America 10 million jobs is finally breaking.FX has confirmed that the Emmy-winning series Fargo will return to Alberta to shoot its third season.
A spokeswoman from the network confirmed Tuesday that production of the third season, which will star Ewan McGregor and Carrie Coon, will again be based in Calgary. Cameras are expected to start rolling in November. Fargo is produced by FX, MGM and Calgary’s Nomadic Pictures.
“We’ve had a great production experience up there for both seasons and have trained our crew and our departments to make the show Fargo and certainly our goal is to come back and do it again,” creator Noah Hawley told the Herald back in December.
Still, Tuesday was the first time FX confirmed Alberta as a location. MGM and the producers had been in talks with the Alberta government for months about the third season.
Seasons 1 and 2 of the Emmy-winning series were shot in Fort Macleod, High River, Didsbury and various parts of Calgary.
Very loosely based on the 1996 Coen brothers classic of the same name, the first season starred Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman and Colin Hanks and picked up three Emmy Awards. Season 2, which took place in 1979, starred Ted Danson, Patrick Wilson and Kirsten Dunst.
Season 3 is expected to take place in 2006 and star McGregor in the dual role of brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy.
“Emmit Stussy is the Parking Lot King of Minnesota,” FX said in a statement. “A handsome, self-made, real estate mogul and family man, Emmit sees himself as an American success story. His slightly younger brother, Ray Stussy, on the other hand is more of a cautionary tale. Balding, pot-bellied, Ray is the kind of guy who peaked in high school. Now a parole officer, Ray has a huge chip on his shoulder about the hand he’s been dealt, and he blames his brother, Emmit, for his misfortunes.”
FX also confirmed on Tuesday that actress Carrie Coon, currently starring in HBO’s sci-fi drama The Leftovers, will star as a police chief named Gloria Burgle. The news was first report on TV Line, where the character is described as “a practical woman who grabs the fire extinguisher when the bacon catches fire and everyone else panics. Gloria is the chief of the Eden Valley police, and a newly divorced mother, who is struggling to understand this new world around her where people connect more intimately with their phones than the people right in front of them.”
In December, Hawley has said that the third season would deal with our “selfie-oriented culture.”
“Our first year was set in 2006 but we didn’t really deal with what it was like to be in that region in a more contemporary world and I like the idea that we’re now living in a very selfie-oriented culture where people photograph what they’re eating and put it up for other people to see,” he said. “It feels like a social dynamic that is very antithetical to the sort of Lutheran pragmatism of the region. I like the idea of setting these very pragmatic and humble people against a culture of narcissism and see what that generates story-wise.”2014 WWE pay-per-view event
Elimination Chamber (2014) (known as No Escape (2014) in Germany[note 1]) was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by WWE. The fifth Elimination Chamber event took place on February 23, 2014, at the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Eight matches, including the pre-show, took place at the event. In the Elimination Chamber match main event for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, Randy Orton retained his title against John Cena, Daniel Bryan, Christian, Cesaro and Sheamus.
The event had 183,000 buys, down from previous year's 213,000 buys.[1][unreliable source] It was the final WWE pay-per-view event before the launch of the WWE Network, which launched the next night and would significantly erode the pay-per-view buyrates.
Storylines [ edit ]
The card consisted of eight matches, including one on the preshow, that resulted from scripted storylines, where wrestlers portrayed villains, heroes, or less distinguishable characters in scripted events that built tension and culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches, with results predetermined by WWE's writers.[2][3] Storylines between the characters played out on WWE's primary television programs, Raw and SmackDown.
The main event was the Elimination Chamber match, where Randy Orton defended the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against five wrestlers after retaining it at the Royal Rumble from John Cena. The night after the Rumble on Raw, Daniel Bryan confronted The Authority for keeping him out of the Rumble match. Stephanie McMahon claimed they didn't want to overwork him with two matches in a night, but Bryan concluded they disliked him due to his popularity. He demanded Triple H put him in the Elimination Chamber title match. Triple H sent in The Shield to attack Bryan, but Cena and Sheamus saved him. This set up an Elimination Chamber qualifying match between those three and The Shield. During the match, The Wyatt Family attacked Cena, giving his team a disqualification win, meaning Cena, Sheamus, and Bryan all qualified for the Chamber match. On the January 31 SmackDown, Cesaro defeated Dolph Ziggler to qualify, and his partner Jack Swagger lost his qualifier to a returning Christian. On the February 3 edition of Raw, Stephanie McMahon would mandate Randy Orton to compete in a Elimination Chamber Gauntlet where he must face each of his Chamber opponents in single matches. He was defeated by Daniel Bryan that same night, but secured a win by defeating Christian on the February 7 edition of SmackDown. He then was defeated by Cena on the February 10 edition of Raw and by Cesaro on the February 14 episode of SmackDown. His last opponent, Sheamus won by disqualification, as The Shield and The Wyatt Family got involved on the February 17 episode of Raw.
On the January 31 SmackDown, The Shield refused Triple H's request for the group to drop the matter of The Wyatt Family disqualifying them from the Chamber match, so a six-man tag team match between the factions was set up for the pay-per-view.
After Batista's WWE return was announced in December, Alberto Del Rio began saying fans should talk about him instead and vowed to eliminate Batista from the Royal Rumble match. On the January 20 Raw, following a victory over Rey Mysterio, Del Rio was attacked by Batista and hit with his finishing move the Batista Bomb. Del Rio entered the Rumble at number 27 and lasted just under three minutes before Batista, who was the next entrant, eliminated him. On the February 3 Raw, Batista was interrupted and briefly assaulted by Del Rio, however the latter quickly escaped the ring. On the next Raw, after Del Rio defeated Dolph Ziggler, Batista came out and delivered a Batista Bomb to Del Rio through the announce table. Triple H then announced the two would wrestle at the Elimination Chamber pay-per-view.
On the February 13 SmackDown, Jack Swagger defeated Mark Henry, Rey Mysterio, and Kofi Kingston in a Fatal Four-Way match to become the number one contender for the Intercontinental Championship, and would wrestle champion Big E for the title at the pay-per-view.
On WWE.com, it was announced The Usos (Jimmy Uso and Jey Uso) would face WWE Tag Team Champions The New Age Outlaws (Road Dogg and Billy Gunn) for the titles at the pay-per-view. This was made when The Usos asked the Outlaws to fight for the championship for the following weeks. Then, they accepted the challenge.
Former Prime Time Players tag team members Titus O'Neil and Darren Young would wrestle at the pay-per-view. The feud began on the January 31 episode of SmackDown when O'Neil attacked Young after a tag team loss by the Prime Time Players, with O'Neil claiming that Young was "dead weight" and "holding him back".
The Elimination Chamber Kickoff Show saw Cody Rhodes and Goldust squaring off against RybAxel (Ryback and Curtis Axel).
Event [ edit ]
During the pre-show, Cody Rhodes and Goldust faced RybAxel (Ryback and Curtis Axel). Rhodes executed Cross Rhodes on Axel to win the match.
Preliminary matches [ edit ]
The actual pay-per-view opened with Big E defending the Intercontinental Championship against Jack Swagger. In the end, Swagger applied a Patriot Lock on Big E but Big E performed an Enziguiri on Swagger to break the hold and executed a Big Ending on Swagger to retain the title.
Next, The New Age Outlaws (Road Dogg and Billy Gunn) defended the WWE Tag Team Championship against The Usos (Jimmy Uso and Jey Uso). The ending saw Jimmy perform a Superkick on Road Dogg, causing him to fall off the apron. Gunn pinned Jimmy with a roll-up to retain the title.
After that, Titus O'Neil faced Darren Young. O'Neil executed a Clash of the Titus on Young to win the match.
In the fourth match, The Shield (United States Champion Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns) faced The Wyatt Family (Bray Wyatt, Luke Harper and Erick Rowan). During the match, Ambrose fought with Wyatt into the arena stands, taking Ambrose out of the match. Harper and Rowan executed a double Chokeslam through a broadcast table on Rollins. In the climax, Reigns attempted a Spear on Wyatt but Harper stood in the way and received a Spear from Reigns. Wyatt executed Sister Abigail on Reigns to win the match.
Next, AJ Lee defended the WWE Divas Championship against Cameron. Cameron won by disqualification after Tamina Snuka attacked her with a Clothesline, meaning AJ retain the title.
In the penultimate match, Batista faced Alberto Del Rio. The match ended when Del Rio attempted to apply the Cross Armbreaker on Batista but Batista pushed Del Rio into an exposed turnbuckle and executed a Batista Bomb on Del Rio to win the match.
Main event [ edit ]
The main event was the Elimination Chamber match for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. Cesaro entered at #1 whilst Sheamus entered at #2. Daniel Bryan entered at #3, Christian entered at #4, John Cena entered at #5 and Randy Orton entered at #6. Orton locked himself in his pod but Sheamus executed a Brogue Kick into the plexi-glass, breaking the Chamber Pod. Sheamus was eliminated by Christian after a Frog Splash off the top of a chamber pod. Christian was eliminated by Bryan after a Running Knee. Cesaro was eliminated by Cena after submitting to the STF. The Wyatt Family interfered in the match, attacking Bryan and Cena. After Bray Wyatt performed Sister Abigail on Cena, Orton pinned Cena to eliminate him. In the end, Kane, who had assisted with removing The Wyatt Family from the chamber, attacked Bryan and Orton executed an RKO to eliminate Bryan and retain the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.
Aftermath [ edit ]
Batista and Alberto Del Rio faced each other in a rematch with Del Rio prevailing due to Randy Orton distracting Batista. Orton then mentioned the boisterous negative reaction since Batista's return. Batista responded by saying that the WWE Universe has their own voice. Later on, however, Batista addressed the crowd, telling them he did not return to the company to be liked, only to win the championship.
Daniel Bryan confronted Triple H arguing about constantly getting screwed in his title matches ever since SummerSlam and challenged him to a match at WrestleMania XXX, but the latter declined. Later that night, Bryan defeated Kane, and afterwards voiced his opinion to Triple H by stating he should give what the fans want. Bryan challenged Triple H on the March 3 edition of Raw but Triple H still declined. Frustrated, Bryan conjured up the Yes! Movement on the March 10 edition of Raw involving WWE fans which gathered around the ring and forced Triple H to accepting his match with the stipulation that if Bryan defeats Triple H, he will get inserted into the WWE World Heavyweight Championship match. On the March 17 edition of Raw, the stipulation was changed instead it will be the winner advancing in the main event for the title, thus assuring a triple threat |
regarding the event.
Event Description: An intestinal tumor located in the body of Grover ███████, a 52-year-old man from Des Moines, Iowa, is found to contain an entire secondary brain, including medulla, pituitary gland, and part of a spinal cord. DNA from the brain does not match that of Mr. ███████, and is currently believed to belong to a twelve year-old girl who vanished from Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1992.
Date of Occurrence: 04/05/2010
Location: Des Moines, Iowa
Follow-Up Actions Taken: Doctors involved with the surgery amnesticized. Mr. ███████ died following the surgery. Despite several autopsies and examinations, no definitive cause of death has been determined. His cadaver, as well as the brain excised from his stomach, remain in cold storage.
Event Description: $237,981 manifested simultaneously, spread across various countries on flat surfaces at approximately $1.3 per square kilometer. This money changed to a different currency depending on the country it manifested within.
Date of Occurrence: 5/9/2014
Location: World wide.
Follow-Up Actions Taken: None, due to the very obscure nature of the event, and that 87% of all the manifested money was made unusable from external forces.
Event Description: The PA system in a Giant Eagle supermarket announced, "Attention Giant Eagle shoppers: the ritual will now commence," whereupon all individuals within the store stopped what they were doing and hummed an intricate series of notes for approximately five minutes. After another tone, the humming ceased and all affected individuals resumed their business as though nothing had occurred.
Date of Occurrence: 10/10/2014
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Follow-Up Actions Taken: Event would not have come to Foundation attention if not for discovery on security footage during in-store theft investigation. Individuals affected during event have no memory thereof. As such, it has been determined that attempting to identify and interview each person visible on the tape is unfeasible. Videos confiscated, amnestics administered to store staff, and Foundation agents stationed at Giant Eagle supermarkets to monitor for future events or signs of PA system tampering.
Update: As of 27/04/2016, surveillance of Giant Eagle stores has produced no further evidence of anomalous activity. Agents recalled.
Event Description: Every human on earth simultaneously blinked. During the event ███ people disappeared.
Date of Occurrence: 3/5/18
Location: Earth
Follow-Up Actions Taken: Various cover up stories to explain missing persons.
Note: Blinking caused a minor containment breach at various sites due to SCPs pertaining to line of sight
Event Description: Between 16:00:04 UST and 19:53:02 UST, black hole Cygnus X-1 underwent a series of rapid fluctuations in registered x-ray flux density, up to 194.2% of the normal value. When converted into Morse Code, the fluctuations spelled out an expanded, 2018 updated version of the 1988 book A Brief History of Time by the recently deceased physicist Stephen William Hawking. Analysis shows the writing style of the updates to be consistent with that of the original author.
Date of Occurrence: 3/14/18
Location: Cygnus X-1
Follow-Up Actions Taken: Non-Foundation observers were administered Class-A Amnestics, and the observation data in question was covered up. Cygnus X-1 is to be monitored for further anomalies. Whether to release the book under an appropriate cover story is currently under debate.
Event Description: All water in the Samur River was converted to human blood for four days. All water which flowed into the river was converted into blood, and all blood which flowed out of the river was converted to water.
Date of Occurrence: ██/██/2018-██/██/2018
Location: Samur River, Russia and Azerbaijan
Follow-up Actions Taken: Amnestics were dispersed aerially through the nearby village of
Samurçay following completion of event. DNA analysis of collected blood compared against the Foundation database identified all blood as originating from one Joshua Havaldar, a 34-year-old Indian-American man living in San Francisco. He was unable to provide information on the event, but did report feeling light-headed at several points in the week leading up to the event. Mr. Havaldar was administered Class-A Amnestics following interview. Both the Samur River and Mr. Havaldar are currently under a standard five-year monitoring period.
Event Description: A small canoe in the Mississippi River was consumed whole by a Carcharocles megalodon, along with its two occupants. Carcharocles megalodon has been extinct for 2.6 million years, and the river in question is much too shallow to contain a creature of that size.
Date of Occurrence: 02/14/2018
Location: Undisclosed location on the Mississippi River, USA
Follow-up Actions Taken: Amnestics were administered to witnesses, and a cover-up story was circulated claiming the canoe occupants were intoxicated and capsized their vessel accidentally. A task force was sent to locate and capture Carcharocles megalodon, but all attempts to locate the specimen failed.
Event Description: Unscheduled subway train passes through 36th Street subway station in Brooklyn at approximately 80mph. Eye witnesses describe the train as purple with Arabic lettering on the side. Train wasn't reported appearing anywhere else.
Date of Occurrence: 07/03/2017
Location: 36th Street, Brooklyn New York, USA.
Follow-up Actions Taken: Cover story established. Train driver distracted by passengers and loses control of train. Security camera footage closely inspected but deemed safe.
Event Description: During a Toys R Us staff meeting, an employee later identified as William J. Horack stood, announced, "Well, guess I won't need these anymore," and removed his lips with one hand. Afterward, he began to consume the remaining flesh around his mouth — described by witnesses as having the appearance of "pulled pork" — as the other employees returned to normal operations. Horack continued to autocannibalize over the course of the day, captured only intermittently by security cameras despite not leaving the meeting room. At 19:05, Horack had been reduced to skeletal remains, which then vanished. Eyewitnesses reported confusion that the event did not strike them at the time as being out of the ordinary.
Date of Occurrence: 15/03/2018
Location: Mayfield Heights, Ohio, USA
Follow-Up Actions Taken: Amnestics distributed to store employees and customers after interviews conducted. Investigation of security cameras revealed no fault. No personal information about William Horack could be attained, and all documentation involved in his three-year employment at Toys R Us appeared to be an intricate forgery. Lips retrieved from initial event location, determined to be thin plastic.
Event Description: Over the course of five days, the entire student population of ██████ ██ Elementary School in ██████, Ohio developed allergies to all nut-based food products. Faculty and individuals not attending ██████ ██ Elementary who enter the building were unaffected. The symptoms ceased if individuals were removed from the premises for sixty-two hours. Notably, a student at the school, Isaac ██████, is currently comatose following a severe allergic reaction as a result of being force-fed a peanut butter sandwich.
Date of Occurrence: 02/19-02/23/2018
Location: ██████, Ohio
Follow-up Actions Taken: School was shuttered, students were integrated into other elementary schools in the area. Isaac ██████'s condition has shown no improvements. Foundation medical staff are currently attempting to treat and revive him in an attempt to find a link between his current state and the anomaly within ██████ ██ Elementary.
Event Description: All canned food sold at Miller's Supermarket in ██████, Iowa was found to contain one or more live specimens of Lampropeltis triangulum (milk snake) in place of their intended contents. X-ray imaging shows that prior to opening, the cans contained their intended contents, and only upon opening do the snakes appear.
Date of Occurrence: 4/18/2017
Location: ██████, Iowa
Follow-up Actions Taken: Anomaly ceased within twelve hours of its first manifestation. Amnestics were administered to all affected, dispatch logs recording emergency calls of the event were scrubbed. All milk snakes contained by the Foundation have yet to show anomalous properties.
Event Description: Everyone on Earth with the name Jeffery Smith gathered into one area and greeted each other before leaving.
Date of Occurance: 12/6/1993
Location: New York City, New York, United States
Follow-up Actions Taken: Everyone named Jeffery Smith was identified and amnesticised. It was covered up as an event to the public.
Event Description: A collection of twenty billboards located in the southern region of Florida were anomalously painted over to display an advertisement for "laundry and tan by dado", an establishment located in █████████, FL. The paint of "laundry and tan by dado" anomalously changes color.
Date of Occurrence: ██/██/2018
Location: Florida, USA
Follow-up Actions Taken: Billboards were replaced with unaltered variations, and the event attributed to ordinary graffiti. Preliminary investigation of laundry and tan by dado initiated under SCP-888-EX designation.
Event Description: For 3 minutes all personal aboard the USS █████ began screaming the phrase "remember fifty-five" before briefly being confused and returning to normal operations.
Date of Occurrence: ██/██/████
Location: The USS ██████ which was located at ███████ ███ █████████ at the time.
Follow-up Actions Taken: [FIELD LEFT BLANK]
Event Description: This event was transcribed for the Log of Extranormal Events. This event appeared on its own, and wasn't written by anyone.
Date of Occurrence: 6/8/2018
Location: The Log of Extranormal Events
Follow-up Actions Taken: The Foundation will view this entry, and subsequently delete it. Then, they will write up an actual event description regarding the actual anomalous event.
Event Description: An event was transcribed onto the document known as "The Log of Extranormal Events" which described itself and how it came into being. Security footage of all locations capable of accessing the log show no personnel within a 1 meter radius of any device capable of editing the aforementioned log. Edit history of all computers shows that there was no edit.
Date of Occurrence: 6/8/2018
Locations: All computers capable of accessing the Log of Extranormal Events and all locations of physical copies.
Follow-up Actions Taken: The original text was written out of all copies of the Log of Extranormal Events and is transcribed below.
Transcript of Added Text Hide Event Description: This event was transcribed for the Log of Extranormal Events. This event appeared on its own, and wasn't written by anyone.
Date of Occurrence: 6/8/2018
Location: The Log of Extranormal Events
Follow-up Actions Taken: The Foundation will view this entry, and subsequently delete it. Then, they will write up an actual event description regarding the actual anomalous event.
Event Description: Mascot costumes resembling familiar Disney characters manifested onto all guests of Disneyland's "Mickey's Toontown" area spontaneously. Each guests had also anomalously adopted the character of their own respective costume until the anomaly demanifested at midnight local time, leaving guests in a wild, confused state.
Date of Occurrence: July 7, 2005.
Location: Disneyland, Florida, USA
Follow-up Actions Taken: All witnesses and guests were amnesticized.
Event Description: Six corpses, visually and genetically identical to former US President Barack Obama, were discovered in a submerged cave by cave divers. All six corpses were wearing animal costumes. Autopsies revealed that all six individuals drowned, and perished two weeks prior to their discovery.
Date of Occurrence: August 17th, 2017
Location: A submerged cave in Quintana Roo, Mexico
Follow-up Actions Taken: Corpses moved to Site-17, all witnesses amnesticized.
Event Description: Twenty kakapo, representing approximately 24% of the extant members of the species, spontaneously combusted over the course of three minutes. Twenty kakapo chicks were found in the remains, genetically identical to the twenty deceased instances.
Date of Occurrence: 9/04/2018
Location: Codfish Island, New Zealand
Follow-up Actions Taken: Amnestics administered to all witnesses, and a brood of mature cloned Kakapo were released to account for the disparity. Genetic testing of the chicks found them to be a hybrid of a kakapo and an unidentified species of parrot.
Event Descripton: At least 1000 instances of plains zebra (Equus quagga) emerged from the opening of the volcanic cone of Shira, located on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Said instances descended Mt. Kilimanjaro and roamed the Kilimanjaro National Park for 2 hours before subsequently disappearing.
Date of Occurrence: 02/23/1988
Location: Kilimanjaro National Park, Tanzania
Follow-Up Actions Taken: All witnesses to the event were given Class-A amnestics. Members of the organization known as the "Anomalous Zebra Collective", or "AZC", who attempted to ride the zebras out of the Kilimanjaro National Park, were interviewed for information on the AZC before being given Class-A amnestics. Mt. Kilimanjaro has been put under constant surveillance in case of anomalous activity.
Event Description: A door was opened.
Date of Occurrence: In a second.
Location: Next door.
Follow-up Actions Taken: The door was welded shut. Personnel are to be reminded that the entity within the room does not exist. The door is never to be opened. SCP classification is pending.
Event Description: All personal within provisional Site-████-█'s life-support maintenance access tunnels reported hearing the voice of Agent ██████ ████ ████ from The █████ Project speak with distortion akin to being played over a speaker several inches from their ears. The content of said speech was calmly requesting staff to not engage in cannibalism despite there being no indication that anybody onsite had considered an act of that nature. The voice at several points attempted to use code phrases to convince staff that it was Agent ██████ ████ ████ but the codes were confirmed to be false codes given to D-███-██ while he was impersonating Agent ██████ ████ ████. Agent ██████ ████ ████ and D-███-██ had both died due to a train crash on the way to the The █████ Project command post before they could become involved in 1963.
Date of Occurrence: 11/06/1966
Location: Provisional Site-████-█, █████ lake.
Follow-up Actions Taken: SCP-████-█ denied any involvement with the event and as far as can be determined is correct. No unusual circumstances have been discovered in Agent ██████ ████ ████ or D-███-██'s deaths.
Event Description: All doors within the University of Wisconsin's Music Hall led to what seemed to be an alternate dimension upon which the Hall stood. Al students who entered this dimension were considered lost, until they emerged from the same door 2 months later, completely unaware of the amount of time that had passed.
Date of Occurence: 12/4/1999
Location: University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, USA
Follow-up Actions Taken: Affected students amnestitized, cover story of a class field trip spread. School placed under a ten year monitoring period.
Event Description: A ███████ washing machine owned by a 54 year old woman produced the head of her dead husband after she performed her daily wash-load. Her clothes were not present inside the washing machine, according to the woman's statement.
Date of Occurrence: 02/█/2015
Location: Southend-on-Sea, England, UK.
Follow-up Actions Taken: The woman in question was given Class-A amnestics and the washing machine was taken into Site-██. On ██/█/2016, the washing machine was destroyed.
Event Description: For the entirety of October 31st, 2010, Every single citizen of the United States practiced 'Trick-or-Treating' in the morning, instead of at night as traditionally done. All memory of this event was ceased the following day, with the only evidence remaining being in digital or physical form.
Date of Occurrence: 10/31/2010
Location: The United States of America
Follow-up Actions Taken: All known online evidence at this time has been discovered and covered up by Foundation Web-crawlers. Project "All Hallows Eve" was put into effect to find and detain anyone who claims to have physical or digital evidence of this event.
Event Description: During a snowstorm affecting Staraya Kuban, 50,000 bath duck toys were found along the shore. The ducks were found inside five plastic wire mesh bags and displayed no anomalous qualities. The ducks were taken to Site-██, where they mysteriously disappeared after five days of recovery when line of sight was broken for approximately three minutes.
Date of Occurrence: 03/25/18
Location: Krasnodar, Russia, near the shore of the lake Staraya Kuban.
Follow-up Actions Taken: All civilians near Staraya Kuban were administered Class-A amnestics. A small search team has been sent in Krasnodar for any appearance of a similarly looking duck toy.
Περιγραφή εκδήλωσης: Για περίπου μία ώρα το ψηφιακό κείμενο σε τυχαίες ιστοσελίδες παγκοσμίως μεταφράζεται στα ελληνικά και όλες οι προσπάθειες υποβολής του εγγράφου στα αγγλικά αποτυγχάνουν. Δεν υπάρχει συσχέτιση μεταξύ των ιστοτόπων που επηρεάζονται.
Ημερομηνία: 09/01/18
Τοποθεσία: Διάφορες ιστοσελίδες
Παρακολούθηση ενεργειών που έχουν ληφθεί: Καλύψτε την ιστορία μιας αποτυχίας του Μετάφραση Google.
Event Description: Robert Wadlow, the tallest person ever recorded at 8'11" (272cm) tall spontaneously materialized, he was approximately 892 feet (272m) tall. This entity quickly dematerialized after approximately 20 seconds. No damage was done to any property.
Date of Occurrence: 15/7/19██
Location: Alton, Illinois
Follow-up Actions Taken: All witnesses were given Class-A amnestics, no footage exists of the event.
Event Description: 16-year-old human female spontaneously generated a 2.5cmx2.5cm emerald-cut sample of brown tourmaline at the base of her spine. Subject had never been exposed to nor displayed any anomalies prior to, during, or after the event. Gemstone did not display any anomalous effects aside from appearing to have generated pre-cut and polished.
Date of Occurrence: 9/16/2018
Location: Los Angeles, California
Follow-up Actions Taken: Gemstone was surgically removed under guise of dentist's visit. Subject was given class-A amnestics. No other evidence of the event exists.
Event Description: A female cosplayer and a male humanoid dressed up as and resembling Himiko Toga and Dabi, antagonists from the My Hero Academia manga series, respectively, entered a local anime cosplay convention. Upon entrance, the male humanoid, initially thought to be another cosplayer, acted erratically before manifesting pyrokinetic powers, incinerating the location where the convention took place and the congoers inside. Local law enforcement arrived in the scene, neutralizing the 'Dabi' entity, but not before the location itself was burnt down, and 26 casualties were reported.
Date of Occurrence: 7/24/2018
Location: Cebu City, Philippines
Follow-up Actions Taken: CCTV footage was altered to remove traces of the 'Dabi' entity, and a cover-up story involving a case of arson is released. Autopsy of 'Dabi' remains revealed that its DNA was 73% genetically similar to a Philippine goat, the remaining 26% to a domestic chicken. Interview of said female cosplayer (who survived) revealed that the entity was the product of a ritual she found in █████████.com (now inactive), and was subsequently given Class-A amnestics.
Event Description: Popular television network Nickelodeon aired the first showing of the Sponge bob Square pants Movie, if the film was viewed in the town of ██████████, Quebec. The end credit song was replaced by "Stolen Dance" by Milky Chance. Anyone who viewed the movie has said that the song was in the movie, reruns of the movie have the movie unaltered. Viewing the movie on the date of the occurrence using SCP-█████ in the town of ██████████ have resulted in the movie being unaltered.
Date of Occurrence: ██/██/200█
Location: ██████████, Quebec
Follow-up Actions Taken: Anyone who viewed the film have been interviewed by agents posing as Broadcasters for Nickelodeon. Interviewed persons say that it is positive they heard Stolen Dance during the song. Class-A amnestics were given.
Event Description: During the decommissioning and deconstruction of Specialized Laboratory 4389-UC!S-11 in Research Sector 8-Alpha of Site-15 ███████ █████ began to experience what was later determined to be a stroke and died in the site medical ward. At the time no actual anomaly was found and operations proceeded as normal. In 1984 Site-15 underwent a routine casual scan which detected retro-casual ectoentropic interference in the events of his death which was confirmed by further scans. To this day the actual alterations made and the entity responsible are unknown.
Date of Occurrence: 06/13/1977
Location: Site-15
Follow-up Actions Taken: ███████ █████'s family was told that he died in a civilian construction operation. Deconstruction was completed in 1978 despite set-backs. The event was extensively investigated but no more more information has been gained. It is theorized that the Foundaion's methods of detecting these events are flawed and simply reading a false negative but similar malfunctions have not been noted. The records of Site-15 were examined but none of the tests run in the Specialized Laboratory 4389-UC!S-11 had any known retrocasual or ectoentropic properties.
Event Description: Over a period of 23 minutes, Agent ███████ shrank to 5% her original height, before expiring due to low body temperature. No cause of this anomaly was found.
Date of Occurrence. 02/27/2012
Location: Area 52
Follow-up Actions Taken: The next of kin was notified, and Agent ███████'s very small body was delivered for burial.
Event Description: Four new species of landfowl, with entire populations including a domestic breed, spontaneously manifested worldwide. Similarly, all members of the species Struthio Camelus Domesticus vanished, alongside all infrastructure related to their breeding and consumption. The memories of roughly 99.7% of the population were simultaneously altered, causing retroactive acceptance.
Date of Occurrence. 01/18/2008
Location: Worldwide
Follow-up Actions Taken: Distance communication between the 0.3% of the population whose memories were not altered are being intercepted and altered by a Foundation AI. Conspiracy groups are tracked down as they arise and administered amnesiacs. The four new species have been classified under a new Genus known as Gallus.
Note: None of you know what you're missing out on. KFO was way better than KFC is or could ever hope to be.
Event Description: An age 16 male high-school of student stated: "See ya suckers!", before entering into a classroom cabinet for 5 minutes. A completely different student exited the cabinet afterwards and resumed classroom activity as normal.
Date of Occurrence. 12/13/2018
Location: [REDACTED], Utah, [REDACTED] High School
Follow-up Actions Taken: Students and staff amnesticized. Cabinet showed no anomalous properties and deemed safe. A 5 year monitoring period has been instated.
Event Description: All written and typed text written by all Foundation personnel, including O5-█, was in all capital letters.
Date of Occurrence: 11/1/2019
Location: All Foundation sites.
Follow-up Actions Taken: Other than standard O5 protection policy, no action was needed as it was a Foundation exclusive event. All text was rewritten following the event.
Event Description: During a prison riot, all pants worn by both inmates and correctional staff suddenly becomes ambulatory and attempts to free themselves from their wearers. After a period of 21 minutes, all instances proceeds to scales over the facility's wall and runs into a nearby river.
Date of Occurrence: 03/08/1990
Location: Jakarta, Indonesia
Follow-up Actions Taken: Class-A Amnestics administered to all participants and witness. Cover story of a prison riot disseminated. Subsequent batches of clothing showed no anomalous property. As per 01/13/2019 none of the anomalous pants instances have been located.
Event Description: In a ███████ buffet, everyone inside of the buffet proceeded to dance vigorously until 1:47 PM to 2:54 PM, after the dancing ceased, subjects showed no signs of being tired after the event, everyone proceeded as normal, when questioned, most described it as “How you remember a party after you blacked out while drunk.” Other descriptions vary. All subjects showed no anomalous occurrences after,
Date of Occurence: 01/0█/199█
Location: █████ ████, Florida.
Follow-up Actions Taken: People who were part of the event were questioned, all known and suspected witnesses, as well as the affected individuals, were given class c amnestics, and all media reports about this event were falsified.
Event Description: In the cafeteria of Site-77, one researcher was walking to a table when they suddenly collapsed on the floor. Everyone else in the cafeteria turned their heads and vocalized "Bruh." in a male voice. The researcher in question climbed back up and said "That was such a fucking epic fail, sorry everyone."
Date Of Occurrence: 01/01/2020
Location: Site-77
Follow-up Actions Taken: All researchers were questioned, everyone who was questioned recognized the abnormality of the event, but could only refer to it as a "bruh moment". It seems only the researchers who were involved in the event were only able to describe it as a "bruh moment".
Event Description: From 04:38 to 14:29 GMT the Galapagos Tectonic Microplate, located under the southeastern Pacific Ocean, spontaneously disappeared. Adjacent lithospheric magma anomalously retained pressure and didn't liquefy or intrude into the vacuum, nor did the surrounding ocean water. At 14.29 exactly GMT a slight tremor of Magnitude 3 occurred in the area and the Plate returned to its original position. No further anomalous properties have yet been recorded.
Date Of Occurrence: 09/10/2018
Location: Pacific Ocean
Follow-up Actions Taken: Seismic data of the event was wiped from global earthquake monitoring facilities. Further public mentions of the event are to be monitored for and acted upon as needed.
Event Description: During the closed-casket funeral of 73-year-old Maurice Gibson, the coffin spontaneously opened and an entire Mariachi band climbed out one at a time. They performed a short piece before climbing back into the coffin which shut behind them. When opened by the wife of the deceased, it contained his body and nothing else unusual.
Date of Occurence: 01-07-2019
Location: Sunny Hills Funeral Home, OK, USA
Follow-up Actions Taken: Event passed off as a marketing prank for a local restaraunt. Sunny Hills Funeral Home is to be placed under watch until 01-07-202█
Event Description: During Researchers Tomas break, his Plague Inc game somewhat formed a connection to Agent Smith, who was as a friend hot spotting Tomas. For the next 15 minutes, all symptoms mutated the game appeared in Agent Smith. Connection was broken after Researcher Tomas accidentally disconnected from Agent Smith's hotspot after his data plan replenished and automatically reconnected to his own data plan.
Date of Occurence: 27-02-2017
Location: Site-81, Indiana, USA
Follow-up Actions Taken: Agent Tomas was quickly quarantined for further signs of illness, with no result of illness. Researcher Tomas granted $███ by Agent Smith to buy a new phone. The old phone was subsequently destroyed. No further action taken.ATLANTA, Ga. (CBS Atlanta) – The American Academy of Pediatrics recommend children aged two and older watch no more than two hours of television per day. They also recommend that children under two watch no television at all.
According to a new study, even one hour more a day can diminish a preschooler’s vocabulary and math skills as well as classroom attention.
“Every hourly increase in daily television watching from two and a half years old is also associated with bullying by classmates, and physical prowess at kindergarten,” Professor Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine children’s hospital said in the study.
At that young age, a child’s brain is wired to play. “These kids are watching too much television at a time when they should be out there in the environment exploring and interacting, especially with other humans,” Pagani added in the study.
Watching television does not teach a child social or motor skills. “If you don’t learn those skills, you get to kindergarten and cry every time someone takes you toy,” Pagani said in the study.
The study involved 991 girls and 1,006 boys in Quebec. Their parents reported their television viewing behavior as part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development.Motorsports fans are fuming with TEN Network over its plans to switch Formula One coverage from ONE to TEN, losing both High Definition and in some cases, Live broadcasts.
From this Sunday night, F1 screens on TEN from 9:30pm instead of on ONE. Bizarrely, the Qualifying Race is Live in all markets on ONE on Saturday, but not the big race.
This results in the coverage airing in Standard Definition and it means viewers in South Australia and Western Australia -including Perth viewers following local lad Daniel Ricciardo- will be unable to see it Live as they have enjoyed on ONE.
The switcheroo comes despite the network having regularly plugged the HD broadcasts on ONE.
On its Facebook page, TEN viewers are fuming:
– So much for live and HD, just lost another viewer. sad as your AFL, and F1 coverage was about all i watched on C10. Now a viewer gone altogether.
– What a joke! Give us live F1 coverage in Perth and in HD
– No. Just no. I take it that TEN are happy for us to use other means to watch F1 since they don’t care? #boycottTEN
– And they will wonder why their ratings plummet due to the majority watching streams online
– Will be boycotting all of your channels and advertisers…F1 deserves to be on HD and live for all states. For shame Channel 10, FOR SHAME!
– Welcome to 2005. Thanks chn 10
– FFS really who makes these decisions? Do they actually watch or understand sport?
– Is a spokesperson for ten/one going to actually explain the reasoning behind this decision? They think more people will watch a netball repeat and a re-run movie?
The move is believed to be ratings driven, to shore up TEN’s dwindling figures on Sunday nights from 9:30pm.
TV Tonight asked TEN about the imminent changes and the fan fury.
A spokesperson said, “As of this Sunday, April 22, Formula One will be broadcast on TEN at 9.30pm. This allows all Australians to access the Formula One coverage in a consistent time slot every Sunday night.”
RelatedThe 4 Major Threats To industrialized Agriculture --
Fred Kirschenmann Speaks
By Kalpa
18 September, 2010
Big Picture Agriculture
On September 3, 2010 I was fortunate to become acquainted with Fred Kirschenmann, a visionary in the field of agriculture. He spoke at the University of Colorado's "Local Foodshed Commons" conference which was sponsored, in part, by Transition Colorado.
Who is Fred Kirschenmann?
Fred Kirschenmann considers himself to be a philosopher and a farmer, holding a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He was an organic farming pioneer, who transformed his family farm in North Dakota to certified organic back in 1980. The farm is a natural prairie livestock grazing system that combines a nine-crop rotation of cereal grains, forages, and green manure.
Kirschenmann is a Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He is President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, also the site of the renowned eat-local Blue Hill Café. He holds and has held numerous other offices and appointments, including positions with the USDA, and in academia as Dean of Curry College in Boston, Massachusetts.
In 1995, Kirschenmann was profiled in an award-winning video, “My Father's Garden,” by Miranda Productions, Inc. A quote worth noting from the movie producer is this..."Food cannot grow forever on a damaged earth, but Fred's lesson is that we can bring health and beauty back into the Garden, if we are willing to cooperate with nature's infinite intelligence. This wisdom holds the secret to our children's future."
In 2010, Kirschenmann published a book, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher (Culture of the Land). To quote Michael Pollan about the book, "Fred is one of the wisest, sanest, most practical, and most trusted voices in the movement to reform the American food system."
His Organic Farm in North Dakota
When his dad became ill in 1976, Fred went back home and turned the operation into a certified organic farm in 1980. This 3,500 acre farm is currently being transitioned to a younger farmer, using the state owned bank of North Dakota. This bank, formed in the populist/socialist days of the 1930's and the only one of its kind in the nation, now has a policy offering loans to beginning farmers at a rate of less than two percent annual. The program is already having a positive impact. Fred says that he is planning ahead by helping his follower get established to buy and takeover the farm for "when I go off to meet with the microbes".
His list of the Largest Problems Facing Agriculture:
1-Energy constraints
The question to challenge policy makers today is this, "What kind of system will we need when crude costs $300 per barrel? Since our current industrial agriculture model is based upon cheap energy, this is his number one concern. Fertilizers, pesticides, equipment manufacturing and operation, all rely upon cheap fossil fuels. When the cost of fossil fuels goes up, farming costs skyrocket. In Iowa, anhydrous ammonia went from $200 per ton to more than $1,000 per ton almost overnight when energy prices peaked in 2008. Farmers cannot operate profitably under such high input cost conditions. The Leopold Center expects crude oil to cost $200 per barrel in 4-5 years and $400 in 5-10 years.
Increases in energy costs are also a factor in local food production. This is a complex issue since a small farmer driving his produce fifty miles to his nearest farmer's market can use relatively more energy than a full semi-truck of produce driving half-way across this country.
2-Water Availability
We have been drawing down our water supplies at an unsustainable rate. We have aggravated the water availability problem by ignoring soil health using industrialized systems. There are four main areas on the planet which are growing grain using rainfed agriculture. They are the central U.S., Brazil, Argentina, and edges of China.
Often, the population density areas match these same rainfed agricultural regions as displayed in the following map. [source]
The two main population centers, China and India are drawing down their water quickly. China, which relies upon irrigation for 80 percent of its grain production draws its aquifers down about ten feet per year and is drawing at depths of 1,000 feet in some places. India depends upon irrigation for 60 percent of its grain production and is drawing down aquifers at twenty feet per year to depths of 2,000 feet some places.
According to Kirschenmann, in the U.S., where 20 percent of our grain production is dependent upon irrigation, we have depleted our Ogallala aquifer by one-half since 1960. We are drawing it down at a rate 1.3 trillion gallons faster than it can be replaced.
His water challenge is to use half as much water as we do now and refocus on soil health so we farm in healthy soils which have the ability to retain water.
3-Climate Change
The latest thinking is that changes in climate probably won't be gradual. Local eating will not solve extreme weather events effects upon agricultural production. To learn more, he encourages us to read the book, "The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth" by Dianne Dumanoski.
4-Ecological Degradation
Under this category he is concerned about the destruction of biodiversity, especially of previously healthy soils. The Rodale Institute tested water retention of soils according to content of organic matter and mulch and found that healthy soils containing organic matter retain much greater volumes of water. According to the Rodale Institute, soil containing 1% organic matter absorbs 33 pounds of water and 5% retains 135 pounds of water. He compared this to the irony of Monsanto wanting drought resistant seeds when the answer is in the soil quality, which same soil has been destroyed through the system embraced by Monsanto.
Kirschenmann referenced Dirt! The movie for learning more about soil.
Deborah Koons Garcia was present and joined him in a panel discussion about her upcoming movie, Symphony of the Soil, which was previewed earlier during "Eat Local" week here in Boulder.
Due to industrial agriculture systems, we have lost 75% of crop diversity over one-hundred years, and we've lost 33% of our animal species. To learn more, Kirs |
illian Murphy was the star. He’s much too unnerving to do jokes.
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Powers (PSN): The PlayStation Network is releasing the first three episodes of this show’s second season, an adaptation of the much-loved comic series by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. Since the first season wasn’t all that good, the show is doing what any self-respecting show like this does in its second season to goose viewership, which is cast a metric crap-ton of recognizable genre favorites in guest roles. So then, coming this season: Michael Madsen! Tricia Helfer! Enrico Colantoni! Wil Wheaton! Much like with last week’s Stitchers entry, this feels like the genre TV equivalent of Deadspin’s acclaimed “Let’s Remember Some Guys” series.
America’s Got Talent (NBC, 8 p.m.): In case you assumed the demise of American Idol and The X-Factor meant we were finally, finally done with Simon Cowell, think again! The 11th season of America’s Got Talent kicks off with him taking over a judge’s chair, one whose lineage includes Howard Stern and Piers Morgan. Goodness, what asses that chair has seen.
Maya & Marty (NBC, 10 p.m.): We guess it’s time again for a network—feels like it’s usually NBC, probably because of the Saturday Night Live pipeline—to have a bash at a variety show, a format that was last even moderately successful with, what, Barbara Mandrell And The Mandrell Sisters? (We won’t even pretend we knew about that show before we looked it up just now. It went off the air in 1982.) But hey, a show doesn’t need to be a multi-season fixture of the airwaves to be charming and worthwhile on its own terms, and here we’ve got hosts Maya Rudolph and Martin Short, joined by first-episode guests Jimmy Fallon, Miley Cyrus, Larry David, and Tom Hanks. Yeah, so, we’d say there’s some good and some not so good there, all things considered.
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Teenage Newlyweds (FYI, 10 p.m.): “In the series premiere, three young couples”—wait, wait, just a second, let’s read that again. “In the series premiere”!? How is this even possibly a new show? We feel like we’ve written snarky, ignorant blurbs for this show at least 50 times already.
Let’s start preparing ourselves for the most important Tuesday premiere in TV history
USA and WWE have announced that come July we’ll be getting two live wrestling shows each week, with Raw still on Mondays and a now live Smackdown moving to Tuesdays. To prepare, we humbly present a video titled “Best Smackdown Ending Ever,” alternately called Finishing Moves: The Opera.
Streaming pick
“Once Upon A Beginning,” Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (Seeso): No particular reason for picking this beyond it being the greatest show ever made in the history of television. Ask anybody.For the past couple of weeks, tech podcaster and pundit Leo Laporte of TWiT has mentioned that his Nexus One’s power button stopped working. It turns out that Laporte isn’t alone in this problem, as several Nexus One owners have taken to the forums to complain about their power button failing.
Androinica.com reader Sam told us some Nexus One owners have been forced to deal with a defect that eventually makes the power button unresponsive. Users report that holding down on the button no longer brings up the option to power off a phone, and removing the battery proves to be a fatal mistake because the power button doesn’t respond to restart. The defective button turns the Nexus One into a $530 paperweight.
Complaints have been appearing on the Nexus support forums since February, which was only a month after the Nexus One was first released. This is certainly not the first time that a phone – or any electronic product, really – has experienced a major flaw, but the gap in occurrences means there could be an issue with some Nexuses in circulation that may take time to manifest.
Thankfully, HTC, been quietly addressing the problem by replacing defective phones for users who complain. Users can contact HTC for support if the Nexus One power button stops working. Also worth noting, while Froyo has yet to be officially released, the power button functioning properly is among the list of improvements reported by people who have installed Froyo.
Back in April, HTC responded to one complaint by issuing this statement to a customer:
“I do apologize that you had this issue with your device. At this time we have no information on how to prevent this issue from happening in the future on your device. We are working on getting the issue resolved on the newly made devices. I do apologize for all the inconvenience that this issue may have caused you.”
If the power button starts to get wonky on your N1, backup your data and put in a word to HTC’s Repairs and Returns division at 1-888-216-4736.
[Thanks, Sam!]SAN JOSE — For the past three years, teams of San Jose gang members staked out jewelry stores and other shops that sell expensive items, followed customers home, watched them and eventually broke in when they thought the residents were away, according to law enforcement officials.
Police suspect the gangs burglarized hundreds of homes since 2012 and made off with jewelry, guns and cash.
Following a three-year investigation by the San Jose Police Department, 29 reputed gang members were charged Friday by a Santa Clara County criminal grand jury with felonies related to the string of burglaries.
On Tuesday, 17 of the suspects appeared in court and were formally indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit burglary and active participation in a criminal street gang, according to deputy district attorney Sandip Patel.
“This was a prolific and well-organized group of criminals who were shattering front doors, windows and our community’s sense of security,” Patel said. “We would like to thank the San Jose Police Department for piecing together this complex case and bringing this gang to justice.”
The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office has accused the group of committing 30 burglaries in San Jose, Union City and Hillsborough, according to prosecutors. However, not every suspect was charged with every burglary.
Many suspects were arrested Monday in a large sweep by San Jose police, dubbed “Operation Grinch.” The remaining 12 suspects are also now in custody and will be making their first court appearances sometime in the next few days.
The suspects, all men, range in age from 18 to 27. Bail for all but two of the suspects was set at $1.5 million, Patel said. One suspect was allowed no bail, and another had bail set at $405,000.
Investigators say a number of separate Norteño street gangs banded together in 2012 and began burglarizing homes throughout the three cities. They would often go out in teams of three to five people and scope out “stores where people buy expensive items.”
“They would follow those people home, watch these homes for a day or two days, and when they believed no one was home, break in,” Patel said.
Each crew of several gang members would burglarize multiple homes in a single day. The gangs would break into homes by busting through the front door or smashing glass doors in the backyard. The gang members kept the weapons and cash and sold the rest of the stolen property to at least one local secondhand store, which was not identified by the District Attorney’s Office.
The gangs would often recruit juveniles to enter the homes, knowing as minors they would face less serious criminal charges if caught.
Asian-American and Middle Eastern families were sometimes targeted because gang members believed they were more likely to keep jewels and money in their homes, prosecutors say.
The arrests and indictment were the result of an investigation by the Police Department’s gang suppression unit and gang investigations unit.
“This department will do everything in its power to make sure residents are safe in their own homes,” police Chief Larry Esquivel said in a statement. “I’m proud that at the end of this challenging investigation, we are holding a brazen and dangerous criminal gang accountable.”
Contact Mark Gomez at 408-920-5869 and follow him at Twitter.com/MarkMgomez.Historical gay sex convictions to be wiped under new Queensland law aiming to redress discrimination
Posted
Draft laws to allow men convicted of historical gay sex offences to apply to have their convictions wiped from the record have been put forward by the Queensland Government.
Under the proposal, men convicted for certain sexual activity once described as "acts of gross indecency" would be able to apply to the director-general of the Department of Justice and Attorney-General to have their convictions expunged.
The expungement scheme would also apply to people convicted or charged with certain historical public morality offences.
Consensual adult male homosexuality activity was decriminalised in Queensland in 1991.
Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath announced the proposed bill in Parliament today, after the Government referred the issue to the Queensland Law Reform Commission in January.
Ms D'Ath told Parliament the legislation would be introduced in "the early part of 2017" after undergoing a period of consultation.
"This is a chance for some closure for Queenslanders who continue to be hurt by the legacy of decades-old discrimination," she said.
"As a Parliament we should apologise to those Queenslanders for these historic wrongs and for the hurt that followed them in the decades since."
Ms D'Ath said applications would be considered "against available official records and appropriate criteria".
Shadow attorney-general Ian Walker told Parliament the LNP supported the laws in principle.
"We understand there is detail to look at and we look forward to perusing what the Attorney-General has tabled," he said.
New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory have expungement schemes already in place for this type of conviction.
The WA and Tasmanian governments have also announced plans to enact the change.
Topics: lgbt, laws, sexual-offences, brisbane-4000Retired NBA star Yao Ming is using his international renown and domestic status as one of China's most recognizable public figures to try to convince his fellow Chinese citizens to stop seeking products made from elephant ivory and rhino horn, hoping to curb the demand that fuels poaching in Africa and is helping bring Kenyan elephants and rhinos perilously close to extinction.
The former Houston Rockets center arrived in Kenya on Friday, Aug. 10, 2012 — his first-ever visit to the African nation — to meet with local scientists and conservationists, to begin filming and to see the animals first-hand. From Jason Straziuso of The Associated Press:
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Poaching deaths of elephants and rhinos are increasing, animal experts say, because of increased demand in Asia for rhino horns and elephant ivory. Yao, the former NBA star from China, said Thursday he thinks increased public awareness about where ivory comes from is needed. Julius K. Kipng'etich, the director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, gave Yao a tour of one of the organization's rooms filled with ivory from poached elephants. Kip, as the director is known, said Thursday that he hopes Yao takes back the message to China to say that when Chinese people buy ivory, they are helping lead elephants to extinction.
[Also: Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak thought Dwight Howard deal 'was dead']
Bringing the message to China — and having one of that nation's greatest sporting heroes serve as the messenger — is especially critical for activists because "China is the world's most prominent destination for rhino horn and ivory, with projections suggesting there will be an added 250 million middle class consumers over the next 10 [to] 15 years," according to Laura Walubengo of Kenyan radio station/lifestyle site CapitalFM:
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The massive consumption in China of the illegal wildlife parts and products meanwhile has been blamed on a combination of "old customs and traditions with new money," among other things. Increasing populations of rhino and elephant between 1989 and 2007 have started dwindling dramatically due to an escalation of poaching activities.
Hit the jump for more photos from Yao's visit to Kenya, plus video of a press conference he gave in Nairobi after his 10-day stay.
There are only seven northern white rhinos left in the world; four of them are housed at Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy, which is working with London-based nonprofit Save the Elephants and wildlife charity organization WildAid on the documentary project, tentatively titled "The End of the Wild." Yao became involved in the film through his work as one of several celebrity ambassadors for WildAid; he has already filmed a public service announcement for the organization in which he blocks a bullet headed for an elephant as if it were a layup.
That image might appear somewhat goofy, but Yao's commitment to speaking out against practices harmful to animals is serious; this isn't the first time he's done it. Last September, he joined billionaire Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson in entreating consumers, especially those in his homeland of China, to stop buying and eating shark fin soup, an in-demand delicacy that requires shark fins for its production, leading to fishermen catching sharks, cutting off their fins and ostensibly leaving them to die, wreaking havoc on underseas ecosystems.
[Also: Michael Beasley holds estate sale to get rid of some weird stuff]
Yao has been writing about his trip to Africa on a just-started blog, detailing his introduction to the extent of the elephant and rhino poaching problem, his flight to Kenya on Virgin Atlantic — "my first time with Virgin (there's probably a joke in there somewhere)" — and his visit to the conservancy. He described his first physical encounter with a pair of rhinos named Najin and Suni in terms hoops fans might appreciate:
These are immense and powerful creatures. As one of them pushes me, I'm reminded of the immense pressure I used to feel when I had to guard Shaquille O'Neal. You knew that pressure while guarding Shaq, and you know it when a rhino leans on you. But this power is meaningless in the face of a poacher's bullet or wire snare. [...] It's tragic to know these impressive animals are among the last of their kind, just because some people believe their horn, which is just keratin like our fingernails, has healing properties.
The documentary is slated for release in 2013.
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• Y! News: Incredible close-up view of snowflakesAfter Republicans spent eight years using filibusters and cloture votes to obstruct President Barack Obama's agenda, prominent Republicans now are advocating for eliminating it.
"I firmly believe that he wants to work; he wants to get things done," Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told radio host Charlie Sykes of WTMJ in Milwaukee, in reference to an earlier conversation he had had with President-elect Donald Trump's running mate Mike Pence. "He wants to be able to say we won and that best way to do that is to allow Paul [Ryan] to help lead the way in the House. I think the Senate, people like Ron Johnson for sure, Ron wants to help Paul in that regard. My biggest is concern that they not allow, some of these arcane rules that have nothing to with the Constitution."
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Walker went on to complain that if Democrats used the filibuster to thwart Trump's agenda, it would be unfair to the American people who voted for him.
"To me, I think that would really upset the electorate [if] the people who not only elected Donald Trump and Mike Pence but the people who elected Ron here and elected other members of the House and the Senate," Walker complained. "You cannot use, they cannot use inside-the-ballpark Washington procedural reason to justify why things don't happen. They've got to get things done and as I said frequently here in this state and continue to, the best time to do them is early."
The irony in Walker's position, of course, is that Republicans have used the filibuster to an unprecedented degree during Obama's presidency. By 2013 Republicans had made sure that more of Obama's executive nominees had been filibustered to a far greater extent than those of his predecessor, with Texas Sen. John Cornyn bragging, "There is a 60-vote threshold for every nomination." (Sixty votes is the number of votes required to break a filibuster.) Republicans have also blocked Obama's legislation at more than twice the rate of any previous Congress.Hello Folks;
Lets continue the Neo4j with Scala. We have earlier discuss about the use of Neo4j with Scala and Neo4j APOC with Scala. In this blog we are going to discuss about how we can migrate data from the other database like MYSQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Cassandra.
But before starting the journey, To those who have caught the train late 😉, this is what has happened till now:
So till now we have some basic understanding of Neo4j and APOC with Scala. Now we will start blog for the series.
We use many databases for storing the data. But when we have a large amount of data and tables that time it becomes so hard to make query and execute them on the database. We have to be extra cautious to perform the task and we get bored to see same screen without any fun 😉.
We have solution for this. We can use Neo4j for this, where we find more fun to do work and its not difficult as we have discuss it in first blog. Before starting the discussion I want to clear one think that when we want to migrate data then we have to keep Neo4j APOC Kit (Download and Install) in the $Neo4j_Home/plugins. Now we start discussing about every database which I have mention before that how we can connect and transfer data from that database to Neo4j :
PostgreSQL :
When we use PostgreSQL, we have to download JDBC.jar file (Download) and keep it in the $Neo4j_Home/plugins and restart the Neo4j. After restarting the Neo4j server we are set for migrating the data from the PostgreSQL to Neo4j.
Now we load the driver with the APOC.
CALL apoc.load.driver('org.postgresql.Driver');
Now we create the call for fetching the data from the PostgreSQL where we have a table with name employee_details to Neo4j.
with 'jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/testdb?user=postgres&password=postgres' as url CALL apoc.load.jdbc(url,'employee_details') YIELD row RETURN count(*);
If we don’t want to use these step than we can provide URL in the $Neo4j_Home/conf/neo4j.conf and restart the server :
apoc.jdbc.postgresql_url.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/testdb?user=postgres&password=postgres
We can now fetch data direct. We don’t need to load driver also.
CALL apoc.load.jdbc('postgresql_url','employee_details') YIELD row RETURN count(*);
Create Nodes and Relation in the data.
/** * Here we define schema and key. In first column we define those column_name * which can be null and In the second we those column name which we want unique. */ CALL apoc.schema.assert( {Detail:['name','age','address','salary']}, {Detail:['id']}); /** * Here we load data in the neo4j and create node with the help of schema which we define * earlier. */ CALL apoc.load.jdbc('jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/testdb?user=postgres&password=postgres','employee_details') yield row CREATE (t:Detail {id:toString(row.id), name:row.name, age:toString(row.age), address:row.address, salary:toString(row.salary)}) return t;
MYSQL :
We want to migrate data from the MYSQL as before we have to download JDBC.jar file (Download) and keep it in the $Neo4j_Home/plugins and update $Neo4j_Home/conf/neo4j.conf as:
apoc.jdbc.mysql_url.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test?user=user&password=pass
Restart the Neo4j server and we are set for migrating the data from the Cassandra to Neo4j.
We hit the MySQL and start fetching data and perform count operation.
CALL apoc.load.jdbc('mysql_url','employee_data') yield row RETURN count(*);
Cassandra :
Now we migrate data from the Cassandra to Neo4j. Now we first import data into the cassandra if we don’t have data in the cassandra or we can use it for test also.
We have to run following command for setting up initial data in the cassandra :
curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neo4j-contrib/neo4j-cassandra-connector/master/db_gen/playlist.cql curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neo4j-contrib/neo4j-cassandra-connector/master/db_gen/artists.csv curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neo4j-contrib/neo4j-cassandra-connector/master/db_gen/songs.csv $CASSANDRA_HOME/bin/cassandra $CASSANDRA_HOME/bin/cqlsh -f playlist.cql
We have set our cassandra database with the data. We have to download JDBC.jar file (Download) and keep it in the $Neo4j_Home/plugins. We can provide URL in the $Neo4j_Home/conf/neo4j.conf as :
apoc.jdbc.cassandra_songs.url=jdbc:cassandra://localhost:9042/playlist
Restart the Neo4j server and we are set for migrating the data from the Cassandra to Neo4j.
We hit the cassandra and start fetching data and perform count operation.
CALL apoc.load.jdbc('cassandra_songs','artists_by_first_letter') yield row RETURN count(*);
Let’s create Index, Constraints and Relation the data.
/** * Here we define schema and key. */ CALL apoc.schema.assert( {Track:['title','length']}, {Artist:['name'],Track:['id'],Genre:['name']});
Now we will load data and perform Merge and Create operation so that we can create the node and relationship between the node.
/** * Here we load data in the neo4j and create node with the help of schema which we define * earlier. */ CALL apoc.load.jdbc('cassandra_songs','track_by_artist') yield row MERGE (a:Artist {name:row.artist}) MERGE (g:Genre {name:row.genre}) CREATE (t:Track {id:toString(row.track_id), title:row.track, length:row.track_length_in_seconds}) CREATE (a)-[:PERFORMED]->(t) CREATE (t)-[:GENRE]->(g);
We can see Relation Graph and it will look something like this :
/** * For Displaying Performed Relation */ MATCH p=()-[r:PERFORMED]->() RETURN p LIMIT 25;
/** * For Displaying GENRE Relation */ MATCH p=()-[r:GENRE]->() RETURN p LIMIT 100;
Oracle :
We are in the last database to migrate data to Neo4j but as obvious not least. We can download JDBC.jar file (Download) and keep it in the $Neo4j_Home/plugins and restart the Neo4j. We can provide URL in the $Neo4j_Home/conf/neo4j.conf as :
apoc.jdbc.oracle_url.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:user/password@127.0.0.1:1521/XE
After restarting the Neo4j server we are set for migrating the data from the Oracle to Neo4j. We fetch the data from the Oracle where we have a table with name employee_details to Neo4j.Now we load the driver with the APOC.
CALL apoc.load.jdbc('oracle_url','employee_details') YIELD row RETURN count(*);
Let’s create Index, Constraints and Relation the data.
/** * Here we define schema and key. */ CALL apoc.schema.assert( {EMPINFO:['name', 'age','salary']}, {EMPINFO:['id'],ADDRESS:['address']});
Now we will load data and perform Merge and Create operation so that we can create the node and relationship between the node.
/** * Here we load data in the neo4j and create node with the help of schema which we define * earlier. */ CALL apoc.load.jdbc('oracle_url','employee_details') yield row MERGE (g:ADDRESS {name:row.ADDRESS}) CREATE (t:EMPINFO {id:toString(row.ID), name:row.NAME, age:toString(row.AGE), salary:toString(row.SALARY)}) CREATE (t)-[:LIVE]->(g);
We can see Relation Graph and it will look something like this :
/** * For Displaying Performed Relation */ MATCH p=()-[r:LIVE]->() RETURN p LIMIT 25;
Now we can see that it is so easy to migrate data from other database to Neo4j.
After importing the data in Neo4j, we have to thing about the sync of data. We can use schedule process which can be timebase and automatically sync data between the databases. We can also used event based integration where we will defined the event at which we want to update the database.
Note : As we discuss I want to notify again if you do not update driver name into $Neo4j_Home/conf/neo4j.conf then you have to load driver in Neo4j otherwise you have to provide only driver name into the query.
I hope it will help for migrating data into the Neo4j. After fetching data we can write simple Scala code for persisting data in the Neo4j as we discuss in the first blog.
Reference:Team 17 and Moldy Toof Studios is releasing some free festive DLC this week to get your Escapist inmates in the holiday spirit.
The new content follows on from last year’s release of the free Santa’s Sweatshop content, and this year's offering sees a daring escapee elf unfortunately lose control of their sleigh mid-flight and make an emergency landing – right in the middle of the grounds of the Jingle Cells prison.
Your aim in the new content is to sneak the elf out of the new jail using new item combinations and unique supplies.
The Jingle Cells update will feature:
New festive themed prison to escape
20 new items and craftables
New leaderboard to make your mark on
The Jingle Cells content will be available as a free The Escapists content update for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac and Linux on the 8th December.This article is about the African-American soul and jazz poet, musician and author. For the music producer, see Guillermo Scott Herren
Gilbert Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011)[7] was an American soul and jazz poet,[2][3] musician, and author, known primarily for his work as a spoken-word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. His collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was "bluesologist",[8] which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues".[note 1][9]
His music, most notably on the albums Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and foreshadowed later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. Scott-Heron is considered by many to be the first rapper/MC ever. His recording work received much critical acclaim, especially one of his best-known compositions, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised".[10] AllMusic's John Bush called him "one of the most important progenitors of rap music," stating that "his aggressive, no-nonsense street poetry inspired a legion of intelligent rappers while his engaging songwriting skills placed him square in the R&B charts later in his career."[6]
Scott-Heron remained active until his death, and in 2010 released his first new album in 16 years, entitled I'm New Here. A memoir he had been working on for years up to the time of his death, The Last Holiday, was published posthumously in January 2012.[11][12] Scott-Heron received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He also is included in the exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) that officially opened on September 24, 2016, on the National Mall, and in an NMAAHC publication, Dream a World Anew.[13]
Early years [ edit ]
Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, Illinois.[8] His mother, Bobbie Scott, was an opera singer who performed with the New York Oratorio Society. Scott-Heron's father, Gil Heron, nicknamed "The Black Arrow", was a Jamaican soccer player in the 1950s who became the first black man to play for Celtic Football Club in Glasgow. Gil's parents separated in his early childhood[14] and he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee.[15][16] When Scott-Heron was 12 years old, his grandmother died and he returned to live with his mother in The Bronx in New York City. He enrolled at DeWitt Clinton High School,[14] but later transferred to The Fieldston School[8] after impressing the head of the English department with one of his writings and earning a full scholarship.[14] As one of five black students at the prestigious school, Scott-Heron was faced with alienation and a significant socioeconomic gap. During his admissions interview at Fieldston, an administrator asked him, "'How would you feel if you see one of your classmates go by in a limousine while you're walking up the hill from the subway?' And [he] said, 'Same way as you. Y'all can't afford no limousine. How do you feel?'"[17] This type of intractable boldness would become a hallmark of Scott-Heron's later recordings.
After completing his secondary education, Scott-Heron decided to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania because Langston Hughes (his most important literary influence) was an alumnus. It was here that Scott-Heron met Brian Jackson with whom he formed the band Black & Blues. After about two years at Lincoln, Scott-Heron took a year off to write the novels The Vulture and The Nigger Factory.[18] Scott-Heron was very heavily influenced by the Black Arts Movement. The Last Poets, a group associated with the Black Arts Movement performed at Lincoln in 1969 and Abiodun Oyewole of that Harlem group said Scott-Heron asked him after the performance, "Listen, can I start a group like you guys?"[14] Scott-Heron returned to New York City, settling in Chelsea, Manhattan. The Vulture was published by the World Publishing Company in 1970 to positive reviews.
Although Scott-Heron never completed his undergraduate degree, he was admitted to the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where he received an M.A. in creative writing in 1972. His master's thesis was titled Circle of Stone.[19] Beginning in 1972, Scott-Heron taught literature and creative writing for several years as a full-time lecturer at Federal City College in Washington, D.C. while maintaining his music career.[20]
Recording career [ edit ]
Scott-Heron began his recording career in 1970 with the LP Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Bob Thiele of Flying Dutchman Records produced the album, and Scott-Heron was accompanied by Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on conga and David Barnes on percussion and vocals. The album's 14 tracks dealt with themes such as the superficiality of television and mass consumerism, the hypocrisy of some would-be black revolutionaries, and white middle-class ignorance of the difficulties faced by inner-city residents. In the liner notes, Scott-Heron acknowledged as influences Richie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and long-time collaborator Brian Jackson.
Scott-Heron's 1971 album Pieces of a Man used more conventional song structures than the loose, spoken-word feel of Small Talk. He was joined by Jackson, Johnny Pate as conductor, Ron Carter on bass and bass guitar, drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, Burt Jones playing electric guitar, and Hubert Laws on flute and saxophone, with Thiele producing again. Scott-Heron's third album, Free Will, was released in 1972. Jackson, Purdie, Laws, Knowles, and Saunders all returned to play on Free Will and were joined by Jerry Jemmott playing bass, David Spinozza on guitar, and Horace Ott (arranger and conductor). Carter later said about Scott-Heron's voice, "He wasn't a great singer, but, with that voice, if he had whispered it would have been dynamic. It was a voice like you would have for Shakespeare."[14]
"Johannesburg" "Johannesburg", a single in 1975 and again in 1983 Problems playing this file? See media help.
1974 saw another LP collaboration with Brian Jackson, the critically acclaimed opus Winter in America, with Bob Adams on drums and Danny Bowens on bass. The album contained Scott-Heron's most cohesive material and featured more of Jackson's creative input than his previous albums had. Winter in America has been regarded by many critics as the two musicians' most artistic effort.[21][22] The following year, Scott-Heron and Jackson released Midnight Band: The First Minute of a New Day. 1975 saw the release of the single "Johannesburg", a rallying cry to the issue of apartheid in South Africa. The song would be re-issued, in 12"-single form, together with "Waiting for the Axe to Fall" and "B-movie" in 1983.
A live album, It's Your World, followed in 1976 and a recording of spoken poetry, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron, was released in 1979.[citation needed] Another success followed with the hit single "Angel Dust", which he recorded as a single with producer Malcolm Cecil. "Angel Dust" peaked at No. 15 on the R&B charts in 1978.
In 1979, Scott-Heron played at the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy to protest the use of nuclear energy following the Three Mile Island accident. Scott-Heron's song, "We Almost Lost Detroit" was included in the No Nukes album of concert highlights. It alluded to a previous nuclear power plant accident and was also the title of a book by John G. Fuller. Scott-Heron was a frequent critic of President Ronald Reagan and his conservative policies.[23]
Scott-Heron recorded and released four albums during the 1980s: 1980 and Real Eyes (1980), Reflections (1981) and Moving Target (1982). In February 1982, Ron Holloway joined the ensemble to play tenor saxophone. He toured extensively with Scott-Heron and contributed to his next album, Moving Target the same year. His tenor accompaniment is a prominent feature of the songs "Fast Lane" and "Black History/The World". Holloway continued with Scott-Heron until the summer of 1989, when he left to join Dizzy Gillespie. Several years later, Scott-Heron would make cameo appearances on two of Ron Holloway's CDs; Scorcher (1996) and Groove Update (1998), both on the Fantasy/Milestone label.[24]
Scott-Heron was dropped by Arista Records in 1985 and quit recording, though he continued to tour. The same year he helped compose and sang "Let Me See Your I.D." on the Artists United Against Apartheid album Sun City, containing the famous line, "The first time I heard there was trouble in the Middle East, I thought they were talking about Pittsburgh". The song compares racial tensions in the U.S. with those in apartheid-era South Africa, implying that the U.S. was not too far ahead in race relations. In 1993, he signed to TVT Records and released Spirits, an album that included the seminal track "'Message to the Messengers". The first track on the album criticized the rap artists of the day. Scott-Heron is known in many circles as "the Godfather of rap"[25][26] and is widely considered to be one of the genre's founding fathers. Given the political consciousness that lies at the foundation of his work, he can also be called a founder of political rap. Message to the Messengers was a plea for the new generation of rappers to speak for change rather than perpetuate the current social situation, and to be more articulate and artistic. Regarding hip hop music in the 1990s, he said in an interview:
They need to study music. I played in several bands before I began my career as a poet. There's a big difference between putting words over some music, and blending those same words into the music. There's not a lot of humor. They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don't really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.[27] — Gil Scott-Heron
Later years [ edit ]
Prison terms and more performing [ edit ]
In 2001, Scott-Heron was sentenced to one to three years imprisonment in a New York State prison for possession of cocaine. While out of jail in 2002, he appeared on the Blazing Arrow album by Blackalicious.[28] He was released on parole in 2003, the year BBC TV broadcast the documentary Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—Scott-Heron was arrested for possession of a crack pipe during the editing of the film in October 2003 and received a six-month prison sentence.[29]
On July 5, 2006, Scott-Heron was sentenced to two to four years in a New York State prison for violating a plea deal on a drug-possession charge by leaving a drug rehabilitation center. He claimed that he left because the clinic refused to supply him with HIV medication. This story led to the presumption that the artist was HIV positive, subsequently confirmed in a 2008 interview.[30][31][32] Originally sentenced to serve until July 13, 2009, he was paroled on May 23, 2007.[33]
After his release, Scott-Heron began performing live again, starting with a show at SOB's restaurant and nightclub in New York on September 13, 2007. On stage, he stated that he and his musicians were working on a new album and that he |
But for Paul, it was a return to form, and a return to the tactics he's been able to employ so successfully from his Senate seat. The healthcare reform fight is an opening for Paul to get back into the spotlight and try to win headlines for his uncompromising brand of fiscal conservatism, and it's one the ophthalmologist and son of an obstetrician is seizing with vigor.
"I have been told that the House Obamacare bill is under lock and key, in a secure location, and not available for me or the public to view," he tweeted last week.
I have been told that the House Obamacare bill is under lock & key, in a secure location, & not available for me or the public to view. — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 2, 2017
Paul showed up to the room where the bill was being worked on with his own copying machine, vowing to let the American people see it. When he wasn't granted a copy, he talked to reporters instead.
"If you'd recall, when Obamacare was passed in 2009 and 2010, Nancy Pelosi said you'll know what's in it after you pass it," Paul said. "The Republican Party shouldn't act in the same way."
The senator's office tweeted out locations throughout Washington where the bill might be hidden.
We are continuing our search for the Obamacare Lite bill! Do you know where the secret location might be? Has anyone seen the bill? pic.twitter.com/WcSIDTs0vP — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 3, 2017
There were some obvious places to look. Perhaps near the statues of some great Republicans from the past. pic.twitter.com/vXLOQwaQZi — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 3, 2017
Nope. Not there. Maybe this one. pic.twitter.com/aA9C9iSNUu — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 3, 2017
Maybe it's over there with the Justices for safe keeping? pic.twitter.com/CXEWPW9BPo — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 3, 2017
But Paul was making a serious point with his whimsical tactics. He has joined with Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, along with the House Freedom Caucus in insisting on full repeal of Obamacare's spending, mandates and taxes, instead of the partial repeal the GOP is pursuing, which critics say would leave the country with "Obamacare-lite."
The senator and Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., have introduced their own Obamacare replacement plan, which goes further than the one backed by House Republican leaders and does not rely on refundable tax credits to help people buy health insurance. The bill does contain tax credits to bolster expanded health savings accounts.
Paul has also tweaked the GOP leadership when he said publicly that then President-elect Trump agreed with him about the need to repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously. Paul was originally elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave election, when Republicans gained seats in Congress in the aftermath of Obamacare's enactment.
Paul's conservative allies in the House give him some chance to bargain for a better deal. On healthcare reform in particular, a combination of staunch conservatives or moderate Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine could determine the fate of the GOP leadership's efforts.
In the meantime, Paul is back in a familiar place: at the center of attention.The feminist activist group UltraViolet condemned Donald Trump’s comments on the Second Amendment on Tuesday, saying that he had threatened violence against Hillary Clinton, and that he had done so because she is a woman.
Nita Chaudhary, the group’s co-founder, issued a statement:
“If you thought Donald Trump couldn’t sink any lower you were wrong. His continued insistence that if the first woman president is elected it will be illegitimate, ‘rigged,’ and now worthy of ‘second amendment’ remedies is beyond the pale, but not surprising from a man whose life has been dedicated to denigrating women and whose campaign has been built on espousing violence against his so-called political enemies. This kind of rhetoric from a presidential candidate is dangerous and it ought to horrify every American.”
UltraViolet Action describes itself as “an online community of over 1,000,000 women and men who take collective action to expose and fight sexism in the public sector, private sector and the media.”
Trump’s 2nd Amendment threat isn’t that surprising given how he denigrates women & espouses violent rhetoric: https://t.co/z2F6sSHn8i — UltraViolet (@UltraViolet) August 9, 2016
Though it has not made any recent statements about Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assaults, UltraViolet Action has targeted conservatives almost exclusively, including U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), who called Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) the “Darth Vader of the financial services world.”
Chaudhry said the term “Darth Vader” was “offensive, sexist and out of line” when applied to Warren. She also blamed Trump for the remark, telling the Boston Globe: “Comments like these, which sound eerily similar to something that Donald Trump would say, have no place in American politics and speak to the impact that Donald Trump is having on the discourse coming out of the Republican party.”
Trump did not, in fact, call for Clinton or anyone else to be assassinated.
As UltraViolet itself noted in a tweet — unintentionally undoing its own argument — Trump’s rhetoric is simply what gun owners have been saying for decades: that attempts to undo the Second Amendment will be politically, and physically, impossible.
THIS –> Trump’s Violent Claim About The Second Amendment & Hillary Clinton Echoes What The @NRA Has Said For Years https://t.co/JOD9SdOC4f — UltraViolet (@UltraViolet) August 9, 2016
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.Ask Americans to name the former U.S. president whose face currently graces the U.S. $10 dollar bill and most will be quick to answer Alexander Hamilton.
Sure, it’s a trick question. But a new study from memory researchers at Washington University in St. Louis confirms that most Americans are confident that Alexander Hamilton was once president of the United States.
“Our findings from a recent survey suggest that about 71 percent of Americans are fairly certain that Alexander Hamilton is among our nation’s past presidents,” said Henry L. Roediger III, a human memory expert at Washington University. “I had predicted that Benjamin Franklin would be the person most falsely recognized as a president, but Hamilton beat him by a mile.
“The interesting thing is that their confidence in Hamilton having been president is fairly high — higher than for six or so actual presidents.”
Roediger, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, has been testing the ability of undergraduate college students to remember the names of presidents since 1973, when he first administered the test to undergraduates while a psychology graduate student at Yale University.
Roediger’s 2014 study in the journal Science suggests that we as a nation do fairly well at naming the first few and the last few presidents in the order they served. But our recall abilities then fall off quickly, with fewer than 20 percent able to remember more than the last eight or nine presidents in order.
The focus of the current study is a bit different, said Roediger, because it’s designed to gauge how well Americans can recognize the names of past presidents, as opposed to the much greater challenge of directly recalling them from memory and listing their names on a blank sheet of paper.
This study, published online this week in the journal Psychological Science, is co-authored by K. Andrew DeSoto, a former psychology graduate student at Washington University who is now a research methodology fellow at the Association for Psychological Science.
“Our studies over the past 40 years show that Americans can recall about half the U.S. presidents, but the question we explore with this study is whether people know the presidents but are simply unable to access them for recall,” Roediger said.
The current study is based on a name recognition test administered to 326 people via Mechanical Turk, an interactive online service operated by Amazon.
Participants were asked to identify past presidents when presented with a list of names that included actual presidents and non-presidents, such as Hamilton and Franklin. The lists also presented other false items, including familiar names from American history and non-famous common names, such as Thomas Moore. With each president-or-non-president response, participants indicated their level of certainty on a scale of zero-to-100, where 100 was absolutely certain.
The rate for correctly recognizing the names of past presidents was 88 percent, well above recall but far from perfect. Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur were recognized less than 60 percent of the time. Hamilton was more frequently identified as president than several actual presidents, and people were very confident when saying he was president (83 on the 100-point scale).
The study identified three other prominent figures from American history that more than a quarter of those surveyed incorrectly recognize as past presidents, including Franklin, Hubert Humphrey and John Calhoun.
Perhaps more striking, nearly a third of those surveyed falsely recognized the common name “Thomas Moore” as someone who was once an American president.
Humphrey served as vice president and ran for president in 1968. Franklin was a famous American involved in the events surrounding the founding of the country and served as ambassador to France. Calhoun was a senator and vice president for seven years.
“These factors may account for their general familiarity in American history, but if subjects cannot recollect their roles, then false recognition as president may occur because subjects cannot oppose the high name familiarity with knowledge of their actual roles,” Roediger said. “John Calhoun is a surprise, because he was a supporter of states rights and slavery, but apparently people remember the name but not why they know it.”
The high false alarm rate for Thomas Moore, however, came as another surprise to the researchers. People with this name have served in the U.S. House of Representatives, but none are particularly famous.
“Our best guess is that the Anglo-Saxon structure of his name, the frequency of both parts of the name, and possibly his confusability with Sir Thomas More, the counselor to King Henry VIII, may have contributed to the name’s familiarity and false recognition,” Roediger said.
Roediger and DeSoto suggest that our ability to recognize the names of famous people hinges on those names appearing in a context that’s related to the source of their fame.
“Elvis Presley was famous, but he would never be recognized as a past president,” Roediger said. “Most of the names in our study that were falsely recognized as belonging to past presidents are those with strong ties to American history. These same individuals would not be recognized if the task were to recognize famous musicians from the 1960s. It’s not just enough to have a familiar name, but it must be a familiar name in the right context.”
This study adds to an emerging line of research that focuses on how people remember history — a field called collective memory or historical memory.
A striking detail emerging from recent studies by Roediger and DeSoto is that the ability of people to remember the names of presidents follows very consistent and reliable patterns.
“No matter how we test it — in the same experiment, with different people, across generations, in the laboratory, with online studies, with different types of tests — there are clear patterns in how the presidents are remembered and how they are forgotten,” DeSoto said.
While many of these patterns can be explained using decades-old theories of memory, the findings are also sparking new ideas about how lasting fame is shaped by the nuances of human memory function.
“Even on a recognition test, knowledge of American presidents is imperfect and prone to error,” Roediger said. “The false recognition data support the theory that false fame can arise from contextual familiarity. And our recall studies show that even the most famous person in America maybe be forgotten in as short a time as 50-75 years.”David Thomas Smith’s Anthropocene series examines global landscapes that have been transformed by the actions and activities humanity. Smith has created these images using a unique and groundbreaking technique. Each image is composited from thousands and thousands of thumbnails extracted as screen grabs from Google Maps, which are then reconstructed piece by piece using Photoshop to produce such incredibly detailed images, a level of detail one can only really experience in person.
Anthropocene itself reflects upon the complex structures that make up the centres of global capitalism, transforming the aerial landscapes of sites associated with industries such as oil, precious metals, consumer culture information and excess. Thousands of seemingly insignificant coded pieces of information are sown together like knots in a rug to reveal a grander spectacle.Questions of photographic and economic realities are further complicated through the formal use of patterns that have their origins in the ancient civilizations of Persia. This work draws upon the patterns and motifs used by Persian rug makers, especially the way Afghani weavers use the rug to record their experiences more literally with vivid images of the war torn land that surrounds them.This collision between the old and the new, fact and fiction, surveillance and invisibility, is part of a strategy to reflect on the global order of things. (via)Ethel Booba likes the world to think that she’s nothing more than a comedienne with a pretty face, but hey, this girl clearly has brains.
This busty beauty doesn’t even need more than 160 characters to prove that she makes sense.
Ethel can practically get away with saying anything because she ends her tweets with with “charot,” which is the gay linggo for “just a joke.”
If you’re feeling particularly bad about the current happenings in the country, here are Ethel’s latest Tweets that will leave you in stitches and will actually get you thinking.
1. Preach, girl!
Sex Education is Pro Life. Ilang buhay ang maliligtas natin sa HIV/AIDS & mga kabataan nasira ang buhay dahil sa unwanted pregnancy. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) December 5, 2016
2. Only Ethel can get away with something like this.
Kung maayos lang ang judicial system sa bansa baka matagal ng bilanggo itong ibang Senador at Congressman. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) December 5, 2016
3. …and this.
Galit sa media kasi mali mali daw ang balita pero ito sila at nagkakalat din ng maling impormasyon. Parehas lang kayo. Shit vs Shit. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) December 5, 2016
4. She is so refreshing!
LOOK: Cabinet Sec. Leoncio Evasco Jr.’s text message telling VP Leni Robredo to desist from attending Cabinet’s Christmas Party. Charot! pic.twitter.com/gCNMUEYN4F — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) December 4, 2016
5. She’s not scared to speak up against powerful politicians.
Kung ibabalik natin ang Death Penalty dapat una ipatupad sa mapatunayang corrupt sa gobyerno. Kaso baka maubusan tayo ng politiko. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) October 13, 2016
6. Again, she can get away with anything because… “charot!”
Yung mga conspiracy theory ng kung sino sino ang ginagawang basehan ng katotohanan. Bagsak na talaga ang edukasyon. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) November 29, 2016
7. Good point!
Ang daming time makipag-away sa Facebook pero walang time magcheck sa Google. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) November 29, 2016
8. We get this, Ethel.
You have the right to express your opinion, but we still have the right to think that you’re gago. Charot! — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) November 22, 2016
9. Really, humor is the key to stay sane.
Ronnie Dayan: Sinampal nya po ako at tumunog ng PAK! Hearing Representative: Anong sabi mo? Ronnie Dayan: GANERN po. Charot! #PakGanern — Ethel Booba (@IamEthylGabison) November 25, 2016
10. No matter how she says what she says, she wants peace too! We all do.This article is about the powered industrial moving truck known as a forklift. For the manual pallet -moving tool sometimes called a pallet truck, see pallet jack
Forklift Forklift being operated by a US airman Classification Vehicle Industry Various Application Multiple Fuel source Various including:
Gasoline
Propane
CNG
Diesel
Lead Acid Battery
Fuel cell Powered Yes Wheels Various wheel configurations Axles 2-3 Components Power source, Mast, Frame, Counterweight, Cab, Axles, Wheels, Overhead Guard, Load Backrest, Hydraulic Pump, Hydraulic Lines, Hydraulic Controls, Hydraulic Cylinders and Attachments
A forklift (also called lift truck, jitney, fork truck, fork hoist, and forklift truck) is a powered industrial truck used to lift and move materials over short distances. The forklift was developed in the early 20th century by various companies, including Clark, which made transmissions, and Yale & Towne Manufacturing, which made hoists.[1][2][3] Since World War II, the use and development of the forklift truck have greatly expanded worldwide. Forklifts have become an indispensable piece of equipment in manufacturing and warehousing.[4] In 2013, the top 20 manufacturers worldwide posted sales of $30.4 billion, with 944,405 machines sold.[5]
History [ edit ]
A forklift truck being used during World War II
The middle nineteenth century through the early 20th century saw the developments that led to today's modern forklifts. The forerunners of the modern forklift were manually powered hoists that were used to lift loads.[4] In 1906, the Pennsylvania Railroad introduced battery powered platform trucks for moving luggage at their Altoona, Pennsylvania train station. World War I saw the development of different types of material handling equipment in the United Kingdom by Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies of Ipswich. This was in part due to the labor shortages caused by the war. In 1917, Clark in the United States began developing and using powered tractor and powered lift tractors in their factories. In 1919, the Towmotor Company, and Yale & Towne Manufacturing in 1920, entered the lift truck market in the United States.[2] Continuing development and expanded use of the forklift continued through the 1920s and 1930s. The introduction of hydraulic power and the development of the first electric power forklifts, along with the use of standardized pallets in the late 1930s, helped to increase the popularity of forklift trucks.[4]
The start of World War II, like World War I before, spurred the use of forklift trucks in the war effort.[6] Following the war, more efficient methods for storing products in warehouses were being implemented. Warehouses needed more maneuverable forklift trucks that could reach greater heights and new forklift models were made that filled this need.[7] For example, in 1954, a British company named Lansing Bagnall, now part of KION Group, developed what was claimed to be the first narrow aisle electric reach truck.[6] The development changed the design of warehouses leading to narrower aisles and higher load stacking that increased storage capability.[6] During the 1950s and 1960s, operator safety became a concern due to the increasing lifting heights and capacities. Safety features such as load backrests and operator cages, called overhead guards, began to be added to forklifts produced in this era.[4] In the late 1980s, ergonomic design began to be incorporated in new forklift designs to improve operator comfort, reduce injuries and increase productivity.[8] During the 1990s, exhaust emissions from forklift operations began to be addressed which led to emission standards being implemented for forklift manufacturers in various countries.[9] The introduction of AC power forklifts, along with fuel cell technology, are also refinements in continuing forklift development.[4][10]
General operations [ edit ]
Forklift cab with control layout.
Forklifts are rated for loads at a specified maximum weight and a specified forward center of gravity. This information is located on a nameplate provided by the manufacturer, and loads must not exceed these specifications. In many jurisdictions, it is illegal to alter or remove the nameplate without the permission of the forklift manufacturer.
An important aspect of forklift operation is that it must have rear-wheel steering. While this increases maneuverability in tight cornering situations, it differs from a driver’s traditional experience with other wheeled vehicles. While steering, as there is no caster action, it is unnecessary to apply steering force to maintain a constant rate of turn.
Another critical characteristic of the forklift is its instability. The forklift and load must be considered a unit with a continually varying center of gravity with every movement of the load. A forklift must never negotiate a turn at speed with a raised load, where centrifugal and gravitational forces may combine to cause a disastrous tip-over accident. The forklift is designed with a load limit for the forks which is decreased with fork elevation and undercutting of the load (i.e., when a load does not butt against the fork "L"). A loading plate for loading reference is usually located on the forklift. A forklift should not be used as a personnel lift without the fitting of specific safety equipment, such as a "cherry picker" or "cage".
Forklifts are a critical element of warehouses and distribution centers. It’s imperative that these structures be designed to accommodate their efficient and safe movement. In the case of Drive-In/Drive-Thru Racking, a forklift needs to travel inside a storage bay that is multiple pallet positions deep to place or retrieve a pallet. Often, forklift drivers are guided into the bay through guide rails on the floor and the pallet is placed on cantilevered arms or rails. These maneuvers require well-trained operators. Since every pallet requires the truck to enter the storage structure, damage is more common than with other types of storage. In designing a drive-in system, dimensions of the fork truck, including overall width and mast width, must be carefully considered.[11]
Forklift control and capabilities [ edit ]
Forklift hydraulics are controlled either with levers directly manipulating the hydraulic valves or by electrically controlled actuators, using smaller "finger" levers for control. The latter allows forklift designers more freedom in ergonomic design.
Forklift trucks are available in many variations and load capacities. In a typical warehouse setting most forklifts have load capacities between one and five tons. Larger machines, up to 50 tons lift capacity, are used for lifting heavier loads, including loaded shipping containers.[12]
In addition to a control to raise and lower the forks (also known as blades or tines), the operator can tilt the mast to compensate for a load's tendency to angle the blades toward the ground and risk slipping off the forks. Tilt also provides a limited ability to operate on non-level ground. Skilled forklift operators annually compete in obstacle and timed challenges at regional forklift rodeos.
Design types [ edit ]
A truck-mounted forklift.
The following is a list, in no particular order, of the more common lift truck types:[13]
Hand pallet truck - no onboard power system of any kind; the operator's muscle power is used to jack-up and move loads.
Walkie low lift truck [14] - powered pallet truck, usually electrically powered [15]
- powered pallet truck, usually electrically powered Rider low lift truck [14] - usually electrically powered
- usually electrically powered Towing tractor - may be internal combustion engine or electrically powered
Walkie stacker [14] - usually electrically powered
- usually electrically powered Rider stacker [14] - usually electrically powered
- usually electrically powered Reach truck [14] - variant on a Rider Stacker forklift, designed for small aisles, usually Electrically Powered, named because the forks can extend to reach the load. There are two variants, moving carriage, which are common in North America, and moving mast which are common in the rest of the world, and generally regarded as safer [ citation needed ]
- variant on a Rider Stacker forklift, designed for small aisles, usually Electrically Powered, named because the forks can extend to reach the load. There are two variants, moving carriage, which are common in North America, and moving mast which are common in the rest of the world, and generally regarded as safer Electric counterbalanced truck[14]- comes in Stand on End Control, Stand on Center Control, and Sit Down Center Control, which is the most numerous[ citation needed ]
Electrical forklift
Internal Combustion Engine Powered Counterbalanced Forklift [14] - comes in Stand on End Control, Stand on Center Control, and Sit Down Center Control, which is the most numerous. Engines may be diesel, kerosene, gasoline, natural gas, butane, or propane fueled, and may be either two-stroke spark ignition, four stroke spark ignition (common), two-stroke compression ignition, and four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American Engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries such as Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems. [ citation needed ]
- comes in Stand on End Control, Stand on Center Control, and Sit Down Center Control, which is the most numerous. Engines may be diesel, kerosene, gasoline, natural gas, butane, or propane fueled, and may be either two-stroke spark ignition, four stroke spark ignition (common), two-stroke compression ignition, and four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American Engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries such as Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems. Battery electric forklifts, powered by lead-acid batteries or, increasingly, lithium-ion batteries, include: cushion tire forklifts, scissor lifts, order pickers, stackers, reach trucks and pallet jacks. Electric forklifts are primarily used indoors on flat, even surfaces. Batteries prevent the emission of harmful fumes and are recommended for indoor facilities, such as food-processing and healthcare sectors.
Fuel cell forklifts also produce no local emissions, can be refueled in 3 minutes, and are often used in refrigerated warehouses as their performance is not degraded by lower temperatures.[10]
Electric Multidirectional Sideloader
Sideloader [14] - comes in Stand on End Control, and Sit Down End Control, which is the most numerous. It may be electrically powered, or have an internal combustion engine. Engines may be diesel, kerosene, gasoline, natural gas, butane, or propane fueled, and may be either two-stroke spark ignition, four stroke spark ignition (common), two-stroke compression ignition, and four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American Engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries such as Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems. Some sideloaders have hybrid drivetrains. [ citation needed ]
- comes in Stand on End Control, and Sit Down End Control, which is the most numerous. It may be electrically powered, or have an internal combustion engine. Engines may be diesel, kerosene, gasoline, natural gas, butane, or propane fueled, and may be either two-stroke spark ignition, four stroke spark ignition (common), two-stroke compression ignition, and four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American Engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries such as Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems. Some sideloaders have hybrid drivetrains. Telescopic handler - comes in Stand on Center Control, and Sit Down Center Control, which is the most numerous. Usually has an Internal Combustion Engine. Engines are almost always diesel, but sometimes operate on kerosene, and sometimes use propane injection as a power boost. Some old units are two-stroke compression ignition, most are four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American Engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries like Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems. Some Telescopic handlers have Hybrid drivetrains. [ citation needed ]
Walkie order picking truck [14] - usually Electrically Powered
- usually Electrically Powered Rider order picking truck[14] - commonly called an "Order Picker"; like a small Reach Truck, except the operator rides in a cage welded to the fork carriage, while wearing a specially designed safety harness to prevent falls. A special toothed grab holds the pallet to the forks. The operator transfers the load onto the pallet one article at a time by hand. This is an efficient way of picking less-than-pallet-load shipments, and is popular for use in large distribution centers.
A reach truck with a pantograph allowing the extension of the forks in tight aisles.
Articulated very narrow aisle counterbalanced trucks - sometimes called "Flexi or Bendi Trucks" after two of the largest manufacturers. Comes in stand on center control, and sit down center control, which is the most numerous. May have an internal combustion engine or an electric motor. Electric motors are most common. Engines may be diesel, kerosene, gasoline, natural gas, butane, or propane fueled, and may be either two-stroke spark ignition, four-stroke spark ignition (common), two-stroke compression ignition, and four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries such as Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems. Some units have hybrid drivetrains. [ citation needed ] Unlike standard counterbalance and reach forklifts, These forklifts are steered via the front swivel articulation of the forklift and are therefore much different to manoeuvre than regular forklifts and additionally have no pantograph feature for retrieving stock in narrow aisles.
Unlike standard counterbalance and reach forklifts, These forklifts are steered via the front swivel articulation of the forklift and are therefore much different to manoeuvre than regular forklifts and additionally have no pantograph feature for retrieving stock in narrow aisles. Guided very narrow aisle truck - A counterbalance type Sit Down Rider Electric Forklift fitted with a specialized mast assembly. The mast is capable of rotating 90 degrees, and the forks can then advance like on a reach mechanism, to pick full pallets. Because the forklift does not have to turn, the aisles can be exceptionally narrow, and if wire guidance is fitted in the floor of the building the machine can almost work on its own. Masts on this type of machine tend to be very high. The higher the racking that can be installed, the higher the density the storage can reach. This sort of storage system is popular in cities where land prices are really high, as by building the racking up to three times higher than normal and using these machines, it is possible to stock an incredible amount of material in what appears to be a small space. [16]
Guided very narrow aisle order picking truck - counterbalance type Order Picking Truck similar to the guided very narrow aisle truck, except that the operator and the controls which operate the machine are in a cage welded to the mast. The operator wears a restraint system to protect him against falls. Otherwise the description is the same as guided very narrow aisle truck. [ citation needed ]
Truck-mounted forklift / sod loader - comes in sit down center control. Usually has an internal combustion engine. Engines are almost always diesel, but sometimes operate on kerosene, and sometimes use propane injection as a power boost. Some old units are two-stroke compression ignition, most are four-stroke compression ignition (common). North American engines come with advanced emission control systems. Forklifts built in countries such as Iran or Russia will typically have no emission control systems.
Specialty trucks [ edit ]
At the other end of the spectrum from the counterbalanced forklift trucks are more 'high end' specialty trucks:
Articulated counterbalance trucks
These are, unlike most lift trucks, front-wheel steer and are a hybrid VNA (very narrow aisle) truck designed to be both able to offload trailers and place the load in narrow aisle racking. Increasingly these trucks are able to compete in terms of pallet storage density, lift heights and pallet throughput with guided very narrow aisle trucks, while also being capable of loading trucks, which VNA units are incapable of doing.[17]
Guided very narrow aisle trucks
These are rail- or wire-guided and available with lift heights up to 40 feet non-top-tied and 98 feet top-tied. Two forms are available:'man-down' and'man-riser', where the operator elevates with the load for increased visibility or for multilevel 'break bulk' order picking. This type of truck, unlike articulated narrow aisle trucks, requires a high standard of floor flatness.[citation needed]
Omnidirectional trucks
Omnidirectional technology (such as Mecanum wheels) can allow a forklift truck to move forward, diagonally and laterally, or in any direction on a surface. An omnidirectional wheel system is able to rotate the truck 360 degrees in its own footprint or strafe sideways without turning the truck cabin. One example is the Airtrax Sidewinder. This forklift truck has also made an appearance in the TV series called 'Mythbusters'.
UL 558 safety rated trucks
In North America, some internal combustion powered industrial vehicles carry Underwriters Laboratories ratings that are part of UL 558. Industrial trucks that are considered "safety" carry the designations GS (Gasoline Safety) for gasoline powered, DS (Diesel Safety) for diesel powered, LPS (Liquid Propane Safety) for liquified propane or GS/LPS for a dual fuel gasoline/liquified propane powered truck.[18]
UL 558 is a two-stage Safety Standard. The basic standard, which is G, D, LP, and G/LP is what Underwriter's Laboratories considers the bare minimum required for a lift truck. This is a voluntary standard, and there is no requirement in North America at least by any Government Agency for manufacturers to meet this standard.
The slightly more stringent GS, DS, LPS, and GP/LPS, or Safety standard does provide some minimal protection, however it is extremely minimal. In the past Underwriter's Laboratory offered specialty EX and DX safety certifications. If you require higher levels of protection you must contact your local Underwriter's Laboratory Office and check ask them what the correct safety standard is for your workplace.[citation needed]
UL 583 safety rated trucks
UL 583 is the Electric equivalent of UL 558. As with UL 558 it is a two-stage standard.[citation needed]
Explosion proof trucks "EX RATED"
These are for operation in potentially explosive atmospheres found in chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food and drink, logistics or other industries handling flammable material. Commonly referred to as Pyroban trucks in Europe, they must meet the requirements of the ATEX 94/9/EC Directive if used in Zone 1, 2, 21 or 22 areas and be maintained accordingly.[citation needed]
U.S. Military 10K-AT "Adverse Terrain"
Automated forklift trucks [ edit ]
In order to decrease work wages, reduce operational cost and improve productivity, automated forklifts have also been developed. [19][20] Automated forklifts are also called forked automated guided vehicles and are already available from a growing number of suppliers.[21]
Counterbalanced forklift components [ edit ]
A typical counterbalanced forklift contains the following components:
Image of an electric forklift with component descriptions
Truck frame - is the base of the machine to which the mast, axles, wheels, counterweight, overhead guard and power source are attached. The frame may have fuel and hydraulic fluid tanks constructed as part of the frame assembly.
- is the base of the machine to which the mast, axles, wheels, counterweight, overhead guard and power source are attached. The frame may have fuel and hydraulic fluid tanks constructed as part of the frame assembly. Counterweight - is a mass attached to the rear of the forklift truck frame. The purpose of the counterweight is to counterbalance the load being lifted. In an electric forklift the large battery may serve as part of the counterweight.
- is a mass attached to the rear of the forklift truck frame. The purpose of the counterweight is to counterbalance the load being lifted. In an electric forklift the large battery may serve as part of the counterweight. Cab - is the area that contains a seat for the operator along with the control pedals, steering wheel, levers, switches and a dashboard containing operator readouts. The cab area may be open air or enclosed but it is covered by the cage-like overhead guard assembly. When enclosed, the cab may also be equipped with a cab heater for cold climate countries along with a fan or air conditioning for hot weather. [22]
- is the area that contains a seat for the operator along with the control pedals, steering wheel, levers, switches and a dashboard containing operator readouts. The cab area may be open air or enclosed but it is covered by the cage-like overhead guard assembly. When enclosed, the cab may also be equipped with a cab heater for cold climate countries along with a fan or air conditioning for hot weather. Overhead guard - is a metal roof supported by posts at each corner of the cab that helps protect the operator from any falling objects. On some forklifts, the overhead guard is an integrated part of the frame assembly. [23]
- is a metal roof supported by posts at each corner of the cab that helps protect the operator from any falling objects. On some forklifts, the overhead guard is an integrated part of the frame assembly. Power source - may consist of an internal combustion engine that can be powered by LP gas, C |
between marching a long way across the map or filing into teleporters with limited space and long cooldowns.
Human base planning.
In the end, then, the humans feel like an old 18th or 19th century colonial settlement deep inside hostile country. Inside the perimeter is safety and security and theoretically limitless defensive power. Beyond those walls, however, is a hard-to-control countryside that can swallow up an army that strays too far from aid.
The Goo are strangest faction of the bunch, and the one I'm struggling to get the hang-of. If the Beta expand onto the map and build lots of little bases, and the humans operate at a distance from one mega-base, the Goo don't have a base of any kind. The globs of nanomechanical goop, the Mother Goos, swarm around the map, vacuuming up resources and using them to spawn units. They're probably the most interesting faction, from a thematic and design perspective, but they're a nightmare for a dedicated turtler like me.
Playing the Goo is partly a shell-game as you try to keep your Mother Goos hidden from the enemy, but it's also a bit like being the Mongol horde sweeping out of the plains to level everything in your path. The Goo are wildly vulnerable and utterly devastating, all the same time. But controlling them requires some kind of Sun Tzu formlessness that I have yet to master.It’s Not Enough To “Move To The Left”
I often make fun of the Democratic Party for its bungling. (See our latest print issue for a special feature mocking Jon Ossoff’s comically ineffective campaign flyers.) One criticism I make is now commonplace: the Party’s messaging has been a failure and it has ceased to offer working people any good reason to believe it will improve their lives. But I’m also actually interested in seeing it improve, and I’m excited by progress. I think it’s important to acknowledge when things are done well, not just scoff when things are done badly.
Since the devastating 2016 election, some senior people in the party who did not recognize the seriousness of its problems have begun to reconsider. Chuck Schumer has gone from thinking that Democrats could discard working class rural Pennsylvanians and rely on suburban Philadelphia Republicans to vowing that “Democrats will show the country that we’re the party on the side of working people.” A record number of Democrats are now supporting single-payer health care, which has gone from something Hillary Clinton insisted would “never, ever happen” to a potential litmus test for Democratic candidates in 2020. There is evidence that Democratic candidates are “moving left” after seeing the rising number of people who identify with the party’s progressive faction, and conscious of the need to appeal to the demographic that Bernie Sanders energized and Hillary Clinton alienated.
Because I am a leftist who agrees that Democrats need to seriously address problems of economic injustice, I’m encouraged by this development. I think it’s both morally correct and strategically sound. Despite some PR gaffes, the party is slowly moving toward discussing more of the issues that directly affect people’s lives, and possibly focusing a little less on Trump’s character and Russian meddling.
There is something very important to understand here, though: it’s not enough to “move to the left.” Many observers, including myself, often discuss the Democrats’ failures as a “messaging” problem. And partly, it is. But to talk in these terms risks implying that the most important thing is to change what you say rather than what you do and who you are. If we discuss this solely as a “messaging” problem then we risk affirming a cynical view of politics, one in which the way to win votes is simply to figure out what voters want to hear and then say it to them.
It’s true, of course, that the unexpected successes of “populist” candidates in 2016 was tied to people’s actual conditions. But Bernie Sanders did not just do well because he’s a leftist, he also did well because he is Bernie Sanders. And Donald Trump is not just the president because he appealed to bigotry and a hated of elites, he is president because he is Donald Trump. This sounds like mere truism, but it’s important: the character of your candidates matters, and can be just as important as the words that come out of their mouths. Personality is an incredibly important part of politics. Barack Obama became the president because of who he was, and the fact that he convinced the United States to embrace him as a person. Anyone can come along offering “hope” and “change” or telling you they’re going to stick it to the D.C. elites. In order to actually convince people of that, though, you have to convince them to buy into you.
I do not think Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America simply because he is the most left-wing politician in America. Yes, those who like him support his policies, and believe in free college and paid family leave. But they also trust and respect him. They like him because he has a certain kind of integrity: he usually says what he means, seems to genuinely care about people, and passes up opportunities for personal pettiness. That’s why even many Republicans are positive about Sanders. The Atlantic reported that in Congress, “Sanders has managed to be respected — even liked — by much of the chamber, according to members on both sides of the aisle,” contrasting him with the universally despised Ted Cruz. It’s an instructive comparison: Cruz’s contempt for his colleagues has made it difficult for them to work with him, whereas Bernie Sanders passed more roll call amendments in the House than any other representative, even in a Republican congress. (For all the standard dismissal of Sanders as a dreamer, he is actually an extreme pragmatist when it comes to legislative compromise.)
The recent history of the Labour Party in Britain offers a similar lesson. When hard left candidate Jeremy Corbyn took over the party in 2015, many in the political center insisted that his leadership would be a disaster. One of the key arguments they made was that the British people didn’t want to move further left. The Labour Party, they said, had already tried that: Ed Miliband, the leader before Corbyn, was further left than his New Labour predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, yet the party’s fortunes had worsened under Miliband. Clearly socialism doesn’t sell.
Yet while Corbyn’s leadership started badly, with some disastrous polling, he ultimately boosted the Labour Party’s membership to record numbers and brought the party a massive increase in its vote share. To those who had pointed to the Miliband example, this was a strange outcome: Blair, the centrist, had done well. Brown, the centrist, had done worse. Miliband, the leftist, had done even worse. Corbyn, the far leftist, had done almost as well as Blair. (These are massive oversimplifications obviously.)
It’s not difficult to see why this makes sense, though: politics is about more than where you fall in the ideological spectrum. Corbyn didn’t just do well because British people were angry about inequality and were receptive to leftism. He did well because they embraced Corbyn the person. At the time he was selected as a leader, I argued that Corbyn might well prove a more formidable political leader than people expected, because he had a personal warmth and likability that helped him appear sincere about his promise to bring a “new kind of politics.” And I think that turned out to be true. “Corbynism” became an actual serious phenomenon while “Milifandom” had always been a sad joke.
We might legitimately be troubled by the role of individual character in political success. After all, at its worst this creates personality cults, whether it was Obama’s dictatorial-looking “HOPE” posters or Bernie’s unkempt hair appearing on T-shirts as a sort of angelic halo. It’s troubling when political movements center around individual people, because it puts too much emphasis and responsibility on a single person, when political success can only be achieved through collective action.
But to a certain extent, character is unavoidable: it matters who you are, not just what you say. Persuasive appeals are of three kinds: appeals to logic, appeals to emotion, and appeals to character, and anyone aspiring to political success should have all three. Democratic candidates are not just pushing a platform, they are pushing themselves.
I worry that unless this is recognized, there may be an impending “Miliband problem.” In 2018, many Democrats will “run to the left,” signing on for single payer and free college. They’ll fill their speeches will references to jobs and wages and the Stagnant Middle Class and the Disappearance of The American Dream, and they’ll get their pictures taken with ironworkers. Everyone will appear at a podium standing next to Bernie Sanders. Then, if those candidates lose, centrist Democrats will conclude that the Sanders wing was wrong, that people do not actually want these things, and that America is an inherently conservative country, with the way to win votes being to appeal to the “median voter.” That won’t necessarily be true, however. Far more is involved here than simply sounding somewhat leftier. You also have to sound more sincere. And if Democrats like Chuck Schumer, who have previously spent their entire lives as buddies of Wall Street, suddenly put on hardhats and rail against the Millionaires And Billionaires, they may actually end up sounding less sincere. And if they do worse, it will be partially because of this perceived insincerity, while conveniently appearing to be a repudiation of “left politics.”
Trustworthy character isn’t the only thing Democrats will need beyond “moving left.” They also need real grassroots organizations and mass involvement, and a clear commitment to results over mere rhetoric. If “Medicare For All” just becomes an empty slogan, with Democrats as ill-prepared to implement it as Republicans were to actually “Repeal Obamacare,” then it will be worse than nothing. Democrats using left messaging cynically, without any serious commitment to taking on insurance companies and Wall Street, would ultimately be very damaging. It would result in another series of broken promises that further erode people’s trust in the political system. (That’s, by the way, what makes me wary of people like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Harris has signed on for Medicare for All, which is great. But it’s important to make sure our candidates are sincere in caring about things, rather than simply adopting whatever position they think people want to hear. People like Bernie Sanders and Nina Turner, on the other hand, rarely change their tune. It makes them seem reliable.)
It’s great to see Democrats finally getting the message: a left political party needs to care about the interests of working people. But this is crucial: it’s not enough to start saying that you care. You have to actually care. And you have to convince people that you mean what you say. Words alone are not a politics.Life satisfaction measures how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings. When asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10, British people on average gave it a 6.7 grade, higher than the OECD average of 6.5.
Happiness or subjective well-being can be measured in terms of life satisfaction, the presence of positive experiences and feelings, and the absence of negative experiences and feelings. Such measures, while subjective, are a useful complement to objective data to compare the quality of life across countries.
Better Policies for Better Lives
Considering life satisfaction in policy
The Green Book is the formal guidance from the Treasury of the United Kingdom to other UK government agencies on how to appraise and evaluate policy proposals. Since 2011 it has included a clause on how subjective well-being – particularly life satisfaction – can be used alongside more traditional approaches to evaluate policy proposals.
While the amendment to The Green Book stops short of fully endorsing the use of life satisfaction measures for use in formally evaluating government programmes, the decision to add the clause in itself signals strongly the importance that UK central agencies attach to obtaining improved measures of the value of well-being outcomes.
Targeting services and programmes based on need
Well-being measures are useful tools to identify what kind of support is needed in different vulnerable neighbourhoods. The United Kingdom produces Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) to measure the levels of deprivation in employment; income; health; crime; education; living environment and barriers to services. These indices use 40 indicators at both district ward and smaller scale levels (around 1 500 persons). The results have been useful in guiding the location of social services (e.g. Sure Start Children's Centres) and targeting regeneration programmes (e.g. the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and the Single Regeneration Budget).
More ResourcesActor Henry Winkler poses for a portrait with his spider plant at his home on Feb. 8, 2016. This plant was smuggled out of Nazi Europe in 1939 when his family escaped. He cut a spring of that plant and has kept it with him, nurturing it and now preparing to give sprigs to his kids. (Emily Berl)
“Everybody got a cutting.”
Henry Winkler is jumping back to West 78th Street now, telling the story of a plant. It’s not just the story of a plant, it’s likely the only story of a plant that includes an escape from Nazi Germany, the sitcom hero named the Fonz and the acclaimed Amazon series “Transparent.”
But let’s get back to the story.
“I grew up with a woman, Tanta Erma,” Winkler explains.
Erma wasn’t a blood relative. Almost all of Winkler’s extended family died during World War II. Harry and Ilse, his parents, somehow managed to escape. That was 1939. How close a call was it? Harry’s brother, who decided to wait an extra day to get his dinner jacket back from the cleaners, did not get out.
In New York, a community of German exiles formed a kind of family. They were joined, a few years later, by Tanta Erma. She was older and became part of Winkler’s extended family, the neighborhood of German immigrants who helped found Congregation Habonim.
Erma had been smuggled out of Germany in a coffin.
“And at her feet was this plant,” Winkler says.
Henry Winkler is 70 now, with gray hair and grandchildren. But he still looks like he could throw on his leather jacket, pound the juke box and deliver a double-thumbed “correctamundo!”
On “Happy Days,” the smash sitcom that ran from 1974 to 1984, Winkler first met lifelong friend Ron Howard, who played Richie Cunningham, and introduced the world to the expression “jump the shark,” a reference to the 1977 story line during which his character literally did just that.
Winkler’s post-Fonzie career has been diverse, from executive producing “MacGyver” to a slew of small but memorable roles in “The Waterboy” and “Scream” and his turn as attorney Barry Zuckerkorn in “Arrested Development.”
And through the decades, from that boyhood apartment on West 78th Street in New York to his current home in Hollywood, Winkler has kept his precious spider plant. Today, it hangs outside the kitchen door in a thicket of bamboo.
The green-and-white leaves flow out of a small, brown pot. He feeds it unceremoniously with a thrust of the metal bowl he keeps on the narrow porch that hangs over the yard where his dogs roam.
Back in the mid-’70s, after Winkler had found success, he headed back to New York for a few possessions. He grabbed a plastic pistol and holster he got in sixth grade and a pair of wooden, carved beavers from a trip to Switzerland as a teenager. Then he sliced off a sprig of the spider plant.
“It was only instinctual, not intellectual,” he says. “I grew up with it, I heard the story, and I thought maybe it’s my responsibility to make sure it lives.”
Years later, Jill Soloway, the creator of “Transparent,” the transgender comedy starring Jeffrey Tambor, heard Winkler reference the spider plant during an interview on the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast. She invited him to visit the show’s set. Winkler brought a clipping from the spider plant.
“We didn’t totally understand what he meant when he told the story,” Soloway says now. “The person in the casket with it. Was the person dead? No, the person was in the casket pretending to be dead. We asked him about his dad, his family, the personalities of his parents.”
Winkler talked of it all. He told them how his father managed to smuggle the family’s jewelry into the States. Harry melted chocolate over the precious items and didn’t flinch when asked by the Nazis if he had any valuables. No. And then Harry proceeded to leave with the box of chocolates under his arm.
During its second season, Soloway wrote this into “Transparent” — with Winkler’s permission — as the show flashed back to 1930s Berlin.
And the plant? It didn’t end up on the screen. But Soloway kept it as a symbol, watering it and keeping it in the writers’ room for inspiration.
“It’s kind of crazy we have it here,” she says. “It’s a beautiful story.”
A spider plant owned by actor Henry Winkler is pictured here at his home. (Emily Berl)
For Winkler, the plant is a symbol of grit and perseverance. It also links him to a difficult past.
He was born in 1945, six years after his parents escaped. And what he learned most from Harry and Ilse, he says, was how not to parent. As a boy, Winkler struggled in school and, at one point, his father gave him the nickname, “dummer hund,” or dumb dog. As a teenager, Winkler would go to summer school — every summer — to try to pass the same introductory geometry class. Finally, the summer after his class graduated, Winkler eked out a D-minus. He got his diploma in the mail.
It would be years before he would be diagnosed with dyslexia, a reading disorder.
Fifty-three years later, Winkler still gets angry about his struggle.
“Here we are and after all this time, not one human being has ever said the word hypotenuse,” he says. “What were they thinking? Why did I have to be humiliated, worried, work so hard, feel so horrible and feel humiliated that I didn’t walk with my class?”
The answer, for Winkler, came in the mid-1970s. That’s when he was diagnosed.
“It was like a miracle,” recalls Howard, now a film director. “Finally, an answer. It was such a relief to him, to actually understand this thing. That he’d been struggling with his whole life. He was the first one who explained dyslexia to me.”
None of this — the poor grades, the stumbling over scripts — had been his fault. Recognizing, though, does not mean forgiving. Winkler had tried to make peace with his father in his early 20s. Today, sitting in his living room nearly a half-century later, he slips into a thick, German accent.
“Yeah, I’m a terrible father,” he says, recounting his father’s response. “I gave you all this.”
Howard, who still remembers Winkler entertaining his co-stars with that accent, knows that the comedy only masked the sadness. Now, when Howard considers his friend and the plant he has maintained for all these years, he imagines a deeper theme at play.
“Those are the lost roots,” Howard says. “He’s a family man, and that’s a significant vacuum in his mind and in his heart.”
When he speaks at events on dyslexia, Winkler will share this frustration. He shows a photograph, taken on Feb. 13, 1980, at his commercial peak. In the frame, he is at the Smithsonian during a packed news conference to donate his “Happy Days” leather jacket.
In the photo, watching proudly, are his parents.
“I will say, ‘The short Germans are behind me,’ ” Winkler says, “and it gets a big laugh. And here I get serious. I say, ‘I didn’t need them to be proud then. I needed them to be there when I could not figure anything out.’ ”
His parents died in the 1990s, but that hasn’t dulled his emotions.
“You know what I mourn,” he says. “I mourn when I hear other people say, ‘My parents were my best friends. I’m so grateful my parents are still alive.’ I think, ‘I don’t have the slightest idea how you can have that thought.’ ”
Actor Henry Winkler poses for a portrait with his spider plant at his home on Feb. 8, 2016. (Emily Berl)
With the childhood wounds still raw, Winkler chose a path once thought unlikely for a man who used to stumble over his scripts. He decided to become a writer.
He has a partner, Lin Oliver, who works to flesh out the adventures of Hank Zipzer, the “world’s best underachiever.” Since 2003, the pair have published six of the books, which are aimed for children ages 8 to 12. The seventh, “You Can’t Drink a Meatball Through a Straw,” is out this month.
“The theme of my life, the theme of what I say to every child is, ‘No matter how difficult it is for you to learn, it has nothing to do with how brilliant you are.’ And that’s Hank. And the emotion is real. When he is really scared and can’t figure it out and he hates his brain, I go back to being 8, to being in my room.”
The difference here is that Hank embraces what makes him different. If he can’t do it the “right” way, he simply does it his way. And because Winkler is pulling the strings, he can create a happy ending.
He is asked what that spider plant, which he clipped without much thought so long ago, means to him. This time, Winkler doesn’t hesitate.
“Life, tenacity and will.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Henry Winkler’s character on the television show “Arrested Development” was Barry Zuckerberg. His character’s name was Barry Zuckerkorn.They’re out there.
Two men with white mustaches in blue California casuals stand at the back of a group of fifty people on a green soccer field atop a bluff overlooking America’s largest urban oil field. Beyond, the city of Los Angeles unfurls in ledges and promontories of pink-and-salmon rooftops, white walls, and barren palms, a fabric sewn together with utility wires and mountain scrub, a brittle blanket flung over a rickety bed. The sun burns hard in the gas-blue sky. Below, on the parched, brown hills of the thousand-acre Inglewood Oil Field, hundreds of black pump jacks work the strata, their hammerhead-shaped weights nodding over the ground like prehistoric birds pecking for the last drops.
Up on the soccer field, in the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, Food & Water Watch holds a press conference to kick off a statewide antifracking campaign. A lectern stands in the grass. A few feet behind it, people from communities around the Inglewood Oil Field hold placards that spell out GOVERNOR BROWN, STOP THE INSANITY. BAN FRACKING NOW.
The word fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, has had a semantically complicated life. Strictly speaking, it describes a well-stimulation technique in which millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals are injected at high pressure more than a mile underground to open fissures in shale rock and release trapped gas. But to fracking opponents, the term signifies the whole production process enabled by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, which have allowed companies to tap gas deposits inaccessible through conventional vertical drilling. This wider process covers well boring, well casing, wastewater disposal, land clearing for well pads and pipelines, infrastructure building, methane flaring, sand mining, and heavy trucking.
Now, in the noonday heat, a man walks to the lectern. He wears a gray Yankees cap, black Simple Shoes, a dark-blue hoodie, and knockoff Wayfarer specs, suggesting a cross between a young Elvis Costello and a late-period Beastie Boy.
People clap and cheer. The men at the back clap, too.
The speaker speaks. “I’m happy to be here for the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the work-over rig right behind you,” he says, referring to the yellow derrick rising into view from the gulch below. East Coast irony glints briefly in the California sun. He goes on: “We’re at a moment where every trend in the world is to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy — solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal. To be taking steps backward in the heart of Los Angeles? I wish I could say that this was unfamiliar and strange to me as an emissary from New York and Pennsylvania, where the proposal was to frack in the New York City watershed and the Delaware River basin.”
“Gasland” director Josh Fox near his home in Milanville, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Jörg Meyer)The emissary is Josh Fox ’95CC, a theater director and filmmaker whose movie Gasland pushed fracking onto the national stage. Ever since Gasland aired on HBO in the summer of 2010, Fox has spent much time in front of microphones in shale-striding states — at colleges, rallies, concerts, town meetings, and anyplace else where people come together to oppose gas drilling. Advocates of fracking tout jobs (for engineers, welders, pipefitters, food-service workers, lawyers, realtors), energy independence, a cleaner-burning alternative to coal and oil, lower energy costs, and, through the leasing of mineral rights, financial relief for people who really need it. The industry says fracking is safe. Yet to Fox, the whole thing seems absurd, surreal, a tragedy made ridiculous by the “what could possibly go wrong?” setup and an all-too-foreseeable denouncement.
“We’re here over the Newport-Inglewood fault,” Fox says. “Earlier this year, I toured central Arkansas with Nightline, visiting a series of towns that had suffered a thousand earthquakes in a year due to injection wells and fracking. The earthquakes ranged from the very small to a 4.7 that cracked the walls of a school.”
The two men at the back shift their weight, watching Fox with pleasantly mild expressions of attentiveness.
“This is insane,” Fox says, “to be thinking about fracking in the fault lines of Los Angeles.”
You don’t have to watch Chinatown nine times to know that water is everything in LA, and Fox doesn’t dwell on the most conspicuous threat — the contamination of the city’s drinking water due to some wildly improbable scenario, much like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster or the BP blowout in the Gulf or the Baldwin Hills dam collapse right here in what is now Kenneth Hahn Park or the methane-tainted drinking wells in Dimock, Pennsylvania, or the earthquakes last winter in Youngstown, Ohio. Nor does he rattle off the health problems that the oil field’s neighbors claim to have endured since 2006, when the Houston-based energy company Plains Exploration & Production (PXP) began restimulating the Inglewood wells after years of falling production. No, for Fox, it’s the fracking-in-a-major-fault-zone angle that really captures the magnitudes.
“It’s an absurdity of the kind that is all too regular back East, where the audacity, the bullying, the level of impunity under which these companies operate can be rather astounding.”
The two men glance down at the grass. When Fox is finished, they join in the applause.
One of the men then approaches someone nearby who is scribbling on a pad.
“Hi. Are you a reporter?”
“More or less.”
“I’m from the California Independent Petroleum Association, and we’re out here to let people know the truth. You can’t believe what you hear in Gasland.” The man hands the reporter a flyer containing quotes from regulators and engineers denying any proven link between fracking and groundwater contamination. “I mean, why on earth would you want to ban something that brings jobs and prosperity and better air, and can free us from Mideast oil, and that we’ve got in abundance? Why would you want to stop something like that?”
“What about those earthquakes in Ohio —”
“That had to do with a reinjection well. Not with fracking.”
“But wasn’t it wastewater from fracking?”
“Give Rock a call.” The man hands the reporter a card. “Rock will be glad to answer any questions.”
“I heard there’s a school next to the oil field that has sixty inhalers for students with asthma —”
“Call Rock.”
After the press conference, Fox, his video camera in hand, chats with local activists and poses for pictures. Then he walks across the soccer field to the parking lot. He doesn’t notice the industry men, but when someone tells him that they were in attendance, Fox isn’t surprised.
“They follow me around,” he says dryly. But you can hear the faintest tremor underneath.
Who’s Afraid of Pennsylvania Fox?
“Pennsylvania is getting fracked to hell. It’s a disaster area.”
— Josh Fox, May 2012
“Gasland seeks to inflame public opinion to shut down the natural gas industry …. The film presents a selective, distorted view of gas drilling and the energy choices America faces today.”
— John Hanger (D), former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
“The myth that terrible chemicals are getting into the groundwater is completely myth. It is bogus.”
— Michael Krancer (R), current secretary of the Pennsylvania DEP
“The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has been wholly captured by the natural-gas industry. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
— Susan Kraham, senior staff attorney at Columbia Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic
“If the specific identity of a chemical, the concentration of a chemical, or both the specific identity and concentration of a chemical are claimed to be a trade secret or confidential proprietary information, the vendor, service provider, or operator may withhold the specific identity, the concentration, or both the specific identity and concentration of the chemical from the information provided to the chemical disclosure registry.”
— from House Bill 1950, or Act 13, signed by Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett (R) on February 14, 2012
When the fox came to the henhouse — no, when the landsman came to the Fox house, the story took a turn. The gas boom hit a bump. The letter arrived on a spring day in 2008, the landsman never knowing that the fellow studying the fine print from under the brim of his Yankees cap in the red house in Milanville, Pennsylvania, was the founder and artistic director of International WOW, a New York– based film and theater company devoted to creating work addressing political and social crises; and even if he had, he might reasonably have assumed that anyone in so unremunerative a business as the avant-garde theater would find his offer a godsend: nearly five thousand dollars per acre to frack the property. At nineteen and a half acres, that was almost a hundred grand. All Fox had to do was sign.
But Fox, unlike many in northeastern Pennsylvania, had no hungry mouths, no failing farm, no mortgage arrears, no crushing medical bills. His parents had built this house in the woods near the Delaware River the year Fox was born, and while the money would certainly have been useful, the prospect of his own tabernacle of wood and stream being transformed into a gas field bestirred the man’s inner Thoreau, not to say his inner Rachel Carson. “I woke up one morning in 2008 and declared myself a journalist,” Fox later wrote. “I had to. My home was under siege by the gas-fracking industry. I felt that I had to not only seek out the true effects on public health and the environment of the largest onshore natural-gas drilling campaign in history but also to report what I found to my community.”
So he made Gasland, a real-life disaster movie in which people who live near fracking sites in Dimock, Pennsylvania, and in Colorado and Wyoming, experience headaches, nausea, sick livestock, contaminated well water, flaming faucets, neuropathy, tumors, brain damage. The gas companies deny blame, regulators appear ineffectual if not compromised, and lessees with health problems and buyer’s remorse fear retaliation for speaking up. We learn that fracking fluids contain proprietary mixtures of hundreds of chemicals, including known or suspected carcinogens (benzene, toluene, xylene), and we see postcard-perfect images of Western landscapes that have been pocked and punctured with well pads and derricks.
Gasland won the 2010 Sundance Special Jury Prize, got picked up by HBO, was later nominated for an Oscar, and turned Fox, the film’s sharp, droll, banjo-picking narrator, into a kind of environmental pop star. Rather than let HBO do all the work, Fox hit the road: for the next year and a half he toured two hundred cities around the United States and ten countries. He screened Gasland; sat on panels with scientists, educators, and actors (Alec Baldwin, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson); and did solo stuff, delivering dead-funny, dead-serious monologues enumerating the perils associated with fracking and noting that “even if you were to get all this gas out perfectly safely, and everyone was really happy with the process — even if nobody got sick from it — we’d still have a huge problem with burning another twenty, fifty, hundred years’ worth of fossil fuels.” Eager crowds turned out wherever he went, and Fox, amazed, found himself at the heart of a grassroots movement largely of his own making.
Not everyone went gaga for Gasland. To his critics, Fox was an alarmist, an agitator, a master of innuendo, a manipulator of facts, an ends-justifies-the-means trickster bent on destroying the energy future of a nation that President Obama has called “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” The gas industry tried to discredit Fox by zeroing in on Gasland’s alleged inaccuracies, particularly the case of a fire-breathing kitchen faucet in Weld County, Colorado, which the movie implies was caused by fracking but which the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission determined was the result of naturally occurring methane in the landowner’s water well.
This past March, Teddy Borawski, the chief oil and gas geologist for Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, compared Gasland to Nazi propaganda. “Joseph Goebbels would have been proud,” Borawski told an audience in Lancaster County. “He would have given [Fox] the Nazi award.” Fox, whose father and paternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, wrote an open letter to journalists condemning the slur and calling on Governor Tom Corbett to take action: “If the Corbett administration fails to fire Borawski and fails to begin a real assessment of the effects of gas drilling on the state, then certainly the Corbett administration has lost all credibility and legitimacy.” Borawski made a public apology and kept his job.
A month earlier, on Valentine’s Day, Corbett, who according to the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics received $1.3 million in campaign funds from the oil and gas industry, signed Act 13 into law. Act 13, among other things, stripped municipalities and townships of zoning authority for gas drilling and gave it to the state. Dozens of Pennsylvania towns that had attempted to regulate fracking saw their local zoning ordinances overturned. It seemed that Gasland’s indictment of Pennsylvania’s modern-day Gold Rush had failed to impress the state legislature. With the new law, Pennsylvania managed to justify Gasland’s paranoid visions and to exceed them.
Columbians on the Case
The fracking question has made for busy times at Columbia’s Environmental Law Clinic. The clinic, an academic program run by law professor Edward Lloyd and senior staff attorney Susan Kraham ’87CC, ’92LAW and staffed by twelve to twenty law students, is representing clients in drilling-related cases involving air pollution exemptions, the Tennessee Gas Pipeline, the Delaware River Basin Commission (a regional regulatory body that includes four states and a federal representative), and, not least, Act 13.
“Pennsylvania had been litigating for years over the scope of municipal authority to limit the production of natural gas,” says Kraham. “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court made it clear that while municipalities couldn’t regulate the operations, they could regulate their location. Act 13 essentially says, gas drilling can happen anywhere.”
“People have basic property rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Kraham says. “Those rights can be limited by zoning under very old federal law, to the extent that zoning is adopted to protect the public health and welfare. If I own property in a residential neighborhood and the municipality tells me I can’t put in a metal-plating facility, that’s because keeping that kind of facility away from a residential area protects the public health. It’s been understood that that is an acceptable restriction on private-property rights. The state of Pennsylvania has now impacted people’s private-property rights. But has it done so on the basis of public health and safety? We would say no. Putting a compressor station or a drilling rig three hundred feet from a public school or three hundred feet from my house affects my property rights in ways that don’t protect the public health.
“The question is, does the state have the authority to do this? It undercuts everything we’ve come to understand about zoning and local authority.”
The state’s argument, according to Kraham, is that the legislature has the authority to determine policy statewide, and has decided that the development of natural gas is in the state’s interest, and that the municipalities’ authority can be restricted.
But, Kraham says, “Pennsylvania’s constitution has a provision giving people the right to a safe and clean environment. One of our claims is that the state is preventing municipalities from exercising their obligation to protect the environment. Another claim is that, under the Pennsylvania constitution, the legislature can’t adopt what is called a special law, meaning that you can’t adopt a law that applies to just one person or just one industry. Every other industry in Pennsylvania is subject to zoning. This one isn’t.”
Meanwhile, law students in the clinic have traveled to towns like Towanda in north-central Pennsylvania to see drilling operations and their effects firsthand. Andrew Kirchner ’09CC has been examining fluid-disposal issues, specifically, the enormous wastewater pits that have bloomed on farms and fields. Of the two to eight million gallons of fluid pumped into a well for a frack job, about half flows back up.
“These wastewater impoundments are being used in ways that are hazardous to the environment and human health,” Kirchner says. “ |
before, City planning staff read all of the comments (emails, comment sheets, telephone calls) and summarized the completed feedback form submissions. Staff identified a variety of themes:
No change should be permitted
An addition should match the existing hotel’s architecture
The proposed design lacks compatibility
The design should be bolder.
The addition is too high and obscures views to the existing building
The addition will alter sight lines along Mackenzie Avenue.
Glass is not an appropriate exterior material
The architecture is undesirable
The property is within a Design Priority Area and the Site Plan Control application was subject to the Urban Design Review Panel (UDRP) process. The architect and the Larco team presented their proposal to the UDRP at a formal review meeting on March 1, 2018, which was open to the public, and at a focused design review session on April 10 with City staff and three panel members. The March 1 recommendations and both sessions informed the changes within the May 2018 revised proposal.
May 2018 design
In May 2018, Larco Investments submitted a proposal for a seven-storey, 164-room addition at the rear of the existing Château Laurier. The development proposal retains the Château Laurier in its entirety, and replaces the remaining walls of the parking garage with an L-shaped addition, which will abut limited areas on the Château Laurier’s east and west wings.
City staff supported this design and wrote a report with recommendations to the Built Heritage Sub-Committee (BHSC).
Heritage permit application approved with conditions (June 2018)
On June 27, 2018, City Council gave conditional approval to the application to alter the Chateau Laurier at 1 Rideau Street, a property designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act.
The Built Heritage Sub-Committee had recommended approval of the addition’s massing and location and the proposed landscaping, but indicated that more work was required to make the addition more visually compatible with the existing hotel.
The sub-committee directed staff to work with the applicant to visually and physically break up the massing of the addition as seen from the north. There was also direction to increase the amount of limestone used and to ensure that all façades draw inspiration from the window patterns and architectural elements of the historic hotel.
Through this decision, Council did not require that the addition be changed to a Château-style building nor that exact architectural elements be copied from the existing hotel.
Revised design submitted (February 2019)
To address the conditions of the heritage permit issued in June 2018, Larco Investments altered the exterior design of the proposed addition and submitted new plans in February 2019. The north façade of the addition has been divided into three asymmetrical parts: an east pavilion, a connector and a west pavilion. The pavilions are clad in Indiana limestone and the connector between them is glass. The addition has bronze accents. The base of the addition includes some granite, which is similar to the existing building’s east wing. The addition has varied setbacks along the north property line to add visual interest and the top two storeys of the connector have also been set back.
The north entrance facing the park is now defined by a double-height entryway. The hotel rooms above this entrance were removed to create a lobby space at the elevators and to make the historic building visible through the addition. There are now 147 rooms in the addition, reduced from the 164 previously proposed in June.
There are new exterior pathways, interior corridors, entrances and publicly accessible spaces, including a courtyard and a staircase that links to the Rideau Canal terraces. Parking is within the five-level, 361-space, underground parking garage. The functionality of the Mackenzie Avenue forecourt for loading and deliveries has been improved and street trees and landscaping have been added.The Los Angeles Kings lost a tough one last night to the Phoenix Coyotes. The Coyotes snuck a goal past Jonathan Quick late in the third period to walk away with a 4-3 victory and two big points. When the deciding play happened it looked as if Quick had made a miraculous save, rolling over and sprawling to keep the puck out of the net with his stick. However, replays showed the puck did indeed cross the line before Quick swatted the puck back into play.
The Kings have to have a sour taste in their mouths after this one. They scored three unanswered goals and took a 3-2 lead into the third period. But at the end of the night they were on the wrong side of a one-goal game.
However, one bright spot from last night’s game that can’t be overlooked is the continued offensive production of Alec Martinez. Martinez chipped in last night and scored the Kings’ second goal of the night, which at the time, brought them within a goal of the Coyotes in the second period.
Martinez’s play has turned him into a bit of a regular on the stat sheet of late. In his last eight games, Martinez has scored four goals, two of those coming with the man advantage and has recorded seven points in total.
This success on the ice has to come as a bit of a relief for Martinez who recently went through a stretch of hockey that saw him miss a month of play. On January 25th the Kings and Anaheim Ducks met outdoors at Dodger Stadium. Ultimately the Kings were outplayed and lost the game by a score of 3-0. Martinez left that game with just over 12 minutes of ice time that night. That would be the last time Martinez saw any game time until February 27th.
Over the time Martinez was left off of the roster the Kings played seven games and went 3-4-0. Since returning to the line-up the Kings have played nine games and have grabbed a 6-3-0 record in those games. The Kings are in a bit of a funk right now having lost three games in a row. But Martinez has continued to produce as the Kings struggle overall. During the Kings’ current losing streak Martinez has fired eight shots at the net, has scored one goal and has recorded one helper.
The Kings likely want to right the ship as quickly as possible. If Martinez can continue his recent production that would make correcting the ship a whole lot easier.PH Una is currently playing in the Donmar’s 30th anniversary revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Una Stubbs and I spend a lot of time talking about men we like a lot; fancy, even. They include Dominic West, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Mark Gatiss and Len Goodman. The difference is, while I get to watch them on the box, she has the pleasure of working with them. She is currently playing West’s aunt in the Donmar’s 30th anniversary revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, will be back on small screens with Cumberbatch and Freeman in the Gatiss co-written Sherlock, and made a TV pilot with Goodman. It seems churlish to write that Una is 78, especially as she looks as trim and bird-like as she did as a young dancer, and in conversation so friendly and confidential that you long to befriend her rather than be mothered by her. No wonder that she is still so much in demand whilst some other actresses of her generation have genteely faded away.
I’ve been very lucky to have a career with such longevity, and I have jumped over lots of fences Una Stubbs
In Les Liaisons, a play about seduction and revenge in 18th century France, she uses her natural warmth to play matriarch Madame de Rosemonde. “She’s wise, and one of the kinder people in the play,” she explains. “Although I do love to play a bitch like the Duchess of Olivarez in Don Carlos (in Michael Grandage’s 2005 production), and of course, Aunt Sally in Worzel Gummidge. ‘I’ve been very lucky to have a career with such longevity, and I have jumped over lots of fences” she says, “but the dancing has helped.” When I ask where she trained as a dancer, she replies “La Roche. Slough”, with a well-honed comedy pause. “I didn’t really get educated, I was taught to read and write and dance, and that was about it. I left school at 15, and started work in the chorus.”
PH Una with Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock
She was a successful professional dancer in TV, cabaret and revue for many years, and made her movie debut in the Cliff Richard movie Summer Holiday in 1963. But it was her appearance as Alf Garnett’s daughter Rita in Till Death Us Do Part two years later that was a real breakthrough for Una. “I was surprised to get the role, but then again, I’m always surprised to get a role,” she laughs. “It was a straight step away from me being a dancer.” Alf was played by Warren Mitchell, who died last month, and Una remembers him as tough but paternal in real life. “It was no secret that he was an irascible person, but only in order to get the job right. He didn’t put up with people not studying their lines, especially has he had to learn the equivalent of a play a week as Johnny Speight’s scripts were so wordy and topical, and he needed all the help he could get and sometimes didn’t. “Because the rest of the cast only had a few lines, there was a lot of waiting around for us, and sometimes I’d just be daydreaming of getting home to my children. But Warren was amazing and really pushed me, looked after me and was wonderful to me.”
PH Una in Till Death Us Do Part
However, it’s her Till Death screen mother, Else, played by Dandy Nichols, that Una says was a greater influence on her acting career. “She was just incredible, and so astute with her timing,” Una remembers. “When her camera light came on, she was just there, and she was a great educator for me. “When she was older, I was the only close person around her as she had no siblings and most of her contemporaries had gone, so the hospital treated me like her daughter and kept me informed as to what was happening. It was nice that I was able to be there for her.” Una also loved working with the other sparky older actresses in Till Death, including Irene Handl and Patricia Hayes. Unlike these ladies, Una’s television career has not involved playing old women in headscarves and raincoats. She is well-known to a whole new young generation of fans as Mrs Hudson, landlady of the flat at 221b Baker Street occupied by Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Like Una, Martha Hudson used to be a dancer, although Martha was, delightfully, one of the ‘exotic’ variety, and Una adores playing her.
PH 'I’ve been very lucky to have a career with such longevity'
“I can’t describe how lucky I feel to be in Sherlock, and how enjoyable it is to make for all of us,” she explains. “You couldn’t have a nicer group of boys – Mark (Gatiss) and Andrew (Scott) and Stephen (Moffatt), as well as Benedict and Martin (Cumberbatch and Freeman). “They are really great, and treat me like one of the boys, which is what I prefer. They’re lovely, funny, and send each other and me up, and expect me to come back with a joke.” The Sherlock storyline for the New Year is, as ever, a closely-guarded secret, and Una can only reveal that the story is “magical”, and the costumes are fantastic. She has great admiration for Cumberbatch and Freeman, two international movie stars who regularly return to the small screen to make Sherlock.Get the biggest FC Barcelona 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
Lionel Messi will not sign a contract extension with Barcelona and will see out his deal before deciding his future, it has been claimed in Spain.
Reports from Madrid-based sports daily Marca claim that the Argentinean superstar communicated his decision to the Nou Camp club in mid-July while on holiday with his partner, Antonella Roccuzzo, and two children, Thiago and Mateo.
The pursuit of Messi by Spanish tax authorities is reportedly one of the reasons behind his unhappiness, but Barcelona still remain optimistic on renewing the 29-year-old's contract.
Barcelona president Josep Bartomeu has recently sealed extensions for a number of key players, including Sergio Busquets, Neymar and Javier Mascherano. Ivan Rakitic, Luis Suarez, Andres Iniesta and Marc-Andre Ter Stegen are all waiting for improved deals too, and Bartomeu claimed last month that he isn't worried about Messi's future and will begin negotiations with the world's best player in January.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
(Image: G Tres/Vantagenews.com)
(Image: G Tres/Vantagenews.com)
"We will have negotiations with Messi in the next couple of months," he told The Telegraph.
"Right now Leo Messi has a contract to the end of the Russian World Cup [in 2018] and we are very happy with him. Very happy. He’s the best player in the world, by far.
"I don’t know what will happen in the future but of course we will always try to explain to him that he is at the best club in the world and this is the best place for him to live and he is living the best experience of his life with us.
(Image: Reuters)
(Image: Reuters)
“He is still only 29. And if you see him playing it seems like he is one of our very young players. Leo Messi reinvented himself two years ago and changed the way he played and he is a better player now than he was then, a much better player.
"So normally players increase and then reduce but he is still growing. So where are the limits? We don’t know.”
MirrorFootball has contact Messi's camp for comment.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play nowPreserved samples of mosquitoes collected from the Zika Forest in Entebbe, south of Uganda's capital Kampala are seen on a tray during research work by scientists from the Uganda Virus Research Institute, March 2, 2016. REUTERS/James Akena
(Reuters) - Quest Diagnostics Inc said it has received emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to sell the first commercially developed diagnostic test for Zika in the United States, a step that may help expand testing capacity and speed diagnosis of the virus.
Previously, the only Zika blood tests that had Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA, were available from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and were only to be used in qualified laboratories designated by the CDC.
Quest, in its announcement on Thursday, said it plans to make the new test broadly available to doctors for patient testing, including in Puerto Rico, by early next week.
Currently, the only laboratory that will use the new Zika test is at Quest’s reference laboratory in San Juan Capistrano, California, where the test was developed and validated. But the Emergency Use Authorization may allow for testing at other qualified laboratories, including one in Puerto Rico, Quest said in a statement.
Quest’s molecular test for Zika can only detect the virus when it is still present in the blood. A negative test does not completely rule out Zika infection. Further serological tests that look for antibodies made in response to the virus can help confirm infection. Quest said it is exploring options to make serological tests for Zika available as well.
The FDA’s authorization is for emergency use, and does not constitute FDA approval.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Zika outbreak an international health emergency on Feb. 1. The outbreak is affecting large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, with Brazil the hardest hit so far.
U.S. health officials have concluded that Zika infections in pregnant women can cause microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size that can lead to severe developmental problems in babies.
The WHO has said there is strong scientific consensus that Zika can also cause Guillain-Barre, a rare neurological syndrome that causes temporary paralysis in adults. The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has now confirmed more than 1,100 cases of microcephaly that it considers to be related to Zika infections in the mothers.I have to say I was hesitant in ordering another PNY product after having some real issues with some flash drives I've ordered from them recently. But for the great price of $39.99 for a 120gb SSD, I couldn't pass it up. And I'm glad I took a chance on this SSD because on my computer it is fast, especially for an entry level SSD. And it's not until I started using an SSD on an everyday basis that I began to realize how slow a regular HDD is in comparison. Everything that's on the SSD like your OS, programs and apps open up instantly and the boot/shut down times are unreal. Now for me, a 120gb SSD is more than enough for my needs since I'm not a serious gamer and I really just wanted to put my OS and most of the programs I use on a regular basis on it and maybe the occasional game or two that I may be playing at the moment. But, with that said, here's some advice that might help you make up your mind if you're considering between a 120gb or a 240gb SSD. My 120gb came with 105gb and of that 98gb was usable and my Windows 10 Home 64bit OS took up 29gb, plus another 10gb for Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, antivirus, anti malware, etc. So when I got done putting everything I wanted on my SSD I have 60gb free space out of the 98gb usable space. Another thing I want to add is that I did a FRESH INSTALL of Windows 10 on the SSD using a USB recovery drive which was so simple to do that the entire process including Windows reinstalling itself took me maybe 30/40 minutes and the SSD was good to go with ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEMS at all. Also, the SSD made all the recovery partitions just like my original HDD that came with my computer. Here's the steps I used to install my SSD with Windows 10 and it couldn't have gone any smoother: 1. Disconnect the POWER and SATA cables of any drives in your computer. 2. Install the SSD and let it boot up. After that reboot and go into your BIOS and change the "SATA" setting to AHCI. Then reboot. 3. Now you will either use recovery discs or a USB recovery drive to boot into the SSD and install your OS. 4. After the install of your OS is finished go back into your BIOS and change the boot order (if your are using more than one HDD/SDD) so that you make the SSD with your OS the first in line so your computer knows that's where you want to boot from. After that, your are done my friend and you can start enjoying your new speedy SSD.
Read moreGoblin Contracts [Changeling: The Lost]
Changeling: The Lost, Chronicles of Darkness, Open Development, Projects, Worlds
Hi, folks! As mentioned on the forums, I’m picking up development on Changeling: The Lost, Second Edition. I’ll be joined by frequent Chronicles of Darkness writer Meghan Fitzgerald.
Today, I’d like to preview Goblin Contracts and the Goblin Debt they encourage you to rack up. As the team was discussing how to implement them in the new edition, we decided that we wanted to do something that relates the costs of these Contracts directly to the roles hobgoblins play in the Hedge, and that plays with the boundaries between different types of faerie creatures.
Click here for the preview.
In addition to these systems and powers for player characters, Chapter 5 will feature guidelines on building hobgoblins, as well as several examples. For now, I’ll just say that reading the draft had me cackling with both glee and fear.
(Update: Check out the comments for an example goblin queen.)If you’re living in a neighborhood of mainly “whites,” or Christians, or non-refugees, or middle-class income earners, or traditional man-woman households, and your town or city receives federal dollars, say goodbye to the neighborhood as you have known it.
That’s because last July, the Obama Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) finalized a new “fair housing” rule called “affirmatively further fair housing choice” (AFFH), which will begin to be enforced nationwide in 2019.
As explained by Ed Gramlich of the National Low Income HousingCoalition, in “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing: Final Regulations,” the new rule is an addition to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits housing discrimination against the “protected classes” of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability, by requiring “program participants” to “affirmatively further fair housing” by taking steps “to actively overcome historic patterns of segregation“.
“Program participants” are defined as “jurisdictions” (towns/cities/counties/states) and public housing agencies (PHAs) that receive federal funds for housing and urban development, which in practice means every neighborhood in the US, for is there a town or city or county or state that doesn’t receive federal dollars for housing and urban development?
Translated into plainer English, that means if your town/city/county/state contains sections and neighborhoods that lack blacks, Muslims, LGBTs, Mexican illegals, Syrian refugees, and the mentally ill, the assumption is that the homogeneity is a result of discriminatory housing practices. And if your town/city/county/state gets federal dollars for housing and urban development — which means everywhere in the U.S. — then your local government is required to “desegregate” and break up your neighborhood’s offensive homogeneity.
In the preamble to the rule, HUD stresses that “the new AFFH approach does not mandate specific outcomes. Rather, it establishes a standardized fair housing assessment and planning process to give program participants a more effective means to affirmatively further the purposes of the Fair Housing Act.” Blah, blah, blah.
What will happen
(1) HUD will provide each “program participant” (henceforth, I’ll call it “your town”) with the following:
Data on housing in your town and the surrounding region.
The new “affirmatively further fair housing choice” (AFFH) rule that provides “a standard framework” for program participants to use to identify and examine “fair housing issues” and the underlying “contributing factors” that cause any housing discriminatory issues. A “fair housing issue” is defined as “a condition that restricts choice or access to opportunity, including: Ongoing local or regional segregation, or lack of integration. Racial or ethnic concentrations of poverty. Significant disparities in access to opportunity. Disproportionate housing needs based on the “protected classes” of race, color,
national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability. Evidence of illegal discrimination or violations of civil rights laws, regulations, or guidance.
“a condition that restricts choice or access to opportunity, including:
(2) Your local government then uses the data to assess whether and how “fair” the housing is in your town; identify neighborhoods lacking “fair housing”; and set “fair housing goals and priorities”. All of that should be submitted to HUD in an “Assessment of Fair Housing” (AFH), the development of which requires “public participation”.
(3) HUD receives, reviews, and decides whether to accept your town’s AFH.
(4) If accepted, your town must “certify (pledge) that they are affirmatively furthering fair housing choice” by incorporating its HUD-approved AFH into its Consolidated Plan (ConPlan) and Public Housing Agency (PHA) Plan. Specifically, this means, your town must “take meaningful actions” to “address significant disparities in housing needs and in access to community opportunity” by:
“Replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns.”
“Transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity.”
“Fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing law.”
Removing “obvious impediments” to “fair housing,” such as “refusing to rent to families with children,” lack of large rental units, zoning that limits multifamily housing, and “insurance practices that reinforce segregated housing patterns” (whatever that means). See “ Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice
(5) HUD will “monitor” your town’s “compliance” to the new “fair housing” rule by requiring your local government to submit an Annual Performance Report of its ConPlan (called CAPER), wherein your local government must:
Summarize the “impediments to fair housing” in your community;
Describe the actions taken in the past year to overcome the effects of those “impediments”.
(6) Your town must submit a new AFH every 5 years, which will result in a new ConPlan and PHA Plan.
When new rule will be enforced
HUD says “Most program participants will not be required to use the new AFFH system until 2019.” The exact timing or due date for a “program participant” to submit an “Assessment of Fair Housing” (AFH) depends on:
Whether the “jurisdiction” (town/city/county/state) receives less or more than $500,000 in federal funds;
Whether the public housing agency has less or more than 550 public housing units and vouchers.
If you thought Agenda 21 is bad, this new “fair housing” rule is Agenda 21 On Steroids, and it will wreak havoc in neighborhoods and communities across America. And yet, not a word from Congress or the useless media.
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~Eowyn
Dr. Eowyn’s post first appeared at Fellowship of the MindsPlease enable Javascript to watch this video
LIBERTY, Mo. -- Police surrounded a Hardee's restaurant near 291 Highway and South Withers on Tuesday evening where there were reports of a gunman inside the restaurant who was refusing to come out of the building.
Liberty Police wrapped up their work at the standoff at about 8:30 p.m., and found nobody inside the restaurant.
Earlier on Tuesday night, employees said a customer came in and muttered something, then pulled a gun and barricaded himself in the bathroom.
SWAT approaching Hardee’s in Liberty where man allegedly barricaded self in restroom #fox4kc pic.twitter.com/eeoChzdOY1 — Kera Mashek (@KeraFox4KC) October 10, 2017
Update: all employees out. Police trying to determine if suspect still inside. #fox4kc pic.twitter.com/wxicNeem3e — Kera Mashek (@KeraFox4KC) October 10, 2017
FOX 4 will update this story as police release more information about the investigation.Saturday evening's blast struck refugees who had fled the fighting in the oil- and gas-rich Syrian province and who had gathered on the east bank of the Euphrates River, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
At least 75 civilians were killed and some 140 others were injured, the monitor said. IS fighters detonated the car bomb at close range, the Observatory's director Rami Abdel Rahman told news agencies.
Syria's state news agency SANA later described the blast as a suicide car bombing.
The blast happened in an area between the Conoco and Jafra energy fields controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and close to the city of Deir el-Zour, which last week was captured by Syrian regime forces from the "Islamic State" (IS) armed group.
The largest city in eastern Syria, Deir el-Zour is a center for the country's oil extracting industry.
Read more: US-backed SDF captures Syria's largest oil field from 'Islamic State'
Refugees still in danger
Save the Children estimates that 350,000 people have fled the recent fighting in Deir el-Zour.
"The situation in the city and surrounding countryside has been especially bleak, with civilians trapped between the fighting and all too often caught in the crossfire," explained Sonia Khush, the charity's Syria director.
The Observatory, which gets its information from a network of Syria-based activists, said civilians were stranded on an island on the Euphrates directly facing Deir el-Zour and where some jihadist pockets remained.
IS is facing an onslaught by both Syrian government troops and the SDF alliance for the few remaining areas it controls in eastern Syria.
Read more: 'Islamic State' suffers major losses in Syria and Iraq
Having been driven from about 96 percent of territory they once captured in Syria and Iraq, the jihadists still control a small stretch inside the war-ravaged country and some desert regions along the Iraq-Syria border.
Last IS areas remain
After taking full charge of Deir el-Zour city, the Syrian army said IS militants were now isolated and encircled in the countryside east of the city.
Meanwhile, Kurdish-led SDF forces were reported to be making fresh gains further north in Deir el-Zour province.
Syrian regime forces, backed by intensive Russian airstrikes, are now attempting to retake Abu Kamal, the last urban center controlled by the jihadi group in Syria, and close to the Iraqi border.
Last month, Syrian Kurd-led forces, allied with the US, captured Raqqa, once the de facto capital of IS' self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria.
Also on Saturday, reports suggested that US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart may discuss a settlement to the 6-year Syrian civil war in the next few days.
Russia's RIA news agency said the talks could take place on the sidelines of the Asian economic summit in Vietnam.
Washington and Moscow remain on opposing sides in the conflict and ties remain frosty over allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
What is the 'Islamic State'? Where did it come from? The "Islamic State" (IS) — also known as ISIL, ISIS and Daesh — is an al-Qaida splinter group with a militant Sunni Islamist ideology. It emerged in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their goal is to create a worldwide "caliphate." It gained worldwide notoriety in 2014 after a blitzkrieg military campaign that resulted in the capture of Mosul.
What is the 'Islamic State'? Where does it operate? IS is believed to be operational in more than a dozen countries across the world. It controls territories in Iraq and Syria. However, the group has lost much of the territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria at the height of its expansion in 2014.
What is the 'Islamic State'? Who is fighting back? The US leads an international coalition of more than 50 countries, including several Arab nations. Russia, Iran and its Lebanese Shiite ally Hezbollah, which all support the Syrian government, also fight IS. Regional forces such as the Kurdish peshmerga (above) and US-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters, fight IS on the ground. The Iraqi army and militia have pushed IS from large parts of the country.
What is the 'Islamic State'? How does it fund itself? One of IS' main sources of income has been oil and gas. At one point, it controlled an estimated one-third of Syria's oil production. However, US-led airstrikes deliberately targeted oil resources and the Syrian government as well as US-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters have retaken most oil wells. Other means of income include taxes, ransom, selling looted antiquities and extortion.
What is the 'Islamic State'? Where does it carry out attacks? IS has claimed responsibility for numerous terrorist attacks across the globe. The militant group has targeted capitals across the EU, including Berlin, Brussels and Paris. IS leaders have encouraged so-called "lone wolf" attacks, whereby individuals who support IS carry out terrorist acts without the direct involvement of the group.
What is the 'Islamic State'? What other tactics does it use? The group uses various tactics to expand its power. IS fighters have looted and destroyed historical artifacts in Syria and Iraq in an attempt at "cultural cleansing." The group has also enslaved thousands of women from religious minority groups, including Yazidis. IS also uses a sophisticated social network to distribute propaganda and recruit sympathizers.
What is the 'Islamic State'? How has it impacted the region? IS has further exacerbated the ongoing Syrian conflict. Millions of Syrians and Iraqis have fled their homes, many traveling to Europe in pursuit of refuge. Although it has lost all of its strongholds, the militant group has left extraordinary destruction in its wake. Areas affected by the militant group's rule will likely take years to rebuild. Author: Rachel Stewart
mm/bw (AFP, AP, Reuters)At the end of Thomas Wolfe's novel You Can't Go Home Again, the protagonist, George Webber, realized, “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” The idea that it is impossible to return home and to the past is commonplace today and a hallmark of modern consciousness.1 Yet generations of Americans have longed to go home, either to their actual childhood homes or to metaphorical homes located somewhere in the past. This essay examines how Americans have understood, expressed, and managed such yearnings for a lost home and traces how the modern perspective—that return is impossible—gradually emerged. It is a preliminary exploration of the history of homesickness and other emotions that often accompanied it, in particular, nostalgia.
Today, homesickness is defined as the longing for a particular home, nostalgia as a longing for a lost time. Nostalgia may carry within it a yearning for home, but it is a home faraway in time rather than space. Both emotions have existed throughout history, albeit under different names. Although some historians maintain that nostalgia, in particular, is a new emotion and an effect of the social, political, and economic changes of the last two or three centuries, such a claim seems questionable.2 Industrial capitalism and liberal democracy provide plentiful occasions for such yearnings, and individuals respond to them in historically specific ways, but there is little evidence that homesickness and nostalgia are wholly new feelings. Instead, those emotions gained new recognition in the modern age and took on new functions.
Although the feelings have long been experienced, the words to describe them have changed considerably. From the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the word “nostalgia” denoted homesickness. Only in the last century did “nostalgia” take on its current meaning. This linguistic tangle started in 1688, when Johannes Hofer, a Swiss scholar, created the word “nostalgia,” combining the Greek word nostos, “return to the native land,” with algos, the word for pain. He used this word to describe a new disease that affected young people far from home. Its symptoms included “continued sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep … decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, … cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, … stupidity of the mind—attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland.” The best remedy was to return sufferers home, for nostalgia could prove fatal.3
Hofer's discussion inspired others to address the problem. For a time doctors believed nostalgia was unique to Switzerland, but eventually cases were identified across Europe and in the Americas. Many observers believed some nations were better adjusted to modernity and that consequently, their citizens did not experience nostalgia. Scholars believed the British were unlikely to contract the illness because they were accustomed to commerce and colonization and therefore to relocation. Yet evidence from the eighteenth century shows otherwise. The word “homesickness” became part of the English language in the 1750s; doctors documented cases of it among Welsh soldiers in the 1780s.4
Until roughly a century ago, the words “nostalgia” and “homesickness” meant the same thing, although physicians tended to use the former, laypeople the latter. By the early twentieth century, the words began to diverge in meaning. While some doctors continued to use “nostalgia” to denote homesickness, a second meaning of “nostalgia” emerged—a bittersweet yearning for a lost time. The sociologist Fred Davis maintained that while the new meaning became attached to the word at the turn of the century, this sense of nostalgia remained “a fancy word,” used mostly by “psychiatrists, academic psychologists, and relatively few cultivated lay speakers,” until the 1950s.5 Eventually, however, the newer definition of “nostalgia” supplanted the original meaning.
In the twentieth century a fundamental divide opened up between the two words. While homesickness still denoted a psychological problem, nostalgia no longer did. Homesickness became a word—and a state—that carried some social stigma, while nostalgia did not. The word “homesickness” also implies that return home is at least theoretically possible, whereas nostalgia represents the longing for something indisputably unattainable: a past time. Other distinctions between the words (and the emotional states they described) also emerged: Nostalgia—once considered painful—gradually came to be identified as a sometimes pleasant sensation, whereas homesickness continued to be described as unremittingly painful. Yet while distinct, the words and the feelings they describe share a linguistic connection and an emotional one. Both represent a yearning for a lost sense of home, whether in time or in space. Scholars suggest that both homesickness and nostalgia may represent individuals' attempts to establish continuity with past selves. Longings for lost places, peoples, and times represent a desire to bridge past experience and present conditions.6
Before the particular words emerged, the yearnings existed. The question is: How should historians treat emotions that were not formally named by those who experienced them? What is the relationship between words and feelings? Jean Starobinski, the first historian to study homesickness and nostalgia critically, observed, “The emotions whose history we wish to retrace are accessible to us only from the time when they find expression, verbally or by other means. For the critic, for the historian, an emotion exists only beyond the point at which it attains a linguistic status.”7 Starobinski maintained that although individuals experienced homesickness and nostalgia throughout history, the invention of the terminology changed the meaning and experience of the emotions, transforming private feelings into a socially recognized problem and a disease.
This essay builds on Starobinski's observation |
everything you need to know to get ready for this year's AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl:
Date and time: Tues., Dec. 29, 9 p.m. ET
TV channel: ESPN
Location: Houston, Texas
Stadium: NRG Stadium, 71,054
Last year's score: Arkansas 31, Texas 7
Last year's attendance: 71,115
Last year's TV rating: 3.4
Last year's payout for each school: $3 million
Team with the most all-time appearances: Minnesota, 2
Team with the most all-time wins: Nine teams, 1
Texas Tech Red Raiders (7-5, 4-5 in Big 12)
Want offense? You're going to want to watch Texas Tech's bowl game. The Red Raiders are sure to provide points, whether with their pyrotechnic offense or their thoroughly permeable defense.
Kliff Kingsbury's bunch have scored 559 points on the season, and their 46.6 points per game are behind only Baylor for the national lead. But the Red Raiders have also given up 511 points, making them the first team since East Carolina in 2010 to give up 500 points in the regular season and make a bowl. Their 42.6 points per game allowed slots them in the bottom 10 nationally, and the lowest-scoring game featuring Texas Tech in 2015 still featured 50 points; the highest-scoring one, a matchup with Oklahoma State, yielded an incredible 123.
Quarterback Pat Mahomes has thrown for 4,283 yards and 32 touchdowns in 2015, but given that Tech's defense has given up more than 3,200 yards both on the ground and through the air, any stats by Red Raiders are more impressively necessary than impressive in their own right.
Last bowl game: 2013 Holiday Bowl (37-23 win over Arizona State)
All-time bowl record: 14-21-1
Head coach's bowl record: Kliff Kingsbury is 1-0 in bowl games, having led Texas Tech to that win in the 2013 Holiday Bowl.
LSU Tigers (8-3, 5-3 in the SEC)
As October came to a close, LSU sat at 7-0. They led the SEC West and ranked second in the College Football Playoff rankings. By Thanksgiving, the Tigers had lost three in a row for the first time this century, had fallen out the top 25 and boosters and university officials were having serious discussions about the future of long-time head coach Les Miles.
The Tigers rallied to take down Texas A&M and carried their head coach off the field, followed by a brief announcement that he'd be staying as head coach. Now the program has to pick up the pieces, starting with a bowl matchup.
On offense, it begins and ends with superstar tailback Leonard Fournette, who rushed for a school-record 1,741 yards this season and appeared to have the lead in the Heisman Trophy race before the late-season slide. Quarterback Brandon Harris will be looking to rebound from a rough final month of the season. With one of the youngest rosters in the country, a bowl win could help set the stage for a better 2016.
Last Bowl Game: 2014 Music City Bowl (lost 31-28 to Notre Dame)
All-time Bowl Record: 23-22-1
Head Coach's Bowl Record: Les Miles is 7-6 overall in bowls. He is 6-4 at LSU and was 1-2 at Oklahoma State.VENUE NOTES:
Parking: "Please park on either Convoy Street, Engineer Road, or Brinell Street. Please reserve the parking lot for Pangea Bakery Cafe customers and avoid parking in other shopping centers as you may get towed."
Hello!
This is the first San Diego Rust meetup.
My name is Nelson and I am starting this meetup group. I'm very new to this meetup thing but after waiting a few months and not really seeing anything stirring around San Diego to fit this interest of mine, I got a little impatient and I decided to go and make this group. There's got to be people out there interested in this in San Diego, right?!
Rust is... to quote... "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents almost all crashes*, and eliminates data races. " - http://www.rust-lang.org/
To me, that is like a language with the nicer/safe parts of Ruby/Scala and the RAM/overhead/speed usage of a decently-written C++ application. In the wake of Heartbleed, gotofail, and other **SCARY** fiascos (more to come in 2015! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻), more and more people are looking hard at this language to get safety guarantees on very fast code without resorting to an expensive GC to paper over issues.
Rust also has *not* been officially released yet and is still in a state of flux. As I'm writing into this "More details:" box, they are currently tearing out the old IO library and reimplementing it with an API that better expresses what's happening "down there". The Rust team is recommending users not start any serious investment or learning or projects until at least the first beta release. That's at least 3 to 5 weeks from now.
I don't really have any talks to announce at this point. If you would like to give a talk, let me know. Personally, I'm still learning my way around Rust and stumbling on basic things (that IO business I mentioned is a wrench!) so I doubt I can personally really give a talk of any meaningful value. But if you actually can, please step right up!
If there are no talks, that's not a problem, aw, come on, let's all just meet! For more info about Rust, refer to " http://www.rust-lang.org/ "Today I received an email from "Construction Insider" concerned about banks suddenly playing hardball and calling in construction loans.
Construction Insider writes:
Hi Mish
I work in the construction business and something has been creeping to the forefront of my attention for the past few weeks and now it seems to be moving full steam ahead.
Banks are forcing developers/builders (especially smaller ones) to give up their properties (unsold homes and lots).
Banks say the reason is that the properties in question are no longer performing assets. I am sure there are some loans out there that are not performing and the owners are going under. I am equally sure that there are plenty of developers that are still selling homes - just not at the pace originally planned on the pro formas.
Having inside information on one of these scenarios that happened today, I cannot help but wonder what is really going on? The bank told a small developer/builder I work for that they were taking back his ongoing subdivision.
He is selling houses and updated pro formas would indicate that the current sales pace would exhaust all remaining lots within 33 months. Yet the bank stated they would only give him until April 15 to find alternative financing. The bank is also willing to let him buy the subdivision at a 33% discount to what is currently owed.
If he is unable to obtain this backing, the bank will let him walk away without penalty or consequence so they can write it off.
I have been on the phone trying to put some of these pieces together. It seems there are many banks doing the same thing. However, there is apparently no interest [or ability - Mish] from anyone wanting to pick up land/lots at 30% - 50% discounts to today's prices.
Another interesting point is that the banks all state that they must have these situations written off or taken care of by the end of Q2.
These are the immediate questions running through my head:
Why the end of Q2? And why do so many banks seem to be simultaneously doing this?
Is it possible that there is some government incentive to the banks to meet this timeline? And how much will this cost the taxpayers?
There is something extremely concerning about this whole thing, especially from the standpoint that many banks appear to be acting in concert, all with the same specific timeline. Any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated.
Construction Insider
For questions like these, I turn to my "California Business Banker" to see what he thinks.
Hi Mish
Your construction industry source raises an interesting issue. Since I work for a relative healthy bank, I don't see that in my bank.
However, we have had federal auditors in the bank for the past couple weeks and I've noticed an interesting development. They are getting tougher on banks recognizing loans that they view as a problem and pushing for downgrades.
So, the very problem might be federal auditors are forcing banks to down grade loans to a doubtful status. In such cases as nonperforming real estate assets, this essentially forces the bank to do something more than wait and see if the developer can turn his investment and pay off the bank.
It forces banks to resolve the issue mostly by enforcing their rights on the collateral, which is why they are probably recommending the developer walk away, so they can their hands on the collateral sooner (maybe deeding it over to the bank) versus going through foreclosure and potential bankruptcy on behalf of the client, which can draw out the process for months.
Most banks would like to get in, fire sell it or sell the note, and move on and not expand the loss by waiting over time.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit, if conceptually this or something very close to this is what's going on.
The auditors reviewing one of my loans want to down grade the loan simply because the owners personal credit score has declined. Bear in mind the client is profitable and meets all of their financial covenants.
Personal credit is a red flag but usually not a reason to down grade loans, unless there are other reasons as well. This tells me the federal auditors are getting tougher across the board.
Hope that sheds some light.
California Business Banker.
Signs Say Wave of FDIC Takeovers Coming in 3rd Quarter
Addendum:
A friend of mine is a loan officer at a small regional bank here in Oregon. She told me last week that she cannot get any of her mortgage loans clients approved for loans because the bank has raised the qualifications so high that NO ONE is being approved for home loans. These are all borrowers who are more than qualified. If she does not make her quota this month for closed loans, per her boss, she will be getting her pink slip on March 31.
There is definitely something going on at banks for all types of loans. They are hunkering down. My banker friend believes also that there is going to be a massive failure of many banks in the near future.Filed on September 20, 2017 | Last updated on September 20, 2017 at 07.56 am
Earlier this week, the UAE government announced that Muharram 1, 1439, will be observed as a holiday for both public and private sector.
The Hijri New Year holiday will be observed on Thursday, September 21, the Federal Authority For Government Human Resources announced on Tuesday.
The private sector, too, will observe a holiday on the same day, the Ministry of Human Resources & Emiratisation announced.
The decision was taken as per the guidance of the council of ministers.
Earlier this week, the UAE government announced that Muharram 1, 1439, will be observed as a holiday for both public and private sectors.
The announcement was made with a circular on the basis of the provisions of the executive regulations of Federal Law No. 11 of 2008 on human resources in the federal government and its amendments.
Saqr bin Ghobash Saeed Ghobash, Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation, extended his sincerest greetings and blessings to the President, His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan; His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai; His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, and Their Highnesses Members of the Supreme Council, and the Rulers of the Emirates.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department of the Government of Dubai released the calendar for Hijri 1439.
According to the calendar, the first day of Muharram 1439 will be September 21, 2017 (click here for the calendar).
The UAE has also launched a unified Hijri calendar ahead of the new Islamic year, the Ministry of Presidential Affairs has announced.
Ahmed Juma Al Za'abi, Deputy Minister for Presidential Affairs, and Chairman of chairman of the Board of trustees of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Centre, told a press conference on Tuesday that the unified Hijri calendar was based on Shariah and astronomical principles.
"The project is a result of three years of comparative field studies and review of industry best practices by a group of UAE, Arab and Islamic scholars, and specialists in physics, space and astronomy, specialised committees and work groups," he said.
"The project will cover all emirates, taking into consideration sharia conditions and scientific results that affect calculation of prayer timings," he stated, while unveiling the Hijri calendar of 1439 at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque.
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ERROR: Macro /ads/dfp-ad-article-new is missing!There is huge public anxiety in Britain. That is the mark of a fundamentally decent society. All of us, whatever our views, whatever our parties, know that the kind of people contacting us are very different from many of those with whom we deal regularly. They are the kind of people who say, 'I have never contacted a Member of Parliament before,' or 'I’ve never been politically active before.' They are the kind of people who have never gone on a march or attended a vigil before. Another significant point is that, whether or not they agree with the Prime Minister, only a tiny fraction ever call into question his sincerity in this matter.
I have never done so and I do not do so today. But much as they detest Saddam’s brutality, they are not persuaded that the case for war has been adequately made at this point, they are worried about the new doctrine of regime change, they are wary of the Bush Administration’s motives, and they do not like to see Britain separated from its natural international allies.
The cross-party amendment is the correct amendment. It is tabled at the correct time, and, if passed, would send the correct signal. It is on those grounds that the Liberal Democrats will vote for it tonight.Ark. issues 1st gay marriage license
EUREKA SPRINGS, Ark. — Two women were married on a sidewalk outside a county courthouse in Arkansas on Saturday, breaking a barrier that state voters put in place with a constitutional amendment 10 years ago.
A day after Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza said the ban was "an unconstitutional attempt to narrow the definition of equality," Kristin Seaton, 27, and Jennifer Rambo, 26, exchanged vows at an impromptu ceremony, officiated by a woman in a rainbow-colored dress.
Story Continued Below
The couple had spent the night in their Ford Focus after traveling to Eureka Springs from their home at Fort Smith, and was the first of about 10 couples to line up outside of the courthouse before it opened.
"Thank God," Rambo said after Carroll County Deputy Clerk Jane Osborn issued them a license, ending a brief period of uncertainty when a different deputy county clerk said she wasn't authorized to grant one and questioned whether Piazza's order in a courtroom 150 miles away had any bearing in Eureka Springs.
Piazza ruled Friday that Arkansas' 2004 voter-approved amendment to the state constitution violates the rights of gay couples, clearing the way for the first same-sex marriage in a traditional southern state. He didn't put his ruling on hold as some judges in other states have done.
That caused confusion among the state's 75 county clerks, said Association of Arkansas Counties executive director Chris Villines. He said Piazza should have issued a stay, just to avoid Saturday's scramble.
"The court didn't give us any time to get the kinks worked out," Villines said.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said he would appeal the ruling and asked it be suspended during that process. No appeal had been filed as of Saturday morning when the license was issued.
Jerry Cox, president of the Arkansas Family Council, which promoted the gay-marriage ban in 2004, said Piazza's decision to not suspend his ruling will create confusion if a stay is issued later.
"Are these people married? Are they unmarried?" Cox said. "Judge Piazza did a tremendous disservice to the people of Arkansas by leaving this in limbo."
Arkansas' amendment was passed in 2004 with the overwhelming support of Arkansas voters. Piazza's ruling also overturned a 1997 state law banning gay marriage.
"The exclusion of a minority for no rational reason is a dangerous precedent," he wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled that a law forbidding the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. Since then, lower-court judges have repeatedly cited the decision when striking down some of the same-sex marriage bans that were enacted after Massachusetts started recognizing gay marriages in 2004.
Federal judges have ruled against marriage bans in Michigan, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Texas, and ordered Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.
In all, according to gay-rights groups, more than 70 lawsuits seeking marriage equality are pending in about 30 states. Democratic attorneys general in several states — including Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Oregon and Kentucky — have declined to defend same-sex marriage bans.
Arkansas' ruling came a week after McDaniel became the first statewide elected official to announce he personally supports gay marriage rights. But he said he would continue to defend the constitutional ban in court.
Aaron Sadler, McDaniel's spokesman, said Friday the attorney general sought the stay because "we know that questions about validity of certain actions will arise absent a stay."
Gay marriage is legal in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. Though technically considered southern states by the U.S. Census, they were not part of the old Confederacy, like Arkansas.
This article tagged under: Gay Marriage
ArkansasPerhaps this game has been surpassed, but at the time, there was perhaps no more exciting game in the Joe Flacco era than the Baltimore Ravens’ last-second 23-20 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 9 three years ago.
Let’s take a moment to remember the moment Joe Flacco established himself as clutch and Torrey Smith established himself as a threat.
The rest of the game is irrelevant to Ravens’ lore at this point except that it set up the greatest drive in Ravens franchise history.
With 2:17 on the clock and down 20-16, the Baltimore Ravens controlled the ball at their own eight-yard line.
Play 1: Joe Flacco pass thrown away after pressure from Brett Kiesel. The pass was thrown in the general direction of Ed Dickson running a deep out.
Play 2: Joe Flacco hit Anquan Bolden on a post for a 21-yard gain, a perfect in-rhythm pitch and catch.
Play 3: Joe Flacco threw a strike to LaQuan Williams, who a ran a deep comeback. A 13-yard gain.
Play 4: Joe Flacco was pressured immediately, forcing incompletion to Ray Rice in the flat.
Play 5: Joe Flacco hit Anquan Boldin for a nine-yard gain on an out route from the slot.
Play 6: Joe Flacco threw an incomplete pass intended for LaQuan Williams, dropped.
Play 7: Joe Flacco pass was completed to Anquan Boldin for 10-yards on an in route.
Play 8: Joe Flacco hit Ed Dickson on the right sideline for a two-yard gain. Less than a minute left.
Play 9: Here was Torrey Smith’s famous drop in the end zone with 42 seconds left. I remember thinking, “If I know the Ravens, Torrey Smith will get another chance to make a play before this is over.”
Play 10: On third-and-ten, Joe Flacco hit Anquan Boldin on an 11-yard out. First down.
Play 11: With under 30 seconds left, Joe Flacco over threw David Reed in the end zone.
Play 12: Joe Flacco’s pass intended for Anquan Boldin fell incomplete over the middle of the field.
Play 13: Torrey Smith’s famous redemption, Joe Flacco hit Torrey for a 26-yard touchdown! Torrey showed a glimpse of what he could do with the veteran move to create separation on a simple go route. To this day, this may be the biggest catch of Torrey’s career.
Though I think the “Mile High Miracle” game has surpassed this in Ravens’ lore, I cannot overstate the importance of this game for the Ravens.
Flacco had been blasted that season for his inability to excel against the Steelers, having thrown an average of 176 yards per game against them to that point. His winning drive and 300-yard performance proved Flacco could excel on the biggest stage against one of the best defenses in the league.
The game is especially relevant now. The only coverage of the Ravens by the national media has been negative, and even that has been minimal, just like three years ago. The season is in Week 9, and the Ravens are in a thick competition for the AFC North race, just like three years ago. The Ravens have a chance to make a statement on national television, just like three years ago.
With everyone down on the Ravens, now is an opportunity to repeat history. Here’s hoping the Ravens do it.SEATTLE, Wash.— (press release) Gorilla Football Collective (GFC), an official supporters group of the Seattle Sounders FC, has partnered with Big Al Brewing and Dick’s Brewing Company to bring two distinct, craft beers to the 2013 soccer season. GFC, a 501c3 with a charitable emphasis, enjoys giving back to the community through its “CIVic Ticket” program, community service projects and fundraising events. Proceeds from both beers will benefit Gorilla FC Charities.
Big Al Brewing created for Gorilla FC Civ’s White IPA which is made using American Two Row, Malted Wheat, Unmalted Wheat, Oats, and given bitterness and aroma with Nugget and Cascade hops. This beer was designed with balance, flavor, and drinkability in mind. A refreshing wheat beer, with a unique Belgian character, balanced by an assertive bitterness and bright hop aroma and flavor and comes in at 6.0% ABV. Alejandro Brown President/Head Brewer of Big Al Brewing had this to say about the project “We are proud to partner with Gorilla FC who share our passion for Seattle Sounders FC and our commitment to community. We look forward to raising many pints of Civ’s White IPA and funds for local charities while supporting our beloved Sounders with this remarkable organization!”
Dick’s Brewing Company is also working with GFC and they have produced the Dick’s Au GFC. The Dick’s Au GFC is a Golden Ale brewed with American Two Row, Malted Wheat, and Magnum hops. The Au GFC is dry hopped with 3 distinct varieties; Saaz, Mt. Hood and Tettnanger. The first sip brings refreshing crispness with a slightly sweet malty aftertaste. The dry hop adds a nice floral and herbal backbone to the beer making it a great session beer with a 5.5% ABV. Julie Young, Owner and Dave Pendleton, Head Brewer of Dick’s Brewing Company said, “We are very excited working with GFC as we are huge football fans! We love supporting GFC’s charity activities and are happy we can do that through our beer.” Dick’s Au GFC is a play on the periodic table symbol Au for Gold and when being ordered go ahead and ask your bartender for an, A-U GFC!
Big Al’s Civ’s White IPA and Dick’s Au GFC will have a special release at four GFC partner bar locations on March 2nd, 2013 for Sounders first kick: Fado Irish Pub in Pioneer Square, Auto Battery Bar and The Summit Public House on Capitol Hill, and Naked City Brewery & Taphouse in Greenwood. Starting March 3rd you will be able to find these two beers around the Puget Sound area. Soccer is a cause for drinking, now you can drink for a cause with Big Al and Dick’s and GFC! The beers are available now at the two breweries.
March 15, 2013, from 4:30 to 9 p.m., a release party for both beers will be held at Golazo Headquarters 714 E Pike, Seattle WA 98122. Meet the brewers, enjoy Big Al’s Civ’s White IPA and Dick’s Au GFC while listening to a live DJ. Media and public are welcome! Proceeds from the event will benefit Gorilla FC Charities.
For more information on our group or to join Gorilla FC go to: http://www.gorillafc.com/
goalWA.net Local Soccer News is sponsored by Pro Roofing Northwest, Kirkland, Bellevue, Seattle, Redmond, Woodinville, Federal Way, Everett, Snohomish, Issaquah, Renton, Kent, Bothell, Edmonds Washington roofing company.
AdvertisementsLast April I remember watching Toby Greene transform from prolific ball winner to potent goal-kicking forward. The Giants were playing the Saints and for three quarters it was hard-at-it stuff. The Giants seemed to have the answers when it mattered most. In the final term the Giants slammed on 8.2 to 3.1. Greene featured in most of those goals; if he wasn’t sinking them, he had a hand in setting them up. That night he finished with seven scoring shots and 4.3, with 10 inside 50s. Greene also collected three Brownlow votes.
Up until then Greene was a one-dimensional ball magnet: someone who knew where to be to collect a lot of the football; someone with a sick sense of reading the play. But adding “goal-kicker” to his repertoire has expanded Greene’s stocks to another level. That Saints match from last year was the moment Greene landed, the moment where Greene became a viable match-winner. I learned from watching that game that he could still rack up possessions even as a forward. He gathered 31 touches against Riewoldt’s Saints. He did so by floating along the edge of packs and being at every contest he could so he could send the ball deep or receive the ball inside 50 for a shot a goal. This is how Toby Greene should be used. It’s the perfect role for a man his size, endurance capacity and goal-sneak nouse.
In 2016 Greene was consistent with weekly bags of three or four and finished with 44 goals – solid output for a small midfield-forward. It felt like Greene was the next Cousins in waiting or something like that. But the one thing that is stopping Greene from being the next AFL pin-up boy are his on-field and off-field brain fades: the fly-kick, suspensions and bar scuffles. He’s clearly stated that he won’t change his brash, in-your-face, thug mojo, but it does change the way we think about him just like Jason Ackermanis’ outspoken persona made it difficult at times to appreciate the good things he did on the field.
So, how should we feel about Toby Greene?
**
GOOD: This Toby Greene Youtube draft clip from 2011 is everything. It’s Toby in his most raw version of himself. I think it’s good to remind ourselves that this is a real version of Toby Greene and he wasn’t always cocky or lippy. In the clip Jay Clark reveals how Toby’s prowess revolves around stoppages and clearances. Toby says his inside game and reading the play are his best attributes and that Matthew Boyd was someone he modeled his game on. There’s something endearing about this clip. It makes it hard to have a beef against Greene knowing that this exists.
BAD: Have we latched on to him to early? I mean, are we really ready to call him superstar or elite after one All-Australian year in 2016? My question is: could he be as effective playing for the Blues? Players like Ablett Jnr., Dangerfield and Fyfe took years before they established themselves as superstars. And as we’ve seen with Ablett at the Suns, he’s carrying the team. Greene needs more time. He’s a talent, either way, but expectations of Greene are too unrealistic.
GOOD: Greene exploded in the first six rounds of 2017. He kicked 20 goals with bags of 5.2 against the Suns, 4.2 over Power and 4.1 when he took on the Swans. All of those games were wins. With these sorts of efforts the hype around Greene is real. He was as good as anybody in the AFL during this block of the season.
BAD: The season looked like it went downhill for Greene from week seven until Round 18. He managed 13 goals but also missed six weeks through suspensions. Just when you thought he was stringing together some excellent work, Greene did what Greene is sometimes known for: making bad snap decisions.
GOOD: The Round 10 Eagles match. The game where he turned in a stats card of 25 disposals, seven marks and five shots on goal for a return of 2.3 It was one of his better days at the office. What’s better he was instrumental in the win. One highlight: Greene took the ball out of mid air, handballed a no-look over his head to Llyod who kicked a goal that put them in front with eight minutes remaining. The game was miserable to watch but not because of Greene.
BAD: The fly kick. THE FLY KICK! Not as bad as everyone made out but why do these things tend to follow Greene around like a dark cloud? If Greene had a clean record the fly kick would have been seen as the accident that it was. But because of his rap sheet the question of intent will always be asked.
GOOD: His 45 goals this season is the most he’s kicked in his career. He’s the fifth best goal-kicker in the league. In 2015 he only managed 15.12 but his role was more inside-midfield focused. That makes his 89 goals in the past two seasons impressive. The only two small forwards doing it better are Eddie Betts and Robbie Gray. And that’s pretty slick company to be in.
**
Greene has the ability to bewilder us. In the Qualifying Final loss against the Crows, Greene was held to 1.0 and 16 meaningless disposals. The 2016 All-Australian was impotent. Then in the Semi Final win against the Eagles the Greene came to the party — 17 touches, 8 marks and 3.1. It’s the stat line we’ve come to expect of a player that will be an elite player of the future.
As much as you want to, you can’t ignore that fact that Greene is on a path to become of the great small forward-midfielders. Think Ackermanis or Alan Didak. Greene is proving to be that guy opposition teams can’t handle. Some have argued we’re debating the “is Greene elite” too early in his career. But when you think of how he’s carried the Giants’ forward line this year – along with main target Jeremy Cameron – with 45 goals and how he leads his club with 18 assists. He’s also had 140 score involvements. The numbers speak for themselves. His forward-mid duality allure means he will always impact games with either goals or assists and greatness is something in his control.
If Greene gets to the pinnacle of the AFL, perhaps winning a Brownlow, he would need to cut the stormy persona that means he misses weeks for striking or rough conduct. But we could be looking at how Greene’s reality right now. The guy that can win games off his own boot is the same guy that doesn’t know when to pull his head him when things get tense. He’s a weird paradox to unravel. He could carry the Giants but also frustrate their fans with his inept attitude. And then just when you think you’ve worked Greene out he goes and does something completely freakish and impossible.
There’s a chance too that Greene will get even better in the coming years. The key for Greene is to eliminate the lulls, the periods where he looks switched off and the suspensions. At 23 he’s got time to fix parts of his game that need tweaking. He needs to look at what the good AFL do. The good players don’t have these complexities. They’re leaders. There’s no real gap between their highs and lows; their lows aren’t thunderous but their highs have overwhelming layers — especially come cut-throat finals. The Giants looked good against the Eagles. And if they beat the Tigers and look good then the answer might be Greene.Fate/EXTELLA Moon Crux Edition Announced for Europe and Australia in January 2017
Marvelous Europe have announced the Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star release for Europe and Australia will be in January 2017! They’ve also announced the stunning Fate/Extella Moon Crux edition! You can pre-order it right now here:
Fate/EXTELLA offers a standalone story by Kinoko Nasu, playable from the perspective of three heroines. Enjoy fast-paced action gameplay featuring a range of Servant characters from across the Fate series, including fan favourites like Medusa and Gilgamesh!
The Moon Crux Edition features:
a 7.5” by 6.3” hardcover art book featuring over 100 pages of high-quality artwork from Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star, a pack of sixteen collectible 3” by 5” cards depicting each of the game’s Servants, and a 24” by 17” cloth poster. All of these fantastic items are housed within a large, high-quality presentation box, complete with a premium finish.
Want a closer look? Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star will be available to play at London MCM Expo this weekend! It will also be showcased in France for the first time at the 22nd Edition Paris Manga and Sci-Fi show from November 4th – 6th!
Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star is available for pre-order now, for PS4 and PS Vita.This article is about the stringed musical instrument. For other uses, see Cello (disambiguation)
The cello ( CHEL-oh; plural cellos or celli) or violoncello ( VY-ə-lən-CHEL-oh;[1] Italian pronunciation: [vjolonˈtʃɛllo]) is a string instrument. It is played by bowing or plucking its four strings, which are usually tuned in perfect fifths an octave lower than the viola: from low to high, C 2, G 2, D 3 and A 3. It is the bass member of the violin family, which also includes the violin, viola and the double bass, which doubles the bass line an octave lower than the cello in much of the orchestral repertoire. After the double bass, it is the second-largest and second lowest (in pitch) bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra. The cello is used as a solo instrument, as well as in chamber music ensembles (e.g., string quartet), string orchestras, as a member of the string section of symphony orchestras, most modern Chinese orchestras, and some types of rock bands.
Music for the cello is generally written in the bass clef, but both tenor clef and treble clef are used for higher-range parts, both in orchestral/chamber music parts and in solo cello works. A person who plays the cello is called a cellist or violoncellist. In a small classical ensemble, such as a string quartet, the cello typically plays the bass part, the lowest-pitched musical line of the piece. In an orchestra of the Baroque era (ca. 1600–1750) and Classical period (ca. 1725–1800), the cello typically plays the bass part, generally doubled an octave lower by the double basses. In Baroque-era music, the cello is often used to play the basso continuo bassline, typically along with a keyboard instrument (e.g., pipe organ or harpsichord) or a fretted, plucked stringed instrument (e.g., lute or theorbo). In such a Baroque performance, the cello player might be joined or replaced by other bass instruments, playing bassoon, double bass, viol or other low-register instruments.
Etymology [ edit ]
The name cello is derived from the ending of the Italian violoncello,[2] which means "little violone". Violone ("big viola") was a large-sized member of viol (viola da gamba) family or the violin (viola da braccio) family. The term "violone" today usually refers to the lowest-pitched instrument of the viols, a family of stringed instruments that went out of fashion around the end of the 17th century in most countries except England and, especially, France, where they survived another half-century before the louder violin family came into greater favour in that country as well. In modern symphony orchestras, it is the second largest stringed instrument (the double bass is the largest). Thus, the name "violoncello" contained both the augmentative "-one" ("big") and the diminutive "-cello" ("little"). By the turn of the 20th century, it had become common to shorten the name to 'cello, with the apostrophe indicating the missing stem.[3] It is now customary to use "cello" without apostrophe as the full designation.[3] Viol is derived from the root viola, which was derived from Medieval Latin vitula, meaning stringed instrument.
Description [ edit ]
Cello close-up
Cellos are tuned in fifths, starting with C 2 (two octaves below middle C), followed by G 2, D 3, and then A 3. It is tuned in the same intervals as the viola, but an octave lower. Unlike the violin or viola but similar to the double bass, the cello has an endpin that rests on the floor to support the instrument's weight. The cello is most closely associated with European classical music, and has been described as the closest sounding instrument to |
been a crucial aspect of the Portuguese boss' reign so far.Tom Tykwer Adapting Cloud Atlas with Wachowski Brothers
We just finished chatting with director Tom Tykwer earlier today at the press day in Los Angeles for his latest film, The International. At the end, we asked him what he had coming up next and while he said he wasn't ready to talk much about it, Tykwer did reveal that he's adapting a novel called Cloud Atlas. Here is what he said: "I'm trying to adapt a novel called Cloud Atlas, which is a novel by David Mitchell that I'm really completely excited about. And I'm sitting down with the Wachowski Brothers and trying to adapt that for a screenplay. It's very interesting." How's that for one hell of an exciting team up?
Cloud Atlas, published in 2004, is a novel comprised of six separate but loosely related narratives that weave together history, science, suspense, humor and pathos. Tykwer didn't reveal which of the six he would be focusing on, which is the next big question to be answered, because the book spans a variety of genres: "from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy." I'm already very curious to hear a lot more about this, especially with the Wachowskis involved as well. Before The International, Tykwer wrote all of his own scripts for his films, although we're not sure if he'll be directing this.
Given this is the very first we've heard of this, we're not sure if Tyker will be directing, or if the Wachowskis will be directing, or if they're only just collaborating on the screenplay, for someone else to direct. Whatever the case, we'll see if we can dig up some additional details and we'll keep our eyes open. Thoughts?
1 Mondo Jay on Jan 29, 2009
2 Derek on Jan 29, 2009
3 Ryan on Jan 29, 2009
4 Joe S. on Jan 29, 2009
5 Ian K on Jan 30, 2009
6 Dave on Jan 30, 2009
7 Sprink on Jan 30, 2009
8 Gene on Jan 30, 2009
9 jason on Jan 30, 2009
10 Count Screwloose on Jan 30, 2009
11 Seth on Jan 31, 2009
12 Darren on Jan 31, 2009
13 Dating in Toronto on Mar 27, 2009
14 Rob on May 16, 2009
15 Joe on May 18, 2010
16 Meghan on May 23, 2010
17 JT3rd on May 24, 2010
18 Ethan on Jun 14, 2010
19 troy on Aug 29, 2010
20 Tom todaro on Jan 5, 2011
Sorry, no commenting is allowed at this time.LG is set to launch its own mobile payment system, taking on Samsung Pay and Android Pay. The manufacturer has just partnered with Shinhan Card and KB Kookmin Card, two of the largest credit card companies in its home country.
There's no mention of when the service will go live in South Korea, although reports from yesterday suggested that it will be sometime next month.
It looks like LG will support MST (magnetic secure transmission) technology alongside NFC, with the manufacturer stating that it is targeting convenience and versatility with its payment service. The move will directly target Samsung Pay, currently the only mobile payment service to utilize MST. While NFC is gaining traction for contactless payments, going with MST ensures compatibility with older point-of-sale terminals.
Update: We've reached out to LG for comment, and have received confirmation that its payment service will be limited to the South Korean market in this current form.
Source: LGMusic is a huge part of our lives. My husband owns a company that makes synthesizers (musical instruments) and we listen to music together as a family every day. We often have music playing in the morning while we eat breakfast and in the afternoons while the boys play together or do artwork.
We also take music with us when we go on road trips or when we travel. We love traveling and we travel lots so the kid’s iPads are filled with the music they love. We just visited Los Cabos, Mexico and when we had downtime after a fun filled morning at the pool or the beach we all enjoyed listening to our music in the hotel room.
The boys are big fans of Disney movie soundtracks so we always have those on repeat. The new Cars 3 soundtrack from the Disney Cars 3 movie is phenomenal, we added it to our music collection already.
The Cars 3 soundtrack features four cover songs, including two bonus tracks (not included in the movie).*
“Kings Highway,” originally released in 1991 by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, makes a comeback courtesy of 23-year-old British singer-songwriter James Bay
Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 hit “Glory Days” gets a modern-day makeover by Grammy®-nominated performer Andra Day, who voices Sweet Tea in the film—a performer in the Cotter Pin with a hairstyle reminiscent of Day’s signature look.
*The Beatles’ classic 1965 song “Drive My Car” is back on the road, compliments of Hollywood Records artist Jorge Blanco.
*“Freeway of Love,” made famous in 1985 by Aretha Franklin, is performed for the soundtrack by actress Lea DeLaria, who also provides the voice of Miss Fritter, a school bus-turned-demolition-derby-queen in “Cars 3.”
The boys are also super excited to watch the Cars 3 movie that just came out on Friday, June 16th. We’ve all been eagerly waiting to watch it! You can download the Cars 3 soundtrack HERE and enjoy the movie at your nearest theater now.On Wednesday evening's "The Ed Show," CUNY physics professor Dr. Michio Kaku spoke about the future of NASA, and had some dire warnings about Senator Ted Cruz.
As of last week the GOP took control of the Senate, and with that came a tectonic shift in leaders and committee chairmen. This change plopped Senator Ted Cruz at the head of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, which as my colleague Lindsay Abrams pointed out puts the often anti-science Cruz overseeing NASA.
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"It’s like having the fox guard the chicken coop," Dr. Kaku began. "Don’t be surprised if all you have left are chicken bones."
The Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness oversees NASA's budget. Prior to chairing the subcommittee, Cruz has attempted to slash NASA's funding.
Host Ed Schultz wondered if the scientific community was worried about Cruz's new position.
"Science is the engine of prosperity," Dr. Kaku explained. "The wealth, the jobs of the world are dependent upon science. It’s the goose that laid the golden egg. But if you kill the goose, don’t be surprised if wealth, jobs, innovation, competitiveness go out the window because of ideology."
Beyond having previously attempted to cut NASA's budget, Cruz also refuses to acknowledge man-made climate change. This view, Dr. Kaku speculated, could color how Cruz treats NASA.
"He could allow the manned space program to go forward, because the Houston Space Center is based in Texas, after all," the physics professor stated. "On the other hand, he may decrease the funding for investigation of the atmosphere -- in other words, global warming. We need the data in order to predict how hot the Earth will get into the future."
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Without NASA "we’re gonna be going blind," Dr. Kaku warned. He is also worried about the politicization of climate change, which 97 percent of climate scientists agree is happening and is man-made, according to NASA.
"We’re not gonna know which way the atmosphere is going, and then it’s strictly a question of political football, as to how the presidential candidates align on this question," Dr, Kaku stated. "We have to have data. That’s the bottom line."
Watch below:Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law.
Among common impressions of the current Supreme Court are that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are joined at the hip and that the majority tilts reflexively in favor of corporations and employers.
As the court heads into the current term’s final three months, I looked at the statistics. What I found surprised me:
• In decisions that have split the court in any direction, Justices Scalia and Thomas have voted on opposite sides more often than they voted together. They differed in all three of the non-unanimous criminal-law cases that the court has decided so far.
• Employees suing companies for civil rights violations have won all three cases decided so far, two of them by votes of 8-0 (with Justice Elena Kagan recused).
• By wide margins, the court has rejected arguments put forward by corporate defendants in several cases. It refused to permit corporations to claim a personal-privacy exemption from disclosure of law-enforcement records under the Freedom of Information Act. It permitted a liability suit to proceed against an automobile manufacturer for not installing the safest kind of back-seat passenger restraint. And in a unanimous opinion on Tuesday, the court refused to throw out a lawsuit by investors alleging that a drug manufacturer’s failure to disclose reports that some patients using its cold remedy had lost their sense of smell amounted to securities fraud.
What accounts for the topsy-turvy world of the Supreme Court’s 2010-2011 term?
One answer might be that the deviation from expected behavior is just an illusion, based on a small number of decisions that might not prove representative of the term as a whole. The court has decided 25 cases so far, with about twice that many yet to come by the time the term ends in late June. Some of the term’s more important cases, including Wal-Mart’s appeal in a huge class-action sex-discrimination suit, have not yet even been argued.
Still, when the court decides so few cases — 73 last year — 25 decisions count for something. At the very least, this preliminary snapshot reminds those of us (and I include myself) who think they have taken the court’s measure that assumptions are a poor substitute for close observation. So that’s what this column is: a portrait of a term in progress.
When I looked at voting patterns, I was surprised by what the numbers revealed: that in the divided cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has voted more often with Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor than with Justices Thomas, Scalia or Samuel A. Alito Jr. The number of cases is small, only nine, and there was no particular ideological spin to most of the decisions, so this is not to suggest that the term will disprove characterizations of the Roberts court, or the chief justice himself, as conservative.
Even so, it is worth noting that in eight of these nine cases (not all the same eight), the chief justice and Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and/or Anthony M. Kennedy saw things the same way. (Justice Kagan’s previous service as solicitor general has required her to stay out of so many cases — 15 of the 25 decided so far — that I am not using her votes in these calculations.)
Chief Justice Roberts has yet to cast a dissenting vote this term; with the exception of Justice Kagan, every other justice has dissented at least once (probably the most eye-catching dissent so far is Justice Alito’s solitary dissent in Snyder v. Phelps, the 8-to-1 decision according First Amendment protection to the obnoxious funeral-picketing activities of the Westboro Baptist Church). And every justice, including Justice Kagan, has written more than one majority opinion, with one glaring exception: Justice Thomas, who has yet to write for the majority in any case this term.
That’s not to say that Justice Thomas has been silent (except on the bench during oral argument). He has written three dissenting and four concurring opinions. He gave the keynote address last month in Charlottesville, Va., at the annual student symposium of the Federalist Society, a national organization of conservative law students and lawyers. There, he offered a vigorous defense of his wife, Virginia, against criticism of her political activism.
“There is a price to pay today for standing in defense of your Constitution,” he said. Recognizing his wife in the audience, Justice Thomas said that the two of them were “equally yoked,” “believe in the same things” and were “focused on defending liberty.” Their critics, he warned, “seem bent on undermining” the court itself.
Assuming that Justice Thomas has received the same number of opinion-writing assignments as his colleagues — one or two cases from each of the court’s monthly argument sittings — the absence of majority opinions in his name is striking.
Granted, once a justice gets an assignment, the timing of the release of the opinion is not completely under his or her control. The need to satisfy a fractious majority can require multiple drafts, or those justices writing dissenting opinions can take their time, perhaps hoping to peel off a fifth vote and change the outcome.
The court’s eventual opinion in a case called Connick v. Thompson, argued back on Oct. 6, may be revealing. It is the only undecided case left from among the 12 the justices heard during the first month of the term, so by deduction, the opinion assignment should have gone to Justice Thomas, the only justice without a majority opinion from that session (Justice Kennedy and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg each have two.)
This is not to suggest that the term will disprove characterizations of the Roberts court, or the chief justice himself, as conservative.
The question in the case is a tricky one: whether a district attorney’s office can be held liable for damages based on a prosecutor’s intentional withholding of evidence that casts doubt on the defendant’s guilt. It’s easy to imagine the court deeply split over a case with disturbing facts (the defendant spent 14 years on death row and came close to being executed before the previously withheld blood evidence came to light) that nonetheless runs up against the court’s extreme reluctance to permit damage suits of this kind, even for egregious official misbehavior. Perhaps Justice Thomas, having received the initial assignment to write the majority opinion, has been unable to hold four other justices to his approach to this case. Or perhaps a dissenting opinion is taking a long time to incubate.
As a case about civil damages, the Connick case does not directly involve criminal law. No one disputes the prosecution’s duty to turn over exculpatory evidence; the question is whether the prosecutor’s office can be held liable for failing to train its staff to observe this very basic requirement. On issues of pure criminal law and procedure, including sentencing, Justices Thomas and Scalia have for some time demonstrated distinctly different points of view. Earlier this month, Justice Scalia joined Justice Sotomayor’s opinion permitting district judges in resentencing proceedings to grant leniency to defendants who have managed to rehabilitate themselves after the initial sentencing. In a solitary dissent, Justice Thomas wrote that he still regarded the federal sentencing guidelines as mandatory, despite the court’s ruling six years ago that rendered the guidelines “advisory.” Justice Thomas expressed sympathy for the defendant in this case, but said the district judge had no discretion to give a lighter sentence than the guidelines provided.
The two justices also diverged on the confrontation clause issue that provoked Justice Scalia’s vigorous dissent last month from another majority opinion by Justice Sotomayor. The question was whether a dying man gave the equivalent of testimony when he told the police the name of the man who shot him; if so, the victim’s statements to the police could not be introduced at trial because cross-examination would not be possible. In a separate opinion, Justice Thomas agreed with the majority that the encounter between the victim and the police was not testimonial. Justice Scalia, whose view of the Sixth Amendment confrontation right is categorical, insisted otherwise.
In all of the last term, Justices Scalia and Thomas were on opposite sides only six times. Already this term, they have split in five cases. An aberration or a trend? Watch and wait.For the stuffing
For the topping over the meatloaf
My mom use to make Cuban Meatloaf when I was kid and I was always fascinated by how she got the egg into it and made it not only taste great but look so pretty. My mom would always wave me off when I complimented the dish and she'd say "eh that's just picadillo with an egg in the middle, nothing special", but it was to me! Her comment is how I figured out how she made it.My parents came over from Cuba in 1960 and I am thinking this may very well be a Cuban-American recipe, not sure that I've ever seen this in a Cuban food cookbook, but I use to see it at a few Cuban restaurants. The flavors are reminiscent of a Cuban Picadillo, one of my favorite of Cuban meal, which is a ground beef dish that simmers in onions, peppers garlic and lots of seasonings in a rich tomato sauce. But I digress, so back to the meatloaf! The meatloaf stays very moist because of the cooked onion, peppers and garlic that are added to the raw meat. It packs a big flavor punch that is a result of the blend of spices in my homemade sazón completa seasoning. When you cut into it, you see a perfectly cooked egg, hugged by a blanket of pimientos and dotted by Spanish green olives, it's really impressive and is just so flavorful and delicious! If you have leftovers it's great the next day in a sandwich or you can make my cheesy biscuit empanadas 1 pound ground beef1/2 pound of ground pork1 large yellow onion, chopped1 medium green bell pepper, chopped2-4 garlic cloves, minced2 small pinches of salt1/4 cup dry white wine or Vino Seco2 tablespoons tomato paste2 tablesspoons Cuban sazón completa {1/2 cup finely grated Cuban cracker or panko breadcrumb1 eggGrated zest and Juice of 1 lime4 large soft boiled eggs {how to make the perfect soft boiled egg*}1 7 ounce can of pimientos10 small Spanish manzanilla green olives - pitted and stuffed with pimientos1 pimiento, chopped until it is pulped8 small Spanish Manzanilla green olives, finely minced2 tablespoons tomato paste1 teaspoon brown sugar2 -3 tablespoons white wineHeat a skillet over medium heat, add oil, onion, pepper, garlic and salt, stirring frequently, cook for 7-10 minutes until the vegetables are well softened. Deglaze pan with 1/4 cup dry white wine, add tomato paste, allow to cook for 1 minute. Remove from heat and allow to cool enough that you can handle it with your hands.To the ground meats add, the sazón, grated cracker, egg, lime zest and juice, and the cooled vegetable mixture. mix through using your (clean) hands. Do not overwork the meat. Keep light and loose.Preheat oven to 350 degreesTo stuff the meatloaf lay out a 1" thickness of beef mixture on to a sheet pan, and shape into a loaf, about 8" long by 4" wide. Make a small "well" about 1/2 in from the edge. Place eggs one behind the other, over each egg with a piece of pimiento (like a blanket), add an olive on either side of the top and bottom of egg. Carefully start covering the eggs with the remaining meat mixture, shape it into a dome shape.To make the topping blend all the topping ingredients together and spread over top and sides of meatloaf.Place in preheated oven, cook for 50-60 minutes, making sure to rotate your baking sheet halfway through the cooking process. Let the meatloaf rest for 15 minutes before cutting into it.Serve with white rice, mashed potatoes, vegetables or a salad of choice. Traditionally, my mom use to serve this with white rice, Cuban black beans and maduros. ENJOY!Recipe Notes:Make your own Cuban Sazón Completa, no MSG or fillers and way better.If you have never made a soft-boiled egg, check out my post How to Make the Perfect Soft Boiled Egg but instead of simmering for 5, simmer just for 3 minutes. This give the egg the head start it will need to continue cooking with the meatloaf.The Ames strain is one of 89 known strains of the anthrax bacterium (Bacillus anthracis). It was isolated from a diseased 14-month-old Beefmaster heifer that died in Sarita, Texas in 1981. The strain was isolated at the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory and a sample was sent to the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).[1] Researchers at USAMRIID mistakenly believed the strain came from Ames, Iowa because the return address on the package was the USDA's National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames and mislabeled the specimen.[2]
The Ames strain came to wide public attention in association with the 2001 anthrax attacks. Seven letters mailed to media outlets and US Senators on September 18, 2001 and October 9, 2001 contained anthrax bacteria of this particular strain. This strain is a monomorphic disease, mutating slowly if at all.
Because of its virulence, the Ames strain is used by the United States as somewhat of a gold standard for development of vaccines and testing their effectiveness, starting in the 1980s, after work on weaponizing the Vollum 1B strain ended and all weaponized stocks were destroyed after the end of the U.S. biological warfare program in 1969.[3]
References [ edit ]A Moroccan man has been arrested in Italy over the Tunisia museum massacre that left 21 tourists dead after fleeing across the Mediterranean on a migrant boat.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the March attack on the Bardo Museum in the capital Tunis which killed British mother Sally Adey.
Abdel Majid Touil, 22, was arrested at the home where he lives with his mother and brothers in Gaggiano, near Milan last night.
The accusations listed in the Tunisian arrest warrant include premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit attacks against the internal security of the state, belonging to a terrorist group and recruiting and training others to commit terrorist attacks, police said.
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Held by terror police: Moroccan national Abdel Majid Touil (above) has been arrested in Italy over the Tunisia museum massacre that left 21 tourists dead after fleeing across the Mediterranean on a migrant boat
A CCTV image shows two of the gunmen who attacked Tunisia's National Bardo Museum in March holding their guns in a room as a man runs away. Two attackers were shot dead, while a third went on the run. Italian police today said they had arrested a Moroccan suspect in the northern Italian town of Gaggiano
The room in Gaggiano, near Milan, Italy, where Abdelmajid Touil was arrested on Tuesday evening
He arrived in Porto Empedocle in Sicily on a migrant boat on February 17 using the alias Abdullah, but received an expulsion order demanding he leave Italy within 15 days.
From that moment, he disappeared before re-emerging in Tunisia where the authorities maintain he was personally involved in both the planning and the execution of the attacks.
The Tunisians claim that he was also involved in recruiting jihadis.
He then disappeared again and managed to re-enter Italy despite the expulsion order.
Police were able to identify him in part after his mother reported that her son's passport was missing immediately after the Bardo attack.
Bruno Megale of the anti-terrorism Digos police said: 'He did not appear to frequent mosques close to fundamentalism in Italy and was unknown to us apart from the deportation order before the intelligence came from the Tunisian authorities.'
Touil arrived in Porto Empedocle in Sicily on a migrant boat (like the one above) in February, but received an expulsion order. The timing of his arrival in Italy suggests he was allegedly involved in planning the attack
A view of the building in Gaggiano, near Milan, where Abdel Majid Touil was arrested by terror police
Prosecutor Bruno Megale speaks during during a press conference by Italian police in Milan about the arrest of a Moroccan man, Abdel Majid Touil
Extradition procedures will now begin, it is understood, but Tunisia could face difficulties because the death penalty could be imposed for the crimes of which he is accused.
A neighbour in Gaggiano claimed Touil could not have taken part in the attacks in Tunis in March because he had been in Italy at the time.
The woman told ANSA news agency: ‘He is a good kid. You are making a serious mistake.
'He has done nothing. At the time of the attack he was here. He is looking for work.'
His brother has also told investigators that Touil was in Italy at the times of the shooting.
Terrified: Tourists and visitors from the Bardo museum are evacuated in Tunis after gunmen opened fire
Blood stains on the ground as journalists and security forces stand at the visitors entrance of the National Bardo Museum in Tunis on March 19 in the aftermath of an attack on foreign tourists in the Tunisian capital
News of his arrest follows warnings by Libyan authorities that ISIS militias in Libya are using migrant boats to smuggle jihadis into Europe.
A police spokesman said:'A Moroccan national, wanted internationally, was arrested yesterday evening in a town in the Milan region.
'The Tunisian authorities suspect him of having taken part in the Bardo attack.'
Mother-of-two Sally Adey was killed in the terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, dying off wounds to her stomach and pelvis
Milan's prefecture was expected to provide more details at a press conference later in the day.
The Bardo attack on March 18 in the capital Tunis killed 22 people in total.
Two Tunisian assailants who had shot tourists as they got off buses outside the museum were gunned down at the scene after taking hostages inside the museum.
Tunisia's President Beji Caid Essebsi said a few days after the attack that a third gunman was on the run.
ISIS claimed responsibly for the massacre, the deadliest involving foreigners in Tunisia since a 2002 suicide bombing on the island of Djerba.
The terror group issued a statement and audio on jihadi websites applauding the dead gunmen as 'knights' for their 'blessed invasion of one of the dens of infidels and vice in Muslim Tunisia'.
The government said the two gunmen had trained in jihadi camps in Libya before the attack inside the heavily secured Tunisian parliament compound.
Among the dead were 17 cruise ship tourists, including British mother-of-two Sally Adey. They also included a Tunisian policeman.
Mrs Adey, 57, from Shropshire, had been on a cruise of the Mediterranean with her husband, Robert, and was on an excursion to the museum.
A coroner ruled at an inquest in March that the the retired solicitor died from wounds to her stomach and pelvis.
Police in Tunisia have arrested five people described as directly tied to the two gunmen.Donald Trump said Wednesday he was wary of relying on the U.S. intelligence community because he does not trust them and believes they’ve made “bad decisions.”
During an interview with Fox News, Trump was asked about his upcoming intelligence briefing and whether he does “trust intelligence.”
“Not so much from the people that have been doing it for our country. Look what’s happened over the last ten years. Look what’s happened over the years. It’s been catastrophic,” he said in response. “And in fact, I won’t use some of the people that are sort of your standards, you know, just use them, use them, use them. Very easy to use them, but I won’t use them because they’ve made such bad decisions.”
Trump did not make clear –and was not asked — whom he would rely on outside of official channels.
He then appeared to allude to the George W. Bush administration’s claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“I mean, you look at Iraq, you look at the Middle East, it’s a total powder keg. If we would have never touched it it would have been a lot better, I mean, we would have been much better off. On top of which we spent probably $4 trillion. Nobody even knows what we’ve spent,” Trump said.
The Republican nominee also told Fox News that he’s concerned about Hillary Clinton receiving classified briefings “because of her email situation.”
“She can’t keep anything private,” he said. “I think her email scandal is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”Tea Party Unity founder Rick Scarborough says that he thinks there ought to be a class action lawsuit against homosexuality, comparing it to holding cigarette makers accountable because their products cause cancer.
During a Tea Party Unity event on Thursday, Peter LaBarbera, the president of the anti-gay group Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, suggested that media should begin telling the stories of people who left the gay lifestyle are happy instead of embracing “the pro-gay thing.”
“We need to work on our conservative, alternate media and say, ‘Look, don’t do the pro-gay thing, why don’t you rather step out and support these ex-gays?’” LaBarbera said. “We should encourage Fox News to tell their stories. Fox is now telling the stories of black conservatives because the other media is not doing that, we should all get on Fox and say, ‘Come on, tell these stories, these wonderful stories of happy men and women who have left the homosexual lifestyle.’”
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Scarborough said there’s much more they can do to stop the pro-gay agenda.
“Peter, the whole issue of a class action lawsuit, you and I have talked about this a little bit,” Scarborough said. “I just wonder if you’ve explored that, talked to anyone about it.”
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“Even the Center for Disease Control verifies that homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer,” the former Baptist pastor continued. “And yet the entire nation has rejected smoking, billions of dollars are put into a trust fund to help cancer victims and the tobacco industry was held accountable for that.”
“Yeah, I think that’s great,” LaBarbera said of the lawsuit. “I would love to see it. We always wanted to see one of the kid [sic] in high school who was counseled by the official school counselor to ‘just be gay,’ then he comes down with HIV. But we never really got the client for that.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that gays, bisexuals and other men who have sex with men (MSM) accounted for 63 percent of the new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2010. CDC data on tobacco say smoking accounts for 90 percent of all lung cancer deaths in men in the U.S. and 80 percent of all lung cancer deaths in women in a given year.
“Smoking causes coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States,” the CDC says.
MSM accounted for 11,400 new HIV infections in 2010, while smoking accounts for 440,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
“More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined,” the CDC says.
Sources: The New Civil Rights Movement, Raw Story
undefinedGoodnight, sweet Philae. (Michael Probst/AP)
On Nov. 12, 2014, the European Space Agency's Rosetta orbiter dropped a little lander named Philae down onto the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The robot made history as the first man-made object to have a controlled landing on a comet and was meant to help us uncover some of the secrets of our early solar system from 67P's icy core. And it did — for two days.
A bumpy landing put Philae in the shade, rendering its solar panels useless. Scientists worked frantically with the bot's reserve battery power, doing improvised science experiments to glean as much data as possible from a lander whose exact whereabouts remained unknown. But once its 60 hours of battery life ran out, the lander went silent.
[Why we all fell in love with Rosetta’s Philae lander]
Scientists hoped that as the comet reached perihelion — its closest orbital approach of the sun — the increase in light would give Philae a charge. Rosetta listened for a signal, even as the chances grew more and more slim. As of February of this year, with the sun in 67P's rearview mirror, hearing from Philae again became virtually impossible.
But until Wednesday morning, Rosetta kept listening.
"Today communication with Philae was stopped," Andreas Schütz, media spokesman of German space agency DLR, told the AFP on Wednesday.
It’s time for me to say goodbye. Tomorrow, the unit on @ESA_Rosetta for communication with me will be switched off forever... — Philae Lander (@Philae2014) July 26, 2016
At around 5 a.m. Eastern time, scientists switched off Rosetta's Electrical Support System Processor Unit (ESS), which was used to communicate with the lander. On Sept. 30, just over two years after entering orbit around 67P, Rosetta will crash onto the comet's surface and complete its mission. Because Rosetta will have very little solar power by that time — it's already over 320 million miles from the sun — the mission team needs to start shutting down unnecessary systems. Four months after the last real chance of hearing from Philae, they've decided it's finally time to stop listening.
Nature reports that the mission team isn't too emotional over the official shutdown. They'd given up on Philae's long odds back in February. Instead, they're saving their tears for September — when the Rosetta orbiter crashes down to join its long lost pal.
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SaveTOKYO >> Two decades after they made news as the first foreigners to reach the exalted rank of yokozuna, it is the medical condition of former Hawaii sumotori Musashimaru and Akebono that has them in the headlines now.
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TOKYO >> Two decades after they made news as the first foreigners to reach the exalted rank of yokozuna, it is the medical condition of former Hawaii sumotori Musashimaru and Akebono that has them in the headlines now.
Fiamalu Penitani, who competed as Musashimaru, is in a Tokyo hospital recovering from a kidney transplant, the Star-Advertiser has learned.
Meanwhile, reports say Chad Rowan, who competed as Akebono, is hospitalized in southern Japan.
Word of Akebono being hospitalized was first reported by the Wrestling Observer website and picked up by several other wrestling blogs and websites but reports that he has been placed in a medically-induced coma after suffering a cardiac condition have not been independently confirmed in the mainstream Japanese media by early Wednesday, Japan time.
Several sumo contemporaries of Akebono said they have had no word of his condition.
Akebono, 47, who took up a wrestling and mixed martial arts career shortly after retiring from sumo in 2001, had been in Fukuoka for a wrestling show. There have been no details of his health or confirmation of what might have led to the hospitalization.
Akebono’s Facebook account has been receiving a flood of “get well” messages from fans and friends.
Penitani, 45, told the Star-Advertiser he became ill while golfing in Nara and was diagnosed with a kidney ailment. When doctors told him he needed a transplant, Penitani said, “My wife right away said she would donate one of hers. She didn’t event hesitate.”
His wife, Masami, 43, is a former hula instructor in Japan. The couple have been married nearly a decade and have one son, Joey, who is 2.
Musashimaru said, “I’m feeling better and I’m hoping the doctors will let me go home soon.”
Penitani, a former Waianae High football player, became the 67th yokozuna when he was promoted in 1999. He won the Emperor’s Cup 12 times. He set an ironman record of 55 consecutive tournaments without a losing record.
After retirement he worked as a coach before opening his own Musashigawa stable three years ago. His wife handles the business side of the stable operation.
Akebono, a former Kaiser High wrestler, became the first foreigner to reach sumo’s highest rank when he was promoted in 1993, becoming the 64th yokozuna in the centuries-old sport. He won the Emperor’s Cup, symbolic of a tournament championship, 11 times in a 13-year career before knee and back ailments forced his retirement.
He has lived in Japan since his retirement competing in wrestling and mixed martial arts events and making celebrity TV and other appearances.
A third member of the record setting and much-celebrated Hawaii sumo contingent, Salevaa Atisanoe, who competed as Konishiki, and reached the rank of ozeki before branching out into the entertainment business, is traveling in California and said he is well.A report has accused bailed-out British bank HBOS of being so badly run it was doomed to fail even without the 2008 financial crisis.
The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards said in the report issued on Friday that former HBOS executives were to blame for the collapse of the bank and and the regulator should consider banning them from the industry.
The commission, entrusted with finding ways to reform UK banks, said in the report An Accident Waiting To Happen that bad lending and losses across the business were likely to have led to its insolvency even without the funding and liquidity problems of the financial crisis.
The review said that regulators bore some of the blame, but it attacked the state-rescued group's ex-chairman, Lord Dennis Stevenson, and two previous chief executives, Sir James Crosby and Andy Hornby, for a "colossal failure" of management in pursuing a high-risk strategy that caused its downfall in 2008.
The parliamentary panel blamed the men's "toxic misjudgements" for a collapse which sparked a vast £ |
Gonzales, whose flight attendant husband Patrick Gomes, was on the flight.
“Although they found something, you know, it’s not the end. They still need to find the whole plane and our spouses as well. We still want them back,” she told Reuters.
Malaysia Airlines described the discovery as “a major breakthrough”.
“We expect and hope that there would be more objects to be found which would be able to help resolve this mystery,” the compan said in a statement.
But Serge Mackowiak, the French deputy public prosecutor, was considerably more cautious, saying it was “highly probable” that the wing flap came from the doomed flight.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paris deputy public prosecutor Serge Mackowiak says debris found on the island of Réunion matches the technical specifications of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370
Mackowiak told a packed press conference: “This afternoon at 15.00 the expert examination (of the flaperon) began under the control and presence of one of the three judges carrying out the inquiry.”
He added that there were two reasons for believing the wing flap came from the Boeing 777 of flight MH370.
“Boeing has confirmed that the flaperon comes from a Boeing 777 because of the colour, structure, joints,” he said.
“The second reason is that Malaysian Airlines representatives have communicated details of the aircraft and on this basis we can link the piece examined by the expert with the Boeing 777 of flight MH370 because of technical similarities.”
“In view of the experts’ report, we can say today there exists very strong presumption that the flaperon found on the beach on Réunion comes from the Boeing 777 of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370,” he said.
He added that further tests to be carried out on Thursday would hopefully confirm this.
“These tests will be carried out as rapidly as possible for the families of the victims who we are thinking of this evening,” Mackowiak concluded.
Mackowiak had begun by outlining the circumstances of the investigation, which he said was examining the possibility that the plane was hijacked by terrorists.
Aviation experts said they were deeply disappointed by the deputy public prosecutor’s statement, which they said would only add to the suffering of the passengers’ families.
Jean Serrat, an aviation consultant, told BFMTV: “The Malaysian prime minister was categoric, he said this piece came from flight MH370 … Let’s put ourselves in the place of the families. This is a form of torture for them.
Despite a massive international search, the fate of the Boeing 777 aircraft remained unknown and until a week ago whenthe flaperon – encrusted with barnacles – was washed up on Réunion.
The debris was flown to Paris where French investigators at the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses took charge of the two-meter long piece of wing, identified by a part number as coming from a Boeing 777, which was despatched to a ministry of defence laboratory near the southern French city of Toulouse at the weekend.
A dozen air accident investigators examined the flaperon on Wednesday in the presence of legal and transport representatives from Malaysia, China and France and representatives from the US aircraft constructor Boeing.
A piece of suitcase washed up at the same time is being analysed by experts in Paris.
The ocean bed search for the aircraft is being led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), but France has taken over the legal investigation after the debris discovered on its overseas department Réunion and because four of the passengers were French.
The test centre in Balma, a suburb of Toulouse, specialises in metal analysis and is equipped with a scanning electron microscope capable of 100,000 times magnification. It was used to store and analyse debris from an Air France jet which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009.
Ships have been scouring more than 50,000 square kilometres (19,000 square miles) of deep ocean floor for evidence of the missing aircraft. Authorities plan to search a total of 120,000 square metres.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. regulators on Thursday approved the use of new technology that will improve picture quality on mobile phones, tablets and television, but also raises significant privacy concerns by giving advertisers dramatically more data about viewing habits.
Thanksgiving Day holiday shoppers line up with television sets on discount at the Target retail store in Chicago, Illinois, November 28, 2013. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes/File Photo
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to allow broadcasters to voluntarily use the new technology, dubbed ATSC 3.0, which would allow for more precise geolocating of television signals, ultra-high definition picture quality and more interactive programming, like new educational content for children and multiple angles of live sporting events.
The system uses precision broadcasting and targets emergency or weather alerts on a street-by-street basis. The system could allow broadcasters to wake up a receiver to broadcast emergency alerts. The alerts could include maps, storm tracks and evacuation routes.
The new standard would also let broadcasters activate a TV set that is turned off to send emergency alerts.
Current televisions cannot carry the new signal and the FCC on Thursday said it was only requiring broadcasting both signals for five years after deploying the next-generation technology.
Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc last month called the new standard “the Holy Grail” for the advertiser because it tells them who is watching and where.
But Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan said the new technology “contemplates targeted advertisements that would be ‘relevant to you and what you actually might want to see.’ This raises questions about how advertisers and broadcasters will gather the demographic information from consumers which are necessary to do targeted advertisements.” [nL2N1N11R0]
Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the new technology would force consumers to buy new televisions. “The FCC calls this approach market driven. That’s right — because we will all be forced into the market for new television sets or devices.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai defended the proposal, calling concerns about buying new devices “hypothetical.” He added five years is “a long time. We’ll have to see how the standard develops.”
One issue is whether broadcasters will be able to pass on the costs of advanced broadcast signals through higher retransmissions fees and demand providers carry the signals.
The National Association of Broadcasters, which represents Tegna Inc, Comcast Corp, CBS Corp, Walt Disney Co, Twenty-First Century Fox Inc and others, petitioned the FCC in April 2016 to approve the new standard. “This is game-changing technology for broadcasting and our viewers,” the group said Thursday.
Many companies have raised concerns about costs, including AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc. Cable, satellite and other pay TV providers “would incur significant costs to receive, transmit, and deliver ATSC 3.0 signals to subscribers, including for network and subscriber equipment,” Verizon said.
Many nations are considering the new standard. South Korea adopted the ATSC 3.0 standard in 2016.CLOSE The most sweeping tax overhaul in three decades will make big changes to how families pay their taxes. The bill lowers tax rates for all income groups, but caps or eliminates many popular deductions. (Dec. 21) AP
Sinclair Broadcast Group headquarters in Baltimore, Md. (Photo11: Eileen Blass, USA TODAY)
Add Sinclair, the nation's largest TV broadcaster, to the companies promising a $1,000 bonus to employees with the successful passage of the tax reform bill.
The Hunt Valley, Md.-headquartered Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has 173 TV stations and reaches more than 38% of the U.S., said Friday that it will pay a special $1,000 bonus to its nearly 9,000 full-time and part-time employees, excluding senior level executives.
Sinclair, which is seeking to grow to 200-plus stations with a $4 billion merger with Tribune Media Co., joins several companies including AT&T, Comcast and Fifth Third Bancorp already pledging to give workers one-time bonuses of $1,000 once President Trump signed the bill — something he did Friday before leaving Washington for the holiday.
Other companies including Boeing, Comcast and Wells Fargo planned other investments. Boeing said it would invest $300 million in its business including $100 million in employee training and education and $100 million as part of its "workforce of the future" initiative.
Broadband and pay-TV provider Comcast, which also owns NBCUniversal, said it expects to invest more than $50 billion over the next five years in its broadband infrastructure and its television, film and theme park businesses.
Wells Fargo said it would boost its employees' minimum wage to $15 per hour, up 11% from its current hourly rate of $13.50, once the law was passed.
In addition to its promised bonuses, Cincinnati regional bank Fifth Third Bancorp said it would also raise the minimum wage for its employees to $15.
“We are grateful to our President and legislature for passing the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and are excited about the benefits it will provide for our country’s economy, our Company, and our employees,” said Sinclair CEO and President Chris Ripley said in a statement. “We recognize that our employees are our most valuable resource, truly appreciate their combined achievements for our Company and look forward to a very bright future.”
The bonuses will cost $9 million to the company, which generated $2.7 billion in revenue in 2016, with net income of $245.3 million.
More: Corporate America's tax-cut generosity: Is it real?
More: AT&T, Comcast, Wells Fargo promise bonuses or pay hikes once tax cut bill passes
More: FCC proposes $13.4M fine for TV-station owner Sinclair
Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2BjetOXKirk J. Nahra is a partner with Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C., where he represents companies in a broad range of industries in connection with privacy and data security laws and regulations across the United States and globally. He is chair of the firm’s Privacy Practice and co-chair of its Health Care Practice.
He is a nationally recognized expert on privacy and data security laws related to the health care and insurance industries. He assists companies in a wide range of industries in analyzing and implementing the requirements of privacy and security laws across the country and internationally. He provides advice on data breaches, enforcement actions, contract negotiations, business strategy, research and de-identification issues and privacy, data security and cybersecurity compliance. He advises companies in virtually all industries, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups.
LIFARS: Tell us some background on you and how you got where you are today.
Kirk: I have been a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C. for almost 30 years. I have spent the past 15 years focusing my work on privacy and data security issues, related to the growth in laws and regulations across the United States and the world addressing legal obligations related to the confidentiality and protection of personal data. This field of practice didn’t exist when I was in law school or in the early years of my practice. It began to develop, slowly, with the expansion of the Internet during the 1990s, the initial European Union guidelines in the mid-1990s, and then the creation of the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Today, there are significant laws covering all personal data in the European Union. Laws are cropping up in a growing range of countries around the world. In the United States, the law has tended to develop on a sectoral basis (e.g., health care and financial services), or related to specific practices (such as telemarketing or data collected from children), but there are now hundreds (and maybe thousands) of laws and regulations addressing compliance obligations, for different kinds of companies in different settings. The challenges these days range from very basic issues (do I need to have a privacy notice?) to substantially more challenging issues that involve business strategy, integration of multiple overlapping and often inconsistent laws and regulations, and overall data management across industry sectors and borders. These issues are affecting virtually any company that has personal data about employees, consumers or others. My clients range from hospitals and health insurers to a broad range of financial services entities, service providers around the world, start-up technology companies and basically any company that has to understand its legal obligations, responsibilities and rights in connection with the use of data. I work with companies on both practical legal issues (negotiating contracts, due diligence, government investigations, developing policies) but also on a broad range of strategic and public policy issues that are helping companies evaluate their appropriate place in a global market.
LIFARS: How would the new administration effect cybersecurity? Would there be any changes in regulations?
Kirk: Just as the world of privacy and data security has expanded to include a broader range of companies that use and disclose personal data, the concept of cybersecurity has expanded these obligations even more. Cybersecurity involves interconnections between entities, and the overall need to protect a broad range of activities related to the Internet and otherwise. Therefore, companies that haven’t had to be too worried about privacy issues – think power companies, chemical companies, defense contractors – now need to be very concerned about cybersecurity protections and the risks of cyberattacks. At the same time, with the growth in big data, we see more and more situations where personal data and the potential for cyberattacks are growing in places we have never thought of before – smart refrigerators, connected cars, a broad range of medical devices, etc. So, protecting cybersecurity is growing in importance on a daily basis. Companies across this broad range of industries are finding the need to think about these issues – whether because of specific legal and compliance requirements, market forces or overall strategic goals.
It’s not really clear yet where this administration will be going on these issues, both on privacy as well as cybersecurity. The government in general (starting with the Obama Administration) has been encouraging companies to improve their overall cybersecurity efforts. There have been government directives focused on information sharing and cooperation, but there have not been specific, detailed compliance obligations as a matter of law – there are lots of “best practices materials”, but not legal requirements. This new administration has made various statements about the poor state of cybersecurity (something it has been saying since the campaign, although usually without any real evidence), but so far we really haven’t seen anything specific from them at all. At the same time, it would be counter to some of the themes of this administration to impose new regulations on a broad range of businesses. So, we can expect to see some proclamations about the importance of improved cybersecurity, but it isn’t clear that there will be significant new guidance or compliance obligations coming from this administration.
LIFARS: President Donald Trump was expected to sign an executive order on cybersecurity. Could you tell us what this order is expected to initiate?
Kirk: The new administration’s cybersecurity executive order has been a subject of significant debate and discussion over the past few weeks. There have been several fits and starts, with statements that it was imminent, and then that it was being pulled, followed by publication of several drafts. So, there is obviously a lot of discussion going on within the administration about how to handle this issue and what an executive order should cover. The set of topics addressed by the draft EO also has been changing. For example, even though there is a general consensus that there are not enough trained cybersecurity experts, one draft of the EO removed a proposal to build up this expertise (which may face additional challenges if an immigration ban comes back). It also is clear that the administration is struggling to assign responsibility for development and oversight of a federal government cybersecurity program when they have not yet appointed the logical personnel to handle these roles.
What we can mainly expect to see is various efforts to review and evaluate cyber vulnerabilities and capabilities, along with a review of the capabilities of various adversaries. This has been done before, but this administration seems to want to do it again. There are various cross-governmental assignments which may end up changing various government agencies, or could also lead to agency overlaps, inefficiencies and tensions. There have been inconsistent statements about whether to develop appropriate deterrence efforts. But, in general, we will see (1) efforts to analyze the current state of affairs on cybersecurity; (2) some assignment of responsibility for overall cyber activities; (3) some kind of information sharing program to share threat information; (4) analysis of appropriate responses to cyber-threats; (5) efforts to improve the overall cyber capabilities of “critical infrastructure” entities; and, most likely, various broad statements about the importance of these goals without too much detail or specific actions. It is likely – based on the earlier drafts – to be a relatively modest order that will re-do prior assessments of capabilities and hope to propose solutions for better practices in the future. Whether we will see meaningful success from this order is very much an open question.
LIFARS: What are your recommendations to the new administration on cybersecurity issues? What can government do to improve cybersecurity?
Kirk: The government has three big picture responsibilities in connection with cybersecurity – the responsibility for the government itself, law enforcement investigations, and leadership obligations as a matter of law/regulation for other entities. The government needs to pay attention to its own house in the first instance – we continue to see reports of various “enemies” trying to attack government databases and government infrastructure, as well as reports about poor security practices both from various high ranking government officials and others. The government needs to make sure to protect its own house first.
The government also needs to improve its capabilities to engage in “normal” law enforcement investigations, to assist companies and consumers who have faced cyberattacks and cyber- crimes. This requires both improved technological skills and a thoughtful approach to investigation and prosecution of computer crimes. My concern is that some of the administration’s other priorities – such as reported efforts to access personal information as part of border and customs investigations – will distract from the need for improved law enforcement performance.
In terms of leadership and regulation, the government clearly can help by developing appropriate best practices for business entities, as NIST and other agencies are doing. This is critical. At the same time, for most companies, they should be motivated to engage in appropriate cybersecurity activities for their own selfish interests – to protect their businesses and their customers – rather than solely because the government tells them they have to. So, I am less concerned about the fact that there aren’t specific new laws or regulations coming out on these issues. We may see them – but it doesn’t seem to be a high priority of this administration and the real pressure for these actions must come from companies on their own. Providing better information and guidance can make this process easier and less expensive for any company interested in improving in these areas.
Connect with Kirk at KNahra@wileyrein.com & Follow Kirk on Twitter @KirkjnahraworkUSA TODAY Sports
The New England Patriots have long struggled against interior pressure, with the New York Giants controlling the A-gaps—the spaces in between the guards and center—in each of the last two Super Bowl losses.
Bill Belichick chose to be the bully—rather than the bullied—against the Denver Broncos in their 43-21 victory in Week 9. He unleashed Dont'a Hightower and Jamie Collins on Denver's unsuspecting interior offensive line and wreaked havoc in key situations all night long.
They started slow in the first and third quarters, but they made Peyton Manning make quick decisions when playing against the wind in the second and fourth quarters. As you can see in the chart below, New England was successful—holding the Broncos to less than five yards—whether they actually brought the pressure or merely threatened it.
Patriots Success in Pressure Quarter Threaten Pressure A-Gap Pressure 1st 2-of-3 0-of-0 2nd 1-of-3 5-of-8 3rd 2-of-5 0-of-1 4th 5-of-8 4-of-7 NFL Game Rewind Charting
Belichick spoke last year with Field Yates of ESPN.com about what that sort of pressure—or threat thereof—can do to an offense:
It puts six guys really on five. Your tackles, guards, and center are against their four defensive linemen and two guys in the A gap. You have to determine how you're going to handle those six players. Sometimes they come, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they line up in there and bring people off the edge, so there's actually a seventh guy that's not part of that six.
Collins and Hightower each rushed the passer 12 times, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required). Despite not sacking Manning, they were able to hurry him a combined eight times and constantly kept him—and his offensive line—contained whether they were blitzing or not.
That guessing game allowed other rushers an easier path to Manning and gave Manning pause as to whether the middle of the field would be open or not.
The guessing game worked well for New England early in the second quarter. Defensive coordinator Matt Patricia lined up six defenders on the line, with Hightower and Collins each threatening the A-gap blitz. Hightower and Rob Ninkovich would drop into coverage, however. Ninkovich ended up in a spot that Manning believed would be vacated and hauled in a gift of an interception.
Looking forward, the Patriots may be able to have success with a similar game plan against the player who replaced Manning in Indianapolis: Andrew Luck.
While Luck is nearly as adept as Manning in picking up on defensive cues, his interior line has struggled greatly in dealing with interior pressure. Center Jonotthan Harrison ranks 36 out of 40 centers in pass-blocking efficiency and right guard Hugh Thornton is 59th of out 78, according to PFF.
Look for Collins and Hightower to be close enough pre-snap to hear Luck breathe as he is calling out his signals in Week 11.Justin Chapman knew he had hooked a big one while fishing off Claremont, but he never expected to haul in a monster pink snapper.
The 10.6kg fish was displayed to gasps of amazement from other keen anglers at the Swanfish 2017 event in Victoria Park yesterday.
Premier Colin Barnett, who was at the event to announce an election commitment to install five floating fishing platforms on the Swan, said the size of the fish was evidence of the river’s health.
Recfishwest chief executive Andrew Rowland said while pink snapper were caught often in Cockburn Sound, he had never seen one that big caught in the Swan River.
Mr Chapman, from Cloverdale, said he took about 15 minutes to bring in the fish on a light bream rod at high tide near midnight on Saturday.
“I thought it was a good chance it was a mulloway because it was very heavy,” he said. “You get juvenile pink snapper in the river, but to find one that big, that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Mr Barnett said he had caught a few tailor near Claremont, but never a big snapper. The $500,000 investment in floating platforms would make it easier for families with young children or people with disabilities to enjoy fishing, he said, as well as protect river bank vegetation.
Mr Barnett said a re-elected Liberal government would also restock the Swan and Canning rivers with recreational fishing species such as prawns and mulloway.Following the March 11th Fukushima disaster, the NRC was overwhelmed by a constant ringing of phones, and ever escalating number of unread inbox messages. By Sunday March 13th, Elliot Brenner, sent out an e-mail to upper level NRC counterparts clearly narrating the sequence of events. “While we know more than what these (press releases) say, we’re sticking to this story for now.” writes Breener, during the weekend he labled “very hectic”.
Elliot Brenner has been director of public affairs at the NRC since April 2004. He does not have a background in the nuclear industry, but rather began his career with 20 years in journalism, covering everything from sports to presidential campaigns. He subsequently became a speech writer for Dick Cheney in his final year as Defense secretary.
During the first weeks following the disaster, the Japanese government officials secretly handed radiation reports and contamination levels of produce around the country to US ambassadors and staff in Tokyo, who transmitted the information discreetly back to the United States. This was not made publicly known until late in 2011, and the United States never took an official stance on whether they approved of the Japanese handling of the nuclear disaster.
In many press releases in the first weeks immediately following the disaster, the NRC repeatedly assured citizens that the Japanese protective actions were appropriate, and similar to the same actions that the NRC would expect to undertake if under the same conditions.
The NRC was using their blog and the updates provided by the American Nuclear Society as the main modes of communication with the public. Interestingly enough, the NRC did also use Twitter to gather information on the event, but declined from using the world-wide popular social networking site to share information with the public. When asked by the Branch Chief of a standards and process oversight board whether the NRC was using Twitter to share or monitor information, NRC staffer Holly Harrington replied that it was being used for “just monitoring”.
David McIntyre also works in the NRC on public affairs, and spent much of his time creating carefully crafted e-mails that constantly downplayed the disaster, and any relationship that might be made to the safety status of US nuclear stations. On March 14th, McIntyre received an email Molly McCrea, a reporter for CBS inquired about the status of a law that Senator Markey had authored that would distribute KI to those living within a certain distance from a nuclear power plant, and whether or not it was being followed. She asked whether or not the pills had been distributed, and why the NRC had been reported to be discouraging the distribution.
McIntyre replied vaguely alluding to the fact that the NRC was not solely responsible, but that it was a “US Government decision, not just the NRC but HHS and others.”
It is true that the NRC has worked hard against the burden of purchasing, storing, and maintaining a fresh supply of KI for those populations closest to nuclear reactors. In 2009, the NRC actually cancelled it’s policy on KI distribution, stating that it was unnecessary, as it did not protect against all radionuclides that could be potentially released, would cause undue stress on the community, and would delay critical response time by adding more duties to local, state, and federal staff.
The NRC was promptly overwhelmed by a public outcry, and partially reversed their decision on the matter, by admitting that KI would be an benefit to those potentially affected, but passing the responsibility for purchasing and stockpiling a supply on the States, who were unprepared and inadequately prepared or capable of handling such a responsibility. So the supply of KI has dwindled to near minimal proportions in the United States, and in late 2011 it was revealed that most of the nations supply of KI was due to expire in the opening quarter of 2012, and no purchase orders had been scheduled. This caused the NRC to deny some states requests for additional KI supply in the fall of 2011.
Following the Fukushima Disaster, the NRC had released various levels of question and answer presentations that had been either distributed to top-level personnel, regional spokespeople, or made publicly available. On March 14th, Holly Harrington acknowledged that not all of the information was considered suitable to be published for the public.
It also appears that McIntrye used his own personal discretion on which information to release to specific reporters or news services. On March 14th, he received an e-mail from Molly McCrea again, this time asking if the United States was possibly sending KI to Japan, or had sent KI to Japan to help out, if he could confirm, and if not who should she contact.
McIntyre replied “We have not been asked to provide KI”, and further explained, “We understand the Japanese authorities have included KI as part of their protective action guidelines, which would indicate they have some stockpiled.” The reply email was sent on Tuesday March 15th, 2011 at 4:07:00 PM.
At 4:10:00 PM, only 3 minutes later, McIntyre rushed a quick note to Matthew Wald, a long-time reporter for the New York Times who has written on nuclear energy for years, with the subject line – “KI Info” stating, “Matt- I’m told we distributed approximately 11 million pills. Dave”.
While it should be noted that there is nothing wrong by sharing the information with the New York Times reporter, the reasoning behind such a decision by Mr. McIntyre is in serious question. It should also be noted, that during the period of March 14th through March 20th, Mr. Wald is attributed to at least 6 articles on the New York Times website, none of which include the information about the KI as relayed by McIntyre.
Did McIntyre assume that Wald would be personally interested in this information, or more appropriate to determine when and if to release it? Were there any underlying reasons behind his failure to disclose the information to a reporter requesting it specifically? The answers are not likely to become clear in the near future, if ever, and while the world struggles with the future fate of it’s electrical supply, many questions are also being raised about the adequacy of the nations nuclear regulators.
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[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]Women should be granted three days off work a month if they suffer from period pain, an expert has said.
Gynaecologist Gedis Grudzinskas's views were criticised by business bosses who said small employers would struggle if women were given the days off.
The London-based doctor said women would be'more happy' and 'comfortable' at work if they had time off each month to recover at home.
She was speaking after a survey found 52 per cent of women suffered from cramps so bad they were not happy while at work.
More than half of women experienced agonising period pain which affected their ability to work, a new survey revealed
Many chose not to tell their boss and were'suffering in silence', the report found.
Women were turning to painkillers and hot water bottles instead to relieve their period pains.
More than half of women had experienced the discomfort from the menstrual cycle, the survey found. And nearly a third of those were forced to call in sick.
But the survey, which was conducted for BBC Radio 5 live, found just 27 per cent of those affected at work had told their employers what was causing their poor performance.
Period pain affected the majority of women, as nine in ten claimed to have had it while they were working at some point.
Dr Grudzinskas told the BBC: 'Menstruation is normal, but some women suffer terribly and they suffer in silence.
'I don't think women should be shy about it, and companies should be accommodating with leave for women who are struggling with painful periods.
'People forget that women make up half the workforce. If they feel supported, it will be a happy and productive workforce.'
Teacher Nancy Eccles, 48, left full-time work partly because of her painful periods. She is now due to have a hysterectomy.
She said: ‘Two weeks before my period I cry at the drop of a hat, feel low, think the world is ending and feel overwhelmed by everything.
‘As soon as I ovulate, there is a surge in progesterone and I fly into rages at the most trivial thing.
‘In my last two years of teaching full-time, I struggled to get through an hour’s lesson.’
The survey, which was conducted for BBC Radio 5 live, found a third of those had been forced to call in sick because of their discomfort
During a period, the wall of the womb starts to contract more to make the lining shed away.
When the muscular wall contracts, it compresses the blood vessels lining the womb, the NHS states.
This cuts off the blood supply temporarily - causing tissues in the womb to release chemicals which trigger pain.
The body simultaneously produces prostaglandins which encourage the womb muscles to contract even more - increasing the pain.
Employment lawyer Fiona Morrison said that in some cases, severe period pain could be considered a disability.
‘Under UK law, if someone is in extreme pain and it is stopping them from working effectively, a tribunal could say that this woman is disabled,’ she added.
The survey comes after one company claimed to have come up with a device that can switch off the pain with the simple click of a button earlier this year.
iPulse Medical created the device, Livia, which they claim is not only an alternative to painkillers, but works even better.This Map Shows Where Immigrants Send the Most Money Home
As politicians turn an eye to remittance payments that immigrants send home, some countries rely heavily on the cash flow.
In his proposal for stricter security at the U.S-Mexico border, Donald Trump seized on an issue that could make him very unpopular among immigrants: remittances.
Remittance payments—money that immigrants send back to their home countries—are one of the latest targets for Trump, who proposed that unless Mexico funds a wall at its northern border, the U.S. should “impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages” of Mexicans working in the U.S.
Mexico currently receives nearly $24.4 billion in remittances each year from immigrants in the U.S., accounting for about 2 percent of the Mexican GDP, according to the World Bank. Across the globe, immigrants sent $583 billion back to their home countries in 2014, with $440 billion of that going to developing countries. Remittances usually form just a small fraction of a country’s national GDP, but they still accounted for almost four times the $135 billion in global foreign aid that was disbursed last year. In the following map, you can click on any country to see where it immigrants living there send money home.
And Trump isn’t the only one with his eye on remittance payments. World leaders who recognize the importance of the remittance industry in their economies include Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose recent visit to the United Arab Emirates put the issue in the spotlight as he worked to attract greater foreign investment in India. This is for good reason, since remittances tend to increase in times of recession while other forms of investment decrease, as tougher times at home can elicity more money from friends and family abroad. India receives about $12 billion in remittances from the UAE, and remittances from the broader Gulf region play a significant part in the economy of South Indian states like Kerala.
While Trump’s plan to confiscate the remittances of undocumented workers may be impractical—not to mention controversial—global remittances provide an interesting look at how immigrants in the U.S. and beyond are lifting people from their own countries out of poverty by sending money home. The practice is most prevalent in Tajikistan, which receives about 40 percent of its national GDP in the form of remittances.
Methodology
Remittances and migration unit data are provided by the World Bank Group. The estimates of total migrant population were obtained from the World Bank’s Bilateral-Remittance matrix. The estimates in this data set are compiled from various primary and secondary sources for international migrant population and remittance outflows, and may in some cases fail to capture the complete volumes of remittances. For more information about the methodology, see South-South Migration and Remittances, by Dilip Ratha and William Shaw.While Veronica Cartwright was at New Beverly Cinema to talk about “The Right Stuff,” filmmaker Brian McQuery couldn’t help but ask her a question about another famous movie she starred in, “Alien.” Specifically, he wanted to know more about the “chestburster” scene which is one of the film’s most horrifying moments. The story behind this scene has been told over and over again throughout the years, but Cartwright was still willing to talk and clear up a few things about it.
Legend has it neither Cartwright nor the other actors in “Alien” had any idea of what exactly was going to erupt from John Hurt’s chest. Cartwright, however, said the actors had read the script and knew something was supposed to come out of there. Also, she and Sigourney Weaver had a scene where they were supposed to know what it looked like, but they had no clue what they were going to be talking about. As a result, they visited the studio where the infant alien was being built.
“A few weeks earlier we had gone down and seen the little mockup of that little penis guy with the tail, but it wasn’t working at that point,” Cartwright said of the alien. “It was sort of a gray thing and the artists were saying ‘oh his teeth will be like this and he breathes…’ It was just like a little puppet thing that came out.”
Then came the day when the chestburster scene was shot, and Cartwright described it as though she had just filmed it yesterday.
“We’re all upstairs in the dressing room and they take John (Hurt) down, and for four hours we never saw John. John was having his false chest made,” Cartwright said. “When we were told that we could come down to the set, the entire set was dressed in plastic, everybody’s wearing raincoats, and there were big buckets of this awful stuff that smelled like formaldehyde. It stank and you gagged when you first went in there.”
“So, here’s John packed in this thing, and they had four cameras so that they would get everybody’s reaction,” Cartwright continued. “What happens is that they cut the t-shirt so that the puppeteer could push the thing through, so we all start leaning forward because you’re just fascinated to see what’s going to happen. One of the effects guys told me, ‘oh you’ll be getting a little blood on you,’ and I said, ‘oh okay.’ Not thinking, I |
, aimed at making the world forget Israel’s misdeeds. Palestinians trapped with no future? They are worse off in Lebanon, others respond, where their “Arab brothers” bar them from buying property and working in most professions.
But the situation is certainly dire. Scores of interviews and hours spent in people’s homes over a dozen consecutive days here produced a portrait of a fractured and despondent society unable to imagine a decent future for itself as it plunges into listless desperation and radicalization.
It seems most unlikely that either a Palestinian state or any kind of Middle East peace can emerge without substantial change here. Gaza, on almost every level, is stuck.
Disunity
A main road was blocked off and a stage set up for a rally protesting the electricity shortage. Speakers shook nearby windows with the anthems of Hamas, the Islamist party that has held power here for the past three years. Boys in military camouflage goose-stepped. Young men carried posters of a man with vampire teeth biting into a bloodied baby.
The vampire was not Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. It was Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
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“We stand today in this furious night to express our intense anger toward this damned policy by the illegitimate so-called Fayyad government,” Ismail Radwan, a Hamas official, shouted.
As if the Palestinian people did not have enough trouble, they have not one government but two, the Fatah-dominated one in the West Bank city of Ramallah and the Hamas one here. The antagonism between them offers a depth of rivalry and rage that shows no sign of abating.
Its latest victim is electricity for Gaza, part of which is supplied by Israel and paid for by the West Bank government, which is partly reimbursed by Hamas. But the West Bank says that Hamas is not paying enough so it has held off paying Israel, which has halted delivery.
“They are lining their pockets and they are part of the siege,” asserted Dr. Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader and a surgeon, speaking of the West Bank government. “There will be no reconciliation.”
John Ging, who heads the Gaza office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as U.N.R.W.A., says the latest electricity problem “is a sad reflection of the divide on the Palestinian side.”
He added, “They have no credibility in demanding anything from anybody if they show such disregard for the plight of their own people.”
Today Hamas has no rival here. It runs the schools, hospitals, courts, security services and — through smuggler tunnels from Egypt — the economy.
“We solved a lot of problems with the tunnels,” Dr. Zahar said with a satisfied smile.
Along with the leaders has come a new generation that has taken the reins of power. Momen al-Ghemri, 25, a nurse, and his wife, Iman, 24, an Arabic teacher, are members of it.
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University educated, the grandchildren of refugees, still living in refugee camps, both of the Ghemris got their jobs when Hamas took over full control by force three years ago, a year after it won an election. Neither has ever left Gaza.
Mr. Ghemri works as a nurse for the security services, earning $500 a month, but is spending six months at the intensive care unit of Shifa Hospital.
Spare parts for equipment remain a problem because of the blockade. But on a recent shift, the I.C.U. was well staffed. In the office next door, there was a map on the wall of Palestine before Israel’s creation.
Mr. Ghemri’s grandparents’ village, Aqer, is up there, along with 400 other villages that no longer exist. A wall in another office offered instructions on the Muslim way to help a bedridden patient pray.
Mr. Ghemri’s wife greets visitors at home wearing the niqab, or face veil, only her eyes visible. She believes in Hamas and makes that clear to her pupils. But her husband sees the party more as a means toward an end.
“You can’t go on your own to apply for a job,” he said. “For me, Hamas is about employment.”
He does like the fact that, as he put it, Hamas “refuses to kneel down to the Jews,” but like most Gazans, he is worried about Palestinian disunity and blames both factions.
In fact, there is a paradox at work in Gaza: while Hamas has no competition for power, it also has a surprisingly small following.
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Dozens of interviews with all sorts of people found few willing to praise their government or that of its competitor.
“They’re both liars,” Waleed Hassouna, a baker in Gaza City, said in a very common comment.
People here seem increasingly unable to imagine a political solution to their ills. Ask Gazans how to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — two states? One state? — and the answer is mostly a reflexive call to drive Israel out.
“Hamas and Fatah are two sides of the same coin,” Ramzi, a public school teacher from the city of Rafah, said in a widely expressed sentiment. “All the land is ours. We should turn the Jews into refugees and then let the international community take care of them.”
Dried-Up Fortunes
Hamza and Muhammad Ju’bas are brothers, ages 13 and 11. They sell chocolates and gum on the streets after school to add to their family income. Once they have pulled in 20 shekels, about $5, they go home and play.
On one steamy afternoon they were taking refuge in a cellphone service center. The center — where customers watch for their number on digital displays and smiling representatives wear ties, and the air-conditioning never quits — seems almost glamorous.
The boys were asked about their hopes.
“My dream is to be like these guys and work in a place that’s cool,” Muhammad said.
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“My dream is to be a worker,” Hamza said. He hears stories about the “good times” in the 1990s, when his father worked in Israel, as a house painter, making $85 a day. Later, their father, Emad Ju’bas, 45, said, “My children don’t have much ambition.”
The family is typical. They live in Shujaiya, a packed eastern neighborhood of 70,000, a warren of narrow, winding alleys and main roads lined with small shops.
The air is heavy with dust and fumes from cars, scooters and horse-drawn carts. Every shop has a small generator chained down outside. Roaring generators and wailing children are the sounds of Shujaiya.
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Families are big. From 1997 through 2007, the population increased almost 40 percent, to 1.5 million. Palestinians say that large families will help them cope as they age, and more children mean more fighters for their cause.
Mr. Ju’bas and his wife, Hiyam, have seven boys and three girls. Two of their children have cognitive disabilities. Since Israel’s three-week war 18 months ago here aimed at stopping Hamas rockets, their children frequently wet the bed. Their youngest, Taj, 4, is aggressive, randomly punching anyone around him.
For six years Mr. Ju’bas worked in Israel, and with the money he bought a house with six rooms and two bathrooms. In 2000, when the uprising called the second intifada broke out, Israel closed the gates.
After that, Mr. Ju’bas found small jobs around Gaza, but with the blockade that dried up. His only source of work is at the United Nations relief agency, where two months a year he is a security guard.
He admits that at times he lashes out at his family. Domestic violence is on the rise. The strain is acute for women. Men can go out and sit in parks, in chairs right on the sidewalk or visit friends. Women are expected to stay off the streets.
The women at the stress clinic gathered about 10 a.m. They entered silently, wearing the ubiquitous hijab head scarf and ankle-length button-down overcoat known as the jilbab. Two wore the niqab over their faces.
They spoke of sending their children to work just to get them out of the house and of husbands who grew morose and violent.
They blamed Hamas for their misery, for seizing the Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, which led to the blockade. But they also blamed Fatah for failing them.
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“My own children tell me it is better to die,” Jamalat Wadi said to the group.
Ms. Wadi’s home was next door and she ran over to check on the family. She found her eight children wandering aimlessly in an open paved area, a courtyard filled with piles of clothes and plastic containers. The house had one unfurnished room and her husband, Bahjat, 28, was on the floor, unconscious, his arm over his head, his mouth open.
“He sleeps all the time,” Ms. Wadi said, motioning as though throwing a pill in her mouth.
The Wadis are refugees, so they receive flour, rice, oil and sugar from U.N.R.W.A. Tens of thousands of others here receive salaries from the Ramallah government to stay away from their jobs in protest over Hamas rule. They wait, part of a literate society with nothing to do.
Ms. Wadi said that when she visited her mother, her two brothers fought bitterly because one backs Hamas and the other backs Fatah. Recently they threw bottles at each other. Her mother kicked them out.
In another meeting, Mr. Ju’bas was unshaven and unwashed. The previous night he had hit his wife, one of his children said. The washing machine had broken and he had no money to fix it.
He told his wife to use the neighbors’. But she was embarrassed. She stayed up all night cleaning clothes and crying.
“My only dream,” Mr. Ju’bas said, “is to have patience.”
Inside Looking Out
The waves were lapping the beach. It was night. Mahmoud Mesalem, 20, and a few of his friends were sitting at a restaurant.
University students or recent graduates, they were raised in a world circumscribed by narrow boundaries drawn hard by politics and geography. They all despaired from the lack of a horizon.
“We’re here, we’re going to die here, we’re going to be buried here,” lamented Waleed Matar, 22.
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Mr. Mesalem pointed at an Israeli ship on the horizon, then made his hand into a gun, pointed it at his head. “If we try to leave, they will shoot us,” he said.
There are posters around town with a drawing of a boot on an Israeli soldier, who is facedown, and the silhouette of a man hanging by his neck. The goal is to get alleged collaborators to turn themselves in. The campaign has put fear in the air.
Israel is never far from people’s minds here. Its ships control the waters, its planes control the skies. Its whims, Gazans feel, control their fate.
And while most here view Israel as the enemy, they want trade ties and to work there. In their lives the main source of income has been from and through Israel.
Economists here say what is most needed now is not more goods coming in, as the easing of the blockade has permitted, but people and exports getting out.
That is not going to happen soon.
“Our position against the movement of people is unchanged,” said Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, the Israeli in charge of policy to Gaza’s civilians. “As to exports, not now. Security is paramount, so that will have to wait.”
Direct contact between the peoples, common in the 1980s and ’90s when Palestinians worked daily in Israel, is nonexistent.
Jamil Mahsan, 62, is a member of a dying breed. He worked for 35 years in Israel and believes in two states.
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“There are two peoples in Palestine, not just one, and each deserves its rights,” he said, sitting in his son’s house. He used to attend the weddings of his Israeli co-workers. He had friendships in Israel. Today nobody here does.
The young men sitting by the beach contemplating their lives were representative of the new Gaza. They have started a company to design advertisements, and they write and produce small plays.
Their first performance in front of several hundred people involved a recounting of the horrors of the last war with Israel, with children speaking about their own fears as video of the war played.
Their second play, which they are rehearsing, is a black comedy about the Palestinian plight. It assails the factions for fighting and the Arabs for selling out the Palestinians.
“Our play does not mean we hate Israel,” said Abdel Qader Ismail, 24, a former employee of the military intelligence service, with no trace of irony. “We believe in Israel’s right to exist, but not on the land of Palestine. In France or in Russia, but not in Palestine. This is our home.”The intensifying global war on cash is destined to give the government more control over your money than ever.
Evidence that most of the world's governments are working toward a "cashless society" has mounted over the past couple of years.
The latest government to launch a major assault in the global war on cash was India. This could foreshadow what's to come in the United States…
This Is What a Government War on Cash Looks Like
In November, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shocked his citizens by announcing a plan to ban existing 500- and 1,000-rupee notes.
These aren't high denominations – 500 rupees is $7.37, while 1,000 rupees is $14.75. Together the two bills accounted for 86% of India's cash in circulation.
Credit Suisse has estimated that more than 90% of consumer transactions in India are made in cash.
"We can gradually move from a less-cash society to a cashless society," Modi said.
Modi gave his citizens until the end of 2016 to exchange the old banknotes – now no longer spendable — for new ones. But there was a shortage of the new bills. People were waiting in long lines at ATMs and bank branches, often to be disappointed as supplies of the new banknotes ran out.
And those who had a large amount of cash to exchange – 250,000 rupees (about $3,687) or more – by law had to explain why they had so much cash as well as prove they had paid the required taxes on it. If they couldn't, they got slapped with a fine equal to 200% of the tax owed.
Still, those folks are better off than the 16 million Indians who live overseas. They had no way of exchanging their now-worthless rupee notes unless they could get back to India. Many lost the equivalent of thousands of dollars.
This sudden, unexpected strike in the war on cash has been a nightmare for the people of India.
And not only could it happen here – it's practically inevitable…
The U.S. War on Cash Has Already Started
The United States discontinued the $10,000, $5,000, $1,000, and $500 banknotes back in 1969, leaving the $100 bill as the largest U.S. denomination.
But lately talk has ramped up about eliminating the $100 and $50 bills. This echoes sentiment in nations such as Australia, which in December announced plans to study the elimination of its $100 banknote.
Former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff published a book in 2016 entitled "The Curse of Cash." In it he promotes a plan to eliminate larger banknotes in stages. First the $100, then the $50, then the $20, leaving the $10 as the largest denomination.
In February 2016, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote a piece for the Washington Post headlined, "It's time to kill the $100 bill." In the article Summers calls for "a global agreement to stop issuing notes worth more than say $50 or $100."
And in March 2015, U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen remarked that "cash is not a very convenient store of value" in a Q&A session following a speech on monetary policy in San Francisco.
Related: This Fed "Nuclear Option" Will Kill America's Free Market
More ominously, the Bank Secrecy Act requires U.S. banks to alert the government when a customer seeks to withdraw $10,000 or more from an account. It's very much like what India is doing now.
Other Western democracies, such as France, Spain, and Italy, all have reduced the maximum allowed cash transactions in the past couple of years.
This requirement is a key part of the war on cash, as it both discourages large cash transactions while giving government another tool to monitor citizens' financial activities.
Money Morning Capital Wave Strategist Shah Gilani sees such capital controls as a threat to the economic freedom of American citizens.
"That means you might not be able to get the money you want out of an ATM. You might not be able to cash a check when you have plenty of money in your account. Or worse… your bank could take your deposited cash and convert it to shares of stock in that bank," Gilani said. "In other words, if you think you'll always be able to get your money out of your bank, you're wrong."
But a key question is why governments are so keen on moving toward a cashless society. Here's what they'll tell you…
How Governments Will Try to Sell You on a Cashless SocietyOne of the most exciting parts of today’s comedy boom is seeing comedians of different generations become friends and collaborators. And there is no better place to see that than Comedy Bang! Bang!, the popular podcast hosted by Scott Aukerman, which often features a very established comedian interacting with more of an up-and-comer. Two of the comedians most associated with the show are Paul F. Tompkins and Ben Schwartz. So, with the fourth season of Tompkins’s political-puppet comedy show No, You Shut Up! premiering on Fusion tonight, Vulture had Schwartz interview his comedy buddy. They talk about Comedy Bang! Bang!, improve, and a brilliant idea for a Hamilton cover album of sorts.
Paul, I went online and put your name into a series of search engines —
A series of search engines?
Well, I used all of the old search engines. I went to, like, Prodigy.net and MetaCrawler, so I could really dig out the dirt on you.
What did your search yield?
I found an amazing clip of you singing Bowie, which made me really excited. There’s a gentleman dressed as a clown who sang backup. But I noticed this: In all three videos that I watched, you had a bunch of likes, and then one person every time presses dislike. It made me laugh so hard. My question to you, Paul, is, do you know who that man or woman is?
No, I don’t. I forget to look at that stuff because the YouTube community is a little scary.
Yeah.
If you upload a video, sometimes it will give you notifications that someone has commented or something, so I got this notification and the big question was, did I really think that I was funny and did I not realize that I was just riding on the coattails of Bob [Odenkirk] and David [Cross]?
Now, I hate to be an idiot, but I have almost the same exact question to start this whole thing off, so if you don’t mind fielding it, that would be amazing.
I thought I was funny, but I never thought about it in those terms, and I have to say, the guy makes a good point.
That’s what I have right here, underlined a bunch of times. “The guy makes a good point. Remember to ask.”
So I am pleased to announce my retirement from show business.
This is the forum to do it. When you were saying that YouTube thing, I remembered the first time I really felt anti-Semitism was when I started putting clips on YouTube. That was a big thing I had to get over, understanding that there are human beings out there and that’s going to be a part of it. Once you put your thing out to the public, there are people in the public that hate Jewish people or hate Paul F. Tompkins.
Yeah, you don’t need to wonder.
Here’s another thing that I noticed, the F is Francis. I was going to ask you, but I found it out online. I was disappointed. I wanted it to be a bigger thing. That’s the reason why you put a period after it, Francis is —
It’s disappointing, right?
It is. That’s exactly what it is. There’s such mystery, to find out that it’s also the name of my cousin, it’s not that big of a deal.
It’s a little anticlimactic.
You’re doing more improv now, right, with your new podcast [Spontaneanation]?
Yeah. Because of podcasting, it’s a road I’ve been going down. I really enjoyed the immediacy of it and the scariness of it. A big turning point for me was doing your show, Snowpants, where you have seasoned improvisers and then a couple of people who have done little to no improv. And then the other inexperienced guest was Jane Fonda, and she said backstage that she was terrified. And then, once the show started and we got out there, she was the first person off the wall to jump in. That is some balls.
She had probably never seen an improv show before. So for her to go out, not having any idea of what was about to happen, was big. Before the show, I was like, “How do you feel?” And she’s like, “I’m really afraid, I’m really scared, but,” and she looks at me and goes, “I’m 73 years old, and I have to do things that scare me.” That was so inspiring to me because she has truly done everything.
I didn’t even overhear that conversation, but that was so clearly the takeaway for me from that night. And it was so inspiring. I think about that night a lot, by the way. Anytime I’m confronted with something challenging or difficult or scary, I think about her doing that, and I’m like, This is what it’s supposed to be all about.
It’s also because comedy’s a personal thing. The second you realize that you’re putting yourself out there with “I think this is pretty funny,” people are like, “Nope, you’re not funny.”
Oh, yeah. Somebody was telling me the other day about stand-up and how if you’re more experienced and you have a bad set, you don’t take it as a judgment on yourself. You just take it as a judgment on the material. And I’m like, “No. Of course you take it as a judgment on yourself.” The ideas that you find funny and the things that you are offering to an audience are tied up with who you are and your soul and your heart.
There’s a world where people are like, “Who cares what the audience thinks,” but for me, when the audience is laughing and loves something that you’re doing, you add more to it. You find that part of the game and you push it, so you get as much as you can. When they’re really feeling a callback or a character, in an improv show, you’re going to stay with it. How does that compare to stand-up?
That’s really where the writing happens. You go up with the idea of the bit and you build it out onstage. You might have a lot of it written, but it’s the moments when the audience is interested in an idea that you can add to it. It enables you to relax enough that you can think more clearly.
The second you’re in a place of confidence, like when I get my first laugh in a show, you take bigger risks, and hopefully the rewards are bigger. That’s why you love the podcast world. When we’re in a room, if it’s Scott [Aukerman, host of Comedy Bang! Bang!] and I, or it’s me and you, and we’re just playing around, it feels so personal. It’s a whole different type of medium in that it’s just a couple of friends hanging out in a room being themselves.
Yeah. The tricky thing is, Okay, we are having fun together, but is this going to be something that’s infectious and the audience can have fun along with us, or is it something that feels exclusionary where the audience is turned off? Like, “I don’t know what these guys are talking about. They seem to be just cracking each other up, but nothing’s really happening.” Comedy Bang! Bang! has meant so much to me over the years, and has brought me so much and so many new fans. Some of the happiest hours of my life have been spent in that studio just fooling around with Scott and the other amazing people he gets on that show. But it’s never lost on me that people are listening. I’m always thinking of the unseen audience, and so whatever heightening goes on and whatever fleshing out of bits, it can’t ever just be us making each other laugh. To me, the making each other laugh is the by-product of it. But the main thing is, how can this get sillier and funnier?
Right. I will say I do this thing with Scott on “Comedy Bang! Bang!” called “Solo Bolo” [episodes that are Ben and Scott and no additional guests or people in character]. That’s the only time where we don’t think about that anybody’s listening. We literally just sing like idiots. Sometimes I feel terrible. But I’ll say that those are some of my favorite things in the universe to do. “Who cares? Let’s just be stupid idiots for an hour.”
Also, I was listening to a Chris Hardwick podcast with Tom Hanks when I was on a run. I barely run. I don’t know why I said that. But it was so personal to me. It was just them in my ears. You can’t hear anything else, and it feels like they’re talking like human beings do. They’re not talking like they’re on camera.
A big difference between podcasts and radio is the intimacy. Radio oftentimes feels big and loud. To me, podcasting is closest to that weird late night stuff, whether it’s late night love song request lines, or it’s some talk radio show where you feel like you’re the only person listening to it. I always like things that shrink the world for me, that make me feel a strange connection, not just to the person that I’m listening to but to the world. I remember as a kid watching The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. That show would come on at like 1:30 in the morning, or maybe 12:30, which seemed so late. I remember that feeling of, Wow, this is for people like me who can’t sleep because they’re too excited at the idea of being awake when everybody else is asleep. That’s still a thing that I have, whether it’s late at night or early in the morning. I don’t know what that is. Here’s what it is. I figured it out, Ben. I’m a freak.
[Laughs.] [In a creepy voice] “I like to be awake really late at night, or I like to be up really early in the morning, before anybody’s stirring, so that Daddy can watch TV by himself.” [Normal voice] Yes, you’re a big freak.
You’re like James Ellroy.
[In voice] “I make sure my wife is very asleep, and then I cling to my tiny TV to watch television programs.” [Normal voice] You’re a madman.
[Laughs.]
You’re in control of your own stuff in terms of you creating and collaborating with people. With Louie and with Baskets out, do you feel like you want to do things like that? Do you have a huge desire of having one of those gritty character pieces where you can be a version of yourself and just go bananas?
No, not really. I have nothing but respect for the people who are doing that kind of thing, but I think that my disposition is just different. Increasingly, I enjoy less the comedy of uncomfortable things and sad things being funny. I enjoy silliness. I feel like, Man, life is hard enough.
[Laughs.]
It’s one of those things where when you are a professional, you can understand why a thing is good and you can appreciate why people like it, but still not seek it out. New shows like Transparent and Casual, on these new platforms, there’s no doubt they’re quality shows that are well-written and well-acted, but seeing people be horrible to each other is difficult for me.
Can you give me a new show that you do connect with?
Something like Billy on the Street makes me laugh so hard — out loud — which is not something I do watching entertainment a lot. It’s a huge thing for me, and that’s pure silliness.
So if I were to write a TV show for you, I should just write Mr. Bean? Correct or incorrect?
[Laughs.] Something like that, yes. To play a weird, silly character would be a lot of fun. You know what else I would like to do is a multi-camera sitcom.
Really?
Oh, yeah. I grew up on that format and loved it. I grew up on shows, like Cheers and WKRP in Cincinnati, that were about characters. The laughs came from not just jokes, but characters. It’s great that a show like Undateable is doing live shows. Man, I love live television.
I know that stand-up will always be a part of you because that’s where it started, but do you find yourself moving further away from getting onstage with a microphone for 30 minutes? Because it seems like your projects take you further away from that.
I’m a restless person by nature. A new thing comes along, and it’s very shiny and very exciting. Right now, improv has captivated my attention because I’m still learning how to do. It’s so immediate, even more than stand-up, because in stand-up, you’ve got to write material. The last special that I did, “Crying and Driving,” represented the last of my material. Now I have nothing. So when I get a break from No, You Shut Up!, I’m going to make myself go onstage so I can force myself to write material. You and I talked about this before, about when you were living in New York and you were doing a bunch of shows, as many as you could, but you found that it was difficult for you to do comedy. You finally realized after talking to someone that it was because you weren’t living life.
It was Christina Gausas, who is a great improviser in New York.
If you do that, you have fewer experiences to draw from to make stuff. I’m in that position now where I’m doing the TV show and that’s a day in, day out job — we’re in the office with the writers all week, and then we’re shooting the show on Tuesdays — and that’s it. And then I get home and I’m just hanging out with my wife. But then, of course, I’m taking on too much in between. My life is really just revolving around scheduling. I want to make sure that I give myself enough of a break that have stuff to talk about. So, when I go onstage, I’m not starting from a completely blank page.
At the beginning, and maybe this applies to you as well, I was like, “I got here. I finally did it. I worked so hard to get here.” “Here” being, like, making even a dollar to do comedy. And I just didn’t want it to stop. I found myself working every day on this show, and then on the weekends, I’d write my movies that I sold. I started getting really sick. I realized I had to take care of myself. Now, I don’t work on the weekends unless I have to. And after a certain time I’m like, “Okay, work’s over.” Those are things that you have to mandate. You and I are both very driven people, and want when we put out stuff for it to be the best version of what we can put out.
It’s important to be able to make hard choices and say, “I could do this. I technically have the time to do this, but I know I need time to just be – to not be working and to rest.”
There’s a famous quote from the musical Hamilton [Hamilton spoiler alert], where he is about to cheat on his wife and the line goes [in faux academic voice], “Show me how to say no to this.” [In normal voice] And again, he was referring to having sexual relations with someone other than his wife, but for us, what a great sentence to think of. The idea of being able to say no to something is so difficult. It was a huge thing for me to be able to say no to things because I knew that it would take up so much of my time that the quality of my life, the quality of my real life, would get worse. [In voice] “Show me how to say no to this.”
[Laughing.] Wait, now on the topic of Hamilton. I have not seen the show, obviously, because it’s a gigantically hot ticket. I downloaded the album, but I have not listened to it yet because I thought, Oh, I want to see the show first. Then people have said, “Well, you’re never going to see that show, and also, the album works by itself.” And then I was talking to my friend, and we had an idea that I would put out a version of Hamilton just based on the song titles and me guessing what the song was about.
[Laughing] That is so brilliant. Will you isolate just the instrumentals of each song and sing over them with what you think is happening? Or do you just make up the music the whole time?
I would completely make it up. I would do it with just a metronome for timing and get someone, maybe Eban Schletter, to put music behind it. [Laughs.]
Oh my goodness. I would like to get behind this in any way I can. By the way, there’s like 100 songs in the album. There’s like 20-something in each act.
[Laughs.]
You should do a one-hour podcast, and you’ll just do, like, quick snippets from each song of what you think they are. We can go to Earwolf together, and I’ll just be the person who gives you the title of each song.
[Laughs.]
I will say, in the future, there is another Solo Bolo coming out, entitled “Solo Bolo Trio” – “Solo Bolo Trolo” – and I don’t want to say that we do, but there is a chance that there is a Hamilton tune or two sung. Because Scott and I went and saw Hamilton together in New York.
It would not be a big surprise.
I’m very behind this project. I’m very excited for you to do this. It’s just idiocy.
[Laughing] Well, it will happen, then. That’s the kick in the pants I needed.
You’ve got to just do it. Do you even have time? You should just do it this week, or you’ll never do it.
Nope! I sure don’t. I’ll tell you what, I’m flying tomorrow, so maybe I’ll just do it on the plane.
You’ll record it on the plane?
No, but that would be amazing. If I just did it under my breath into a cordless microphone.
And in the background we hear, “WHOOSHHH!” This is such a good idea, Paul.
All right. I’m going to do that.
And it is “Paul,” right?
[Laughs.] This is the most pleasant telemarketing experience I’ve ever had.Boise State’s New Years Six and Mountain West Conference title hopes took a big hit on Sunday. Starting quarterback Ryan Finley will probably miss the next eight weeks after breaking his ankle in Friday night’s game against lowly Idaho State.
Boise State head coach Bryan Harsin announced the injury status on Sunday, saying Finley broke a bone in his ankle, but he was unsure what the treatment process will be. That should become more clear on Monday.
With Finley on the sideline rehabbing his ankle, Harsin says both backup quarterbacks — freshman Brett Rypien and sophomore Thomas Stuart — should be expected to play. The two have combined to throw 22 pass attempts this season, completing 17 of those for 196 yards and a touchdown.
Boise State’s next eight weeks consist of six Mountain West Conference games, one game against Virginia and a bye week. If Finley is out for eight weeks he would miss Boise State’s road games at Virginia, Colorado State, Utah State and UNLV and home games against Hawaii, Wyoming and possibly New Mexico. Finley could return to play Air Force in Boise on November 20 if he only has to be out for eight weeks and can return after that, but that stretch of eight games is a tough one with Virginia, Utah State and Colorado State all being played on the road.
Boise State has already lost once and now may have little margin for error in the race to the New Years Six, if not just the Mountain West Conference.The Tories are at pains to make sure that Brexit is being done by the book; sadly, that book is Lord of the Flies. If the EU had created Brexit as a deliberate The Producers-style disaster to demonstrate how difficult it was to leave, they’d probably have been tempted to tone down the casting.
The key players include Liam Fox, a man who looks like he could finish a steak while looking at footage from Hiroshima; Boris Johnson, who for the first time finds himself in a cabinet without it involving someone saying: “Quick! My husband’s home early!”, and David Davis, Sid James after a This Morning makeover and a half-hearted tilt at therapy.
Davis has suggested that MPs will have a vote on Brexit but only after Britain has left the EU. What a great country we are. So confident in our democracy |
P.
“I’m concerned Angela is being put up to this strategy by masters of the dark arts who are intent on splitting the Labour Party come what may, so I’m asking her even at this late stage to pull back from this dangerous game of brinkmanship.
“Let’s face it, if she doesn’t, it will be Angela Eagle’s name that may yet go down in history as the woman who split the Labour Party caused Labour electoral oblivion and paved the way for the new Thatcher clones Teresa May or Angela Leadsmen to lead yet more years of austere Tory government. It’s not an epitaph we would choose for Angela.
“So I hope she’ll reconsider in the national interest, in the interests of our working class people and in her own interest and not let PLP hot heads condemn us to another Tory government.”Soccer, or football, puts its emphasis on the human foot, largely to keep it safe now that delinquent hands are using real rocks, paper, and scissors in their games. Keep feet from falling in with a bad crowd with today’s deal: for $65, you get two aqua section tickets to see Vancouver Whitecaps FC take on Real Salt Lake on October 6, 6:30 p.m. ($76.50 total value), plus two Whitecaps T-shirts ($54 value), at BC Place.
Founded in 1974, Vancouver Whitecaps FC builds on their storied history during their first Major League Soccer season with sharp passes and precise headers performed to the soundtrack of a passionate crowd’s booming chants. Visitors take a seat in the aqua section behind the net and get an up close view of the keeper’s reaction saves, lunging dives, and feverish diary-writing during downtime. Pull on a Whitecaps T-shirt and show support by joining in with the thousands of fans singing and hollering as Whitecaps stars such as striker Eric Hassli perform fancy footwork around a tough Real Salt Lake defense and big time midfielders such as Kyle Beckerman. With just three home matches remaining in the season, the Whitecaps look to finish a rough and tumble season strong.
BC Place continues a long tradition of Whitecaps soccer, going back to the North American Soccer League begun in the 1970s. Today the stadium is a modern work of art, boasting a retractable roof and an ultra-modern, FIFA two-star rated Polytan Ligaturf 240 RS+ all-weather turf pitch. Fans all around the stadium are also treated to close-up views via the center-hung, four-sided, high-definition video board, which is the largest in MLS and second biggest in all of North America, letting even moon-based soccer fans easily sneak a peak into all the grass-tethered action.CLOSE Kurt Russell and Chris Pratt talk about playing an estranged father and son in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2' and bonding in real life. USA TODAY
Kurt Russell, 66, and Chris Pratt, 37, star as father and son in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.' (Photo11: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY)
Correction & clarifications: An earlier version of this report misidentified the location of Pinewood Studios. It is south of Atlanta.
FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. — Chris Pratt has the most awesome space dad ever.
On this sunny afternoon at Pinewood Studios just south of Atlanta, Kurt Russell is holding court on the set of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (in theaters Thursday night), telling stories over a campfire. Not tales from Big Trouble in Little China or Escape From New York, though — Russell is in cosmic character as Ego, a living planet who’s just met his long-lost son, Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Pratt).
Yes, you read that right: Russell plays an all-powerful living planet and that's not even the craziest aspect of the Guardians’ corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A talking raccoon, a sentient alien tree with a three-word vocabulary ("I am Groot") and the rest of this misfit accidental family took the world by storm with the 2014 runaway summer hitGuardians of the Galaxy. The sequel — which is on track to open with $150 million domestically — doubles down on the eye-popping new worlds, over-the-top personalities and family drama.
CLOSE Baby Groot steals the show in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.' USA TODAY NETWORK
"Guardians has gone from being an untested, little-known risky Marvel side project with an unusual cast and offbeat sensibility, to a premier brand worthy of its ascension to the coveted opening summer weekend slot," says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore.
The biggest asset at the heart of this sci-fi space opera? A crew of “damaged souls who are looking for some form of love or redemption and haven’t really ever experienced either of those things,” says returning writer/director James Gunn.
Rocket Raccoon (voice of Bradley Cooper, left) and Baby Groot (voice of Vin Diesel) are friends till the end. (Photo11: Marvel)
“The reason why so many people love this movie and feel so connected to these characters is because they’re utterly outcasts and oddballs and strange," Gunn says. "They're not the Avengers, they're not the pitch-perfect group of guys who have everything going on. They’re losers often, and even though they have some extraordinary abilities, they’re no better or worse than we are.”
The Guardians — the rogueish Star-Lord, assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), overly literal warrior Drax (Dave Bautista), sarcastic yet damaged Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and adorably precocious Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) — have already saved the universe, though Peter is still in search of his real father after having been raised from childhood by space outlaw Yondu (Michael Rooker).
The sequel has them on the run from the conceited aliens known as the Sovereign, and after having saved the heroes from certain doom, Ego is enjoying a meal with his son on the forest planet Berhart, though Peter is curious why Dad never came back for him when his mother died and instead hired Yondu to pick him up.
Ego (Kurt Russell, center) reconnects with his son Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) over a campfire meal while Gamora (Zoe Saldana) looks on with distrust. (Photo11: Marvel)
“I would have done so myself, but I was in the midst of an outlandish adventure battling demonic forces to save this dimension or some such nonsense. I don’t even recall. It all bleeds together after a while,” Ego explains. He wonders aloud why Yondu kept Peter instead of returning him, leaving Ego searching for his boy ever since.
“Because I was a skinny kid who would squeeze into places adults couldn’t and it made thieving easier,” says Quill, clad in a shirt sporting an alien candy logo.
Yet there’s as much humor as serious stuff in a Guardians film, and Drax is the first to break the tension. “I thought Yondu was your father,” he says, leading everyone to look at the muscular warrior like he’s nuts.
“Wait. After all this time hanging out together, you thought Yondu was my blood relative?” Quill says in exasperation, leading Drax to deadpan, “You look exactly alike.”
Yondu (Michael Rooker, center) is ousted from his role as leader of the Ravagers. (Photo11: Marvel)
Rocket chimes in “One’s blue!” — though Cooper hasn't yet added the furry guy’s vocals. Gunn’s brother Sean (who also returns as Yondu’s Ravager buddy Kraglin) does Rocket’s motion-capture performance and line reading with co-stars.
James Gunn has put together a close-knit clan of friends and actual family on his Guardians films, and it’s reflected in the sequel’s story of "fathers, sons, stepfathers, sons who have never seen their father, fathers who have lost their son,” Russell says. “And when they finally get back together, everybody’s got to get used to each other. They’re not quite the way you had made them out to be in your imagination.”
Adds Gunn: “It’s a father/son story that could take place if your father’s a living planet in another galaxy or if your father’s a Wall Street broker."
Director James Gunn (left) goes over a scene with Zoe Saldana and Chris Pratt on the Atlanta set of 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.' (Photo11: Marvel)
Pratt is effusive with praise for his legendary co-star Russell. “It’s a dream. I’ve been a huge fan of his for ages. There’s nothing disappointing about working with him,” says the actor, who enjoyed Russell’s frequent stories from his heroic roles in such movies as Tombstone and Tango & Cash.
So how does an icon like Russell play a planet? He leans into the machismo and quirks of those old parts. “There’s a lot of baggage that’s right for this in terms of the kinds of things I can bring as an actor to the table,” he says. “And some of the things we created years ago have an element of connection to this character.”
Gamora is skeptical of Ego’s extreme interest in Peter, though she's also dealing with her adoptive sister and frenemy Nebula (Karen Gillan), a villain from the first film whom the Guardians have taken captive. Nebula is looking extremely irked while handcuffed as everybody else is gobbling Ego’s blue space chow. (It’s not very good, Russell reports. “It’s prop Jell-O. We never ask questions, we just eat it.”)
Nebula (Karen Gillan) returns with a bone to pick with her sister in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.' (Photo11: Chuck Zlotnick)
But everybody needs and seeks a sense of belonging, even Nebula. “She’s been raised to be a killing machine and not have any empathy or emotion,” Gillan says. “However, she has these natural feelings toward her sister that she’s trying to suppress but can’t.”
Saldana is just glad to have more women around — not just Gillan but also new cast member Pom Klementieff, who plays the Guardians’ insect-like telepathic ally Mantis. “The older I get, the more I realize that it’s pretty lonely being the only female in the cast,” Saldana says. “You’re going to be surrounded by a whole bunch of dudes talking about their (manhood) and bodybuilding and eating healthy.”
She loves her dudes, though, and there’s a connection between the stars of that original Guardians. Saldana is proud of how Pratt lost weight and got fit for the first movie while “still remaining this super-humble and sweet and charming individual,” and she’s continually wowed by Bautista’s gentleness and subtlety.
Drax (Dave Bautista, left) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) launch into a new mission to save the universe in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.' (Photo11: Marvel)
“He doesn’t believe that he’s funny,” Saldana says. “I hope that day doesn’t come where Dave goes, ‘You know what, you’re (messing) up my take here.’ ”
More than anyone, the success of the original Guardians has been career-making for Bautista, a former pro wrestler who parlayed Drax into a high-profile role as the villainous Mr. Hinx in the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre.
His Marvel character looks like “a powerhouse who’ll rip your head off and then he says something completely ridiculous,” says Bautista, though as emotionally scarred as he is, “there's definitely a sense of innocence about him.” Drax also has a body full of tattoos, and Bautista had a sauna outside of his trailer to soak off all the makeup and prosthetics daily. “You’d think I’m like a diva with a sauna. But no.”
Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) enjoy a laugh in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.' (Photo11: Marvel)
Drax meets his quirky match in Klementieff’s Mantis, and the French actress is impressed that Gunn is so good at casting. “Everybody he chose has a big heart and I think it shows on screen.”
The director wears his fandom on his sleeve, with pop-culture references aplenty and scads of Easter eggs and cameos born from a lifetime of reading comic books. "Anybody can delve into comic history and pull out obscure characters,” says Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. “Not everybody can turn them into emotionally resonant and relatable characters that audiences can fall in love with.”
Gunn says the emotion he feels for his family and friends is “a bigger inspiration than even the comic-book characters.” He dedicated the movie to his parents in the audience at Vol. 2’s Hollywood premiere, and Gunn looks out for those closest to him.
Sean Gunn plays Kraglin the Ravager in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2' and also provides the motion-capture performance for Rocket Raccoon. (Photo11: Chuck Zlotnick)
The filmmaker went to bat for his close friend Rooker when it came to casting Yondu. “I don’t think I was Marvel’s first choice. I’m sure there are many other stars and actors that would have brought in more money,” Rooker says. “I wasn’t in the room when he was convincing them, but I would bet you my right arm that he had my back in a big way.”
And Sean Gunn embraces his status as “the utility infielder of the Guardians cast” with pride. Watching his older brother’s rise has been “probably more fun and gratifying for me than just about anyone. I feel like I’ve had a front-row seat to his success.”
Taserface (Chris Sullivan, right) and the Ravagers take Rocket and Groot prisoner in the 'Guardians of the Galaxy' sequel. (Photo11: Marvel)
James Gunn has already started writing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to complete his trilogy, discussing the story with Pratt and having “some pretty intense conversations” with Saldana about a significant role in the threequel. The only travels Gunn has on his docket in the near future, though, are relaxing ones to “get my head on straight after three years of waking up and going to sleep and thinking about a talking raccoon.”
In the Marvel galaxy, there’s room for more than one awesome space dad.
“I love these characters,” Gunn says. “Including my father and my dog, my mother had eight kids, and I have all these Guardians. They’re my kids.”
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2pnJz4GThe T-God is on the move as Team Naventic have signed Thomas "Tomster" Maguire. The organization announced the signing on their website Thursday.
The former Tempo Storm player will play ranged, allowing Fan "Fan" Yang to move to melee/flex while Chris "Zuna" Buechter will play warrior.
"I think my new teammates are a lot more strict and hardworking them I'm used to," Tomster told theScore esports. "But [they] can still have a lot of fun and laugh in games which is always a nice thing to have on a team.
"I think fans can expect the best performance I've ever done on this team"
Tomster's first big success in the competitive scene came with King of Blades' roster, where he earned accolades at the NA Spring Regional for his melee play, particularly on Greymane, though he says that he expects Greymane to be nerfed soon.
"I actually don't know why they buffed Greymane," Tomster said. "He is in a good spot at the moment with that he is suppose to do, but they just made his damage so much higher for no reason. I mean, I like the changes because I love Greymane, but they weren't needed at all and probably will be reverted to some extent in the upcoming patches."
After King of Blades' team left their former organization and assumed the moniker of Gust or Bust, Tomster left to join Tempo Storm, where he moved to the ranged/flex role.
"I think ranged is a lot more fun to play at the moment and I feel like I'm not 100% confident on the meta melees (Kerrigan, Zera, Illidan)," Tomster said. "So I wanted to play ranged, and I feel like I look at my positioning and the map a lot more on ranged than on melee and I feel like I play a whole lot better since I just look around more."
Tempo's performance during the summer season did not improve, with the team qualifying at the final invitational qualifier with a 2-0 win over Hot Dog Burglars but then finishing 7-8th at the regional in Burbank.
Josh "Gauntlet" Bury wants to see Fan play Illidan again. You can find him on Twitter.Opeth have become an institution. Formed in Stockholm in 1990 as a death metal group, they have become one of the most influential and distinctive groups of the last twenty-five years. With frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt at the helm, they sought to combine progressive rock, folk and extreme metal in a manner that no other group had previously attempted. Albums such as 1999’s Still Life and 2001’s Blackwater Park are essential additions to the record collection of anyone with a passing interest in progressive music of any stripe.
To celebrate the group’s twenty-fifth anniversary the band undertook a brief tour playing 2005’s Ghost Reveries record (a fan favourite) in full, whilst also looking at their catalogue as a whole, which recently has left behind extreme metal in favour of a sound more influenced by classic progressive rock on albums Heritage and Pale Communion. They have also re-released the albums Deliverance and Damnation in one package, reflecting the fact that they both originated during the same period in 2002-2003. If anything the band are as successful as ever. DiS caught up with Åkerfeldt to discuss the band’s rich history.
DiS: So, twenty-five years of Opeth. If someone had told you back in 1990 that the band would last this long how would you have responded? I’d have said ”Of course!” When I was 16 of course life was different. Easy. I was convinced I’d make it in the music business, mainly because I knew I’d be good at it. With this I mean that I loved it so much, and once I love something I will excel at it. Simple as that. Had I set my sights on tennis, I’d become good at that too I believe. I just need to have a pure love for things and I’d do fairly well within that field. If I didn’t have the interest I’d not be able to blow my nose properly.
DiS: How have the shows to celebrate the anniversary been? In particular, how has it been to revisit the ‘Ghost Reveries’ records, which you have been playing in full on its tenth anniversary?
It was one of my favorite tours ever to be honest. I liked it. It was business as usual in many ways, but I felt that we have made an impact. I felt that we’re a different band to all other bands out there. There’s only one Opeth. We have a unique sound, regardless of what we do, it will sound like us. So playing those old songs was quite interesting. It made me see Ghost Reveries in a new light. Also, performing songs that are both older and more recent made me feel quite proud of the musical aspect of this band. On top of that we played packed theaters everywhere, so all in all, it was a great success.
DiS: These shows were announced a long time in advance and were highly anticipated by the fans. Did you feel under extra pressure to perform?
There’s always pressure. We always do the best we can. I get very irritated if something is in the way of us doing our best. It’s happened that we’ve been working with the wrong people that’s made it more difficult for us, and of course every night is different… but we always ”try” our best at least.
DiS: How did you go about preparing a show that matched the expectations?
Rehearsing. Breaking down the songs so we’d get the best out of them. We usually want to play versions that are as close to the original the best we can, but sometimes we rearrange things to make it more interesting. Like with the song ‘Atonement’ for instance on this tour. Some of the material has over 100 recorded tracks from the studio versions and we only have ten arms collectively. But I think we did fairly well reproducing new versions of these songs.
DiS: The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane is the latest great London venue you have taken Opeth to, and previously you’ve obviously been at the likes of the Union Chapel and the Royal Albert Hall. Have you deliberately looked for opportunities to play heavy music in more traditional venues like these?
We’ve done our share of touring. We’ve been almost everywhere. We play regular clubs, pubs, arenas. You name it. For this tour we deliberately wanted theaters. Something that added to the whole experience. There’s a different reverence that comes automatically when you play inside theaters like the Albert Hall or Theatre Royal. I got a taste for it now. I want to make that the norm for Opeth, even if I’m sure we’ll do many sweaty clubs in the years to come.
DiS: The ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Damnation’ records are being reissued now as they were originally intended. Is this something you have always hoped to be able to do? How frustrating was it at the time when the record label decided to release the two albums separately?
On the contrary, it was my decision to separate the two as far as I remember. We wanted to have a longer time to promote the records which is why they were put out separately. The reissue makes sense as they’re recorded at the same time. They’ve been remastered and remixed and sound amazing. But they’re also old records now. I have a different feeling about them and don’t necessary feel the need to promote them separately, or at all to be honest. It’s just a good package of two of our hopefully-soon-to-become-classic-records. They sound much better now than they did back in the day if you ask me. We haven’t added anything or re-recorded anything. They’re the originals sounds but tweaked so it sounds better and closer to how I wish they had sounded in the first place. Steven Wilson did the Damnation mix a while back out of his own initiative. Bruce Soord (The Pineapple Thief) did Deliverance and made it sound more “real” than the original mix. It was a disastrous recording and it didn’t have a place in my heart until now. I was indifferent to that record, but now I think I love it. Only took twelve or thirteen years!
DiS: Obviously this pair really showcases the two different sides of Opeth. I’ve always wondered how you see this contrast? Have you always been trying to balance the two?
Damnation was an experiment that ended up changing the band drastically in every way. We’ve always had the soft side, we’ve had the ballads and the acoustic interludes always, but never had we done anything like that. It was met with a shrug at the time, but now it’s highly regarded by our fans. Deliverance is a really good record but marred by the difficult recording and there were severe strains within the band. It was a horrible time. At least now I can exhale and be a little bit proud of it. Wilson did a great job on that one and Andy Sneap really “saved” the recording back then, but it sounds better now I think.
DiS: The band’s music has changed a lot over the years – particularly on the most recent two albums, of course. Do you feel the band’s fanbase has now come to terms with the move away from metal on the last two releases?
Perhaps. But the so-called ”new” sound is not here to stay really. I don’t know. We might do something completely different. I’m happy if we end up having a diverse discography, and it doesn’t matter if we’re considered to be an inconsistent band. As long as we’re not considered samey, I’m fine… or as long as we don’t consider us samey at least. Fans have their favorite records or eras regardless of what I think.
DiS: What would you say to continued critics of the band’s new style? It always seems churlish to me to criticise bands for choosing to make the music they want to make…
It’s taste I guess. Some people don’t think ‘Taxi Driver’ is a good film and prefer Adam Sandler. We are more De Niro than Adam Sandler but public opinion is not how I think. And De Niro did both Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, you know. Adam Sandler has become known for playing a slightly retarded character in virtually all his films. It’s what he does. He’s happy with it and his fans are happy with it too. So don’t fix it. Just that we’re not happy with being that, or ‘Taxi Driver’ all the time either for that matter.
DiS: Does the change reflect a decline in your own interest in extreme metal music at all? I know you’ve stopped doing Bloodbath as well now…
I don’t consume that music anymore unless I’m in a party vibe. I love some of the older bands like Celtic Frost, Morbid Angel, Bathory and Autopsy, but new metal is too polished for me. It’s a paradox since we’re so polished in comparison but “my” death metal has to be gritty and dirty. Not polished, quantized and “perfect”. And I never considered Opeth to be a pure death metal band anyways. It’s in our DNA but there’s a lot more to Opeth than death metal. It’s virtually only been the vocals, the screams, that had us rubbing shoulders with our extreme metal peers. You take the screams out and we’re some type of metal, but not very extreme like that.
DiS: Watershed is probably one of my favourite Opeth records, but looking back now I feel like it marks an appropriate end point for the “traditional” Opeth sound in a sense. It really felt like it pushed the boat out in terms of some of the arrangements and influences it threw in…
It was the best and the last album I could make in that style at that point. I love it. It’s a great record. ‘Heir Apparent’ is the heaviest song we have I think. ‘Lotus Eater’ is the weirdest. ‘Hex Omega’ is one of our best” ‘Hessian Peel’ is a corker! ‘Coil’ is beautiful and ‘Porcelain Heart’ is marvelous too. Boasting? Forgive me. But of course I dig our stuff or it wouldn’t have been made available.
DiS: Has the way you write songs changed over the last twenty-five years?
Yes. I write more complete songs now than I did. I love to experiment and I love when I like something without knowing why. It pushes me forward and makes my mind expand a little. I just keep looking for a ”feel” now while before I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Feels like I was lucky in retrospect, but some songs really has a unique feel. I feel detached from past works, as in it feels like I didn’t write them, but I did. And I’m extremely happy about them all. Even the bad songs.
DiS: Has leaving behind the death metal elements made songwriting an easier, or more natural, process for you at all? Whilst I love Watershed, listening back to it recently I felt that it sounded like a hard record to write, largely because the contrast between the extreme metal moments and other moments felt more severe than normal. Pale Communion, in contrast, has a real natural flow to it…
I think I’ve focused a bit more on the vocals. Death metal vocals only needed rhythm and feel, but writing vocal lines you need melody too. So it’s harder because of that. If I write a death metal song I know it’s good enough even before the screams are added: if the riffing and arrangement is good, the song is good. Now I have the vocals carrying the song a lot more which makes it harder, but once you hit the spot it’s a more fulfilling feeling to me. Watershed is an apt title as the album was a watershed moment. Can’t remember if I chose that title because of it, but it couldn’t have been better really.
DiS: The amazing thing, for me, is just how big a band Opeth have become. I appreciate you aren’t chart-toppers but for a band with roots in progressive rock and death metal, you are massively successful. Do you feel the band has benefited from a renewal of interest in progressive music in particular?
Yes we have. Once we became “softer” we got more interest from the progressive rock audience. We’re voted best band and best album with Pale Communion in Prog magazine but at shows there’s all sorts of people. It’s just music, you know. To the general person I think after a specific age you listen to music that you like. Once your personality has settled you become less interested in fitting in or making a statement. Luckily we have interest from both sexes and all ages, and all styles. And I don’t discriminate. If you like us, it doesn’t matter who you are, you’re highly valued. Until you start pointing fingers and telling us what we should do, that is.3 YouTube Channels To Watch For Your Gun Dog by Stefano Marrone
When my wife and I bought our German short-haired, “Pepper“, she actually wasn’t even born yet. We had basically bought the right of first choice to one of the pups in the litter. That didn’t stop me from starting my research in how to train a hunting dog. I’ll have more posts on this, actually an entire section, posting what I’ve learned, how I am progressing with my GSP Pepper, plus plenty of videos to go along with it.To start, you’ll need a good basic training. When you have a gun dog with this much energy, you’ll need to have her basic commands down packed before you can start any hunting drills. Zak George’s Dog Training Revolution (Willow Creek Kennels (Green Acres Sportsman’s Club (The INSIDER Summary:
• A travel blogger claims someone is following her around the world, copying her photos, and posting them on her own Instagram account.
• The story has gone viral, but the pieces don’t all add up.
There’s a story making the rounds on news outlets and fashion sites alike about an Instagram star who allegedly discovered a copycat account.
This 23-year-old Australian Instagram star, originally from Lennox Head in northern NSW and famous for her travel photos, says another Instagrammer followed her around the world and mimicked every detail of her photos, from the angles to the outfits.
It’s a crazy story. Imagine the planning and expense that would go into following a travel blogger to multiple countries just to replicate her exact photos.
In fact, it’s such a crazy story that when we started digging into it, we found that it was all a little fishy. And then we found one particular piece of evidence that made us even more suspicious.
Here’s the story, in case you missed it: Travel blogger Lauren Bullen (who goes by @gypsea_lust on Instagram) claimed in a November 11 blog post that she had discovered a copycat Instagrammer named @diana_alexa who was allegedly following her around the world and imitating her pictures with impressive detail.
In the blog post, titled “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Bullen shared screenshots of the alleged copycat photos and noted that “Diana” had made her Instagram account private. A few days later, Bullen updated the post to say that she had been in touch with Diana, and the two had reconciled in the wake of the media storm.
But that’s when things got weird. Bullen later took down her blog post (she restored it on Nov. 17) and when INSIDER got in touch with her, she refused to put us in contact with Diana or to share any details of their conversation. We’ve been unable to find Diana on our own.
And while it’s not impossible, it seems beyond reason that someone would go to the trouble and expense of recreating another person’s travel photos in such detail. This has led some to speculate that it was a stunt to gain Bullen more followers on social media.
Bullen, who currently has 778,000 Instagram followers, gets paid for her photos and posts. Diana doesn’t have much of a following, and would likely have to travel on her own dime.
Putting aside the expense and unlikelihood that Diana would have been able to book identical hotel rooms to the ones Bullen stayed in days before, here are some of the other red flags we can’t get past:
Many of Bullen’s geotags only list cities, not exact locations. It would have taken an absurd amount of time, money, and effort for Diana to track down the exact fruit stands or market vendors that serve as Bullen’s backdrop.
Just look at these photos taken in Marrakesh, Morocco. What are the chances a stranger would have stumbled on the exact same doorway in a city of almost 1 million people?
Diana also wears the exact same outfits as Bullen, and they look a lot smaller on Diana. This makes us think that the two were travelling together. Bullen could have been lending the much taller Diana her outfits, which would explain why Diana’s hemlines are so much higher. Some of the outfits, like the yellow t-shirt in the Moroccan doorway, would have been almost impossible to replicate.
We considered the possibility that Diana’s pictures were Photoshopped. Business Insider senior graphics editor Mike Nudelman took a look at the images and thought they were real (or a really impressive Photoshop job). He said it seemed more likely that the photos were taken around the same time, but not one immediately after the other.
Then there’s what could be the smoking gun: when you Google “diana_alexa” and “gypsea_lust,” the results include a Twitter account from 2011 that appears to link “Diana” with Bullen’s email address. The message board sleuths who discovered it are citing it as evidence that Diana doesn’t exist and the whole thing is a hoax.
Diana Alexa’s Twitter account is private, but the Google search appears to show a cached version of the Twitter account’s information, from when it was still public.
At this point, we’re totally baffled. In an email to INSIDER, Bullen maintains that it’s no hoax — but we still can’t find Diana.
Publicity stunt or not, the whole debacle has been a boon for Bullen: She’s gained nearly 200,000 Instagram followers in a week.
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Louis van Gaal knew it and Daley Blind did, too. As the duo walked towards the tunnel at the interval of Manchester United's FA Cup quarter-final with Arsenal, it was apparent something had to change to alleviate the freedom their visitors had enjoyed in midfield.
Fatally, Van Gaal remained loyal to the blowing Blind and hooked Ander Herrera. Arsenal regained their lead, United were devoid of impetus in midfield and lost.
Blind, who has started every game he has been available for this season, was culpable for Arsenal's dominance and his manager, whose infamous Dutchification of Barcelona outraged Catalans in the late 90s, was accused of, well, blind loyalty.
Like others before him this season, though, Blind was reprieved by an injury and the Dutchman's Clockwork Orange timing was perfect.
Blind's switch to left-back has sparked perhaps his best run of form. During a testing sequence of fixtures, he has shone as one of United's most consistent performers and his versatility has proved to be valuable.
Timing, as he showcased in Brazil last summer, is not underestimated by Blind. Without his perceptive technique, the Netherlands would almost certainly not have annihilated Spain 5-1 in Salvador. Robin van Persie's Superman impression levelled the game, however it was Blind's incisive pass that bypassed Spain's midfield and defence to leave Iker Casillas powerless.
Blind has spent the majority of the season in midfield with United. One Dutch journalist, shortly after it was announced United had agreed a deal with Ajax, opined Blind was 'phlegmatic' and in danger of being over-hyped due to his assist for Van Persie.
At times, Blind's passing and plodding have caused problems. Before the Arsenal tie, he resembled a Robin Reliant attempting to catch a Ferrari as Moussa Sissoko powered past him at Newcastle and he looked like he had stepped off a rollercoaster following 45 minutes against Arsene Wenger's fleet-footed midfield.
Only Van Gaal knows whether Blind would have continued in midfield had the brittle Luke Shaw not succumbed to another injury. The returning Michael Carrick would have intensified the competition too but, with Marcos Rojo also sidelined, the Dutchman started at left-back against Tottenham.
At the start of the season, United supporters would have expected their left-wing combination to be Shaw and Angel di Maria, but it is Blind and Ashley Young who have truly prospered as a partnership.
Tottenham's right-hand side was swamped by the swashbuckling pair, as Kyle Walker was left looking like schoolboy victimised by bullies and Andros Townsend was hauled off before the interval.
Blind was excellent at Anfield, where he caused Emre Can to tumble like Paul Alcock and there was little surprise that United's breakthrough at Villa came via the left flank.
Accustomed to a left wing role in Van Gaal's 3-5-2 with Hollland, Blind has quickly developed into an attack-minded and dependable Premier League left-back.
The benchmark for that role at United is Denis Irwin and Blind is a graceful full-back who has dashed concerns over his pace by dominating speedy threats like Townsend, Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Agbonlahor.
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education? High school or less 19% of voters Trump +2 - 45 3 4 47 1
Some college/assoc. degree 36% Trump +8 1 39 7 4 47 0
College graduate 27% Cruz +6 1 42 13 8 36 0
Postgraduate study 18% Cruz +15 2 42 21 7 27 0
Education by race White college graduates 42% of voters Cruz +8 1 42 16 7 34 0
White non-college graduates 51% Trump +8 1 40 6 4 48 0
Non White college graduates 3% Not enough data - - - - - -
Non White non-college graduates 3% Not enough data - - - - - -
2015 total family income: Under $30,000 13% of voters Not enough data - - - - - -
$30,000 - $49,999 21% Cruz +13 0 50 10 3 37 1
$50,000 - $99,999 38% Trump +5 1 40 9 6 45 0
$100,000 - $199,999 21% Cruz +14 1 44 15 9 30 1
$200,000 or more 6% Not enough data - - - - - -
No matter how you voted today, do you usually think of yourself as a: Democrat 5% of voters Not enough data - - - - - -
Republican 69% Cruz +3 1 44 8 6 41 0
Independent or something else 26% Tie 2 37 15 6 37 1
On most political matters, do you consider yourself: Very conservative 40% of voters Cruz +19 1 55 3 4 36 0
Somewhat conservative 39% Trump +5 1 38 11 6 43 0
Moderate 19% Trump +20 2 23 21 9 43 1
Liberal 2% Not enough data - - - - - -
On most political matters, do you consider yourself: Conservative 78% of voters Cruz +7 1 46 7 5 39 0
Moderate or liberal 22% Trump +18 2 24 21 9 42 1
Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian? Yes 60% of voters Cruz +16 1 52 6 4 36 0
No 40% Trump +19 1 27 16 9 46 1
White evangelical or white born-again Christians White evangelical or white born-again Christian 54% of voters Cruz +11 1 49 7 4 38 -
All others 46% Trump +7 0 34 14 8 41 1
How often do you attend religious services? More than once a week 24% of voters Cruz +26 1 56 10 2 30 -
Once a week 33% Cruz +17 0 50 9 7 33 -
A few times a month 11% Not enough data - - - - - -
A few times a year 22% Trump +19 1 29 14 5 48 2
Never 9% Not enough data - - - - - -
How often do you attend religious services? Weekly 57% of voters Cruz +20 1 52 9 5 32 -
Occasionally 33% Trump +20 1 28 12 8 48 2
Never 9% Not enough data - - - - - -
Before today, had you ever voted in a Republican presidential primary? Yes 81% of voters Cruz +1 1 42 10 5 41 0
No 18% Not enough data - - - - - -
Which ONE of these four issues is the most important facing the country? Immigration 11% of voters Trump +32 1 31 2 2 63 1
Economy/Jobs 34% Trump +6 1 36 14 6 42 1
Terrorism 21% Trump +1 0 38 9 11 39 0
Government spending 32% Cruz +21 1 53 9 4 32 -
Which ONE of these four candidate qualities mattered most in deciding how you voted today? Can win in November 10% of voters Trump +7 1 36 8 9 43 0
Shares my values 38% Cruz +49 1 62 13 10 12 0
Tells it like it is 20% Trump +69 2 11 4 2 80 1
Can bring needed change 31% Trump +10 0 38 11 2 48 0
How worried are you about the direction of the nation's economy in the next few years? Very worried 71% of voters Trump +5 1 40 8 6 45 0
Somewhat worried 23% Cruz +8 1 42 16 5 34 -
Not too worried 4% Not enough data - - - - - -
Not at all worried 1% Not enough data - - - - - -
How worried are you about the direction of the nation's economy in the next few years? Very or somewhat worried 94% of voters Trump +1 1 41 10 5 42 0
Not too or not at all worried 5% Not enough data - - - - - -
Which best describes your family's financial situation? Getting ahead financially 22% of voters Trump +1 1 35 17 7 36 1
Holding steady financially 62% Cruz +4 0 45 9 4 41 1
Falling behind financially 15% Trump +16 2 32 5 10 48 -
Should most illegal immigrants working in the United States be: Offered a chance to apply for legal status 53% of voters Cruz +11 0 42 15 10 31 1
Deported to the country they came from 42% Trump +14 1 39 4 1 53 0
How do you feel about temporarily banning Muslims who are not U.S. citizens from entering the U.S.? Support 73% of voters Trump +9 0 40 5 4 49 1
Oppose 24% Cruz +23 2 46 23 12 13 1
Which best describes your feelings about the way the federal government is working? Enthusiastic 1% of voters Not enough data - - - - - -
Satisfied, but not enthusiastic 6% Not enough data - - - - - -
Dissatisfied, but not angry 52% Cruz +10 1 43 14 8 33 0
Angry 40% Trump +9 1 41 3 3 50 0
Which best describes your feelings about the way the federal government is working? Enthusiastic or satisfied 6% of voters Not enough data - - - - - -
Dissatisfied or angry 92% Cruz +2 1 42 9 6 40 0
Would you say you feel betrayed by politicians from the Republican Party? Yes 59% of voters Trump +1 1 42 10 3 43 0
No 38% Trump +1 0 39 10 9 40 -
Would you like the next president to: Have experience in politics 39% of voters Cruz +45 1 60 15 13 9 -
Be from outside the political establishment 53% Trump +42 1 25 4 2 67 1
If Ted Cruz is the Republican nominee in November, would you: Not vote for him 21% of voters Trump +42 1 3 21 9 63 -
Probably vote for him 28% Trump +32 1 23 13 7 55 -
Definitely vote for him 50% Cruz +43 1 67 5 3 24 1
If John Kasich is the Republican nominee in November, would you: Not vote for him 28% of voters Trump +23 3 33 2 6 56 -
Probably vote for him 32% Cruz +9 0 47 5 7 38 0
Definitely vote for him 38% Cruz +12 0 43 22 3 31 1
If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in November, would you: Not vote for him 27% of voters Cruz +37 2 59 22 13 2 -
Probably vote for him 21% Cruz +34 2 57 11 6 23 1
Definitely vote for him 50% Trump +46 0 24 4 2 70 0
If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the candidates in November, would you: Be satisfied with that choice 54% of voters Trump +49 - 21 7 2 70 0
Seriously consider voting for a third party candidate 43% Cruz +50 2 64 14 11 5 1
Do you think Ted Cruz is honest and trustworthy? Yes 61% of voters Cruz +40 1 65 5 4 25 -
No 37% Trump +46 1 5 18 8 64 1
Do you think John Kasich is honest and trustworthy? Yes 62% of voters Cruz +3 0 40 16 5 37 0
No 30% Trump +9 2 40 1 6 49 1
Do you think Donald Trump is honest and trustworthy? Yes 48% of voters Trump +58 0 18 3 2 76 0
No 48% Cruz +46 2 64 18 8 6 1
If these had been the only candidates on the ballot today, would you have voted for: Ted Cruz 49% of voters Cruz +73 2 81 8 8 2 -
Donald Trump 42% Trump +90 0 0 4 1 94 1
Would not have voted 8% Not enough data - - - - - -
If these had been the only candidates on the ballot today, would you have voted for: John Kasich 34% of voters Cruz +26 1 55 29 12 4 -
Donald Trump 50% Trump +58 1 20 - 1 78 1
Would not have voted 13% Not enough data - - - - - -
Which ONE of these four candidates do you think would make the best commander in chief? Ted Cruz 38% of voters Cruz +92 1 94 0 2 2 0
John Kasich 15% Not enough data - - - - - -
Marco Rubio 8% Not enough data - - - - - -
Donald Trump 38% Trump +97 0 1 - - 98 1
When did you finally decide for whom to vote in the presidential primary? Just today 12% of voters Not enough data - - - - - -
In the last few days 17% Cruz +33 - 55 14 8 22 1
Sometime last week 7% Not enough data - - - - - -
In the last month 23% Cruz +5 1 42 15 6 37 -
Before that 40% Trump +27 0 32 4 3 59 1
Population City over 50,000 13% of voters Cruz +4 2 41 10 7 37 1
Suburbs 54% Cruz +2 0 42 11 6 40 0
Small city and Rural 33% Trump +4 1 40 8 5 44 0
Region StL City/County 16% of voters Tie 2 35 17 9 35 1
East Central 17% Trump +5 - 40 8 6 45 0
Kansas City Area 15% Cruz +3 1 42 13 5 39 0
North 17% Trump +1 1 40 10 6 41 -A Palm Beach County School District principal was driving to school on a recent morning when he noticed a car zooming right at him.
Behind the wheel, police say, was Jashon Johnson, a former employee who once helped students work on anger and behavioral issues. As the blue Volvo approached, the principal swerved to avoid being run off the road. He later told Riviera Beach police officers he ended up on the sidewalk, where he sat in his car, terrified.
"You think I forgot," Johnson yelled out the window, according to the principal. "I am going to kill you, (expletive), I am going to kill you!"
Johnson, who district officials said was not rehired at John F. Kennedy Middle after the 2014 school year due to budget constraints, was arrested and taken to jail. He's charged with assault and aggravated assault on a school employee.
A behavioral intervention specialist, Johnson worked for the school district from 2011 to 2012, then again from August 2012 to June 2014, when his position was cut, district spokeswoman Julie Houston Trieste said.
"It wasn't a typical disgruntled-employee situation," she said. "It was nothing like that — he was non-reappointed because of funding."
Late Wednesday, a day after the alleged attack, the 37-year-old Riviera Beach man remained behind bars.
Meanwhile, the principal, Corey Brooks, was on his way to an out-of-state conference. The 38-year-old, who was promoted from assistant principal to principal of the John F. Kennedy Middle in 2011, declined to comment through Houston Trieste.
"He's physically fine," she said. "He's shaken up. It did scare him pretty good."
Though Johnson's car never hit Brooks, he told officers he was scared for his life.
After the near-crash at North Congress Avenue and West Blue Heron Boulevard, Brooks drove into the school parking lot to get away.
"Mr. Brooks stated that Johnson did not follow him, but he was in such fear of what Johnson might do to him, he stood by his vehicle for a few moments before entering the school," an officer noted in the report.
Hours later, Johnson reported to the police department to give his account of what happened.
He initially denied seeing Brooks and said he didn't know why he was summoned, the report said. Eventually, after further questioning, he alleged that Brooks "flipped a bird at him."
Johnson denied trying to hit Brooks' car. Then he said he wanted a lawyer.
Staff researcher Barbara Hijek contributed to this report.
bshammas@sunsentinel.com, 561-243-6531 or Twitter @britshamThere was planking. Neknominations. The Harlem Shake. And the ice bucket challenge.
But the latest video craze to go worldwide is perhaps weirder than them all.
The “condom challenge” is a viral video that involves people -- mostly teenagers -- filling a condom with water and then dropping it on to the head of their willing victim.
When it drops, the condom breaks open to cover the head of the participant, enclosing them in a temporary latex-and-water prison.
It usually works, and it’s usually funny -- but the social media buzz reportedly has a serious side. Pieces from Mashable, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post outline how the videos posted online are trying to emphasise safe sex by showing how much a condom can stretch -- and thus how condoms can fit a penis of any size.
But does the one-size-fits-all approach to condoms actually promote safe sex?
Condoms come in a range of sizes and materials, from “snug fit” right through to the much-mocked Magnum brand, known for its larger condoms. They’re made from latex (most often), latex-free (for those with latex sensitivities or allergies), lambskin and other materials.
What’s more, condom sizes don’t just focus on length. Girth is also an important factor -- with condoms available in Australia and overseas ranging from 41-69mm.
Some experts suggest those sizes are there for a reason, and that the viral “condom challenge” isn’t quite hitting the mark with its message.
“You definitely want to make sure you’re using the right size. If the condom is too small it’s going to slip, too big and you may experience breakages,” sex educator and managing director of the Youth Wellbeing Project, Liz Walker, told The Huffington Post Australia.
“You want to create a tight fit, but not too tight. As part of intercourse a good erection maintained throughout sex is important,” she said.
Slippages or breakages of condoms could lead to the transmission of STIs, the need for women to access emergency contraception, or unwanted pregnancy.
But Walker also said the videos could raise awareness among young people of the need to wear protection more generally, saying anything that draws attention to the importance of condoms is good.
“Everyone can use a condom -- don’t blame it on the condom,” she said.
thanks to the condom challenge girls can now call bs when guys say they're "too big" for condoms — Cali Patten (@CaliHatesCows) November 26, 2015
The only good part of this condom challenge is that guys can no longer say that it's "too big" for it — Roxy (@RoxLuck) November 25, 2015
Okay so we are seeing things like the condom challenge and boys still think they can get away with sayin that they are "too big" smh — baby spinach (@iwannafrickyou) November 25, 2015
Associate Professor Rachel Skinner, a clinical academic whose research includes condom and contraception use, told HuffPost Australia that it was uncommon for condoms to break, but there were circumstances where it occurred.
“Condoms are at risk of breaking in a number of situations. If they’re stretched too much, that would be the case. And also if lubricants aren’t used, and if they’re left beyond their use-by-date,” she said.
She said condoms should be used in all circumstances, especially for young people, who typically experience a high rate of STI transmission.
“Trying them out beforehand, that they fit, that they’re comfortable, that they fit quite firmly -- so they don’t come off."
She said condom size was less important than making sure you use the condom correctly.
“I don’t have a strong concern about getting the right size. I don’t really think that that is a major concern. In general, the average size would cover everybody. Except in certain circumstances.”
The condom challenge is, however, raising other concerns - with The Guardian calling it a new way for teens to potentially maim themselves.
"As a rule, please do not put airtight seals over your mouth and nose, particularly when they are also filled with water. It is a Bad Idea," reports The Guardian's Alex Hern.The Liberal government is looking to ease some rules to make it easier for international students who have been "shortchanged" by express entry to obtain permanent residency, says Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister John McCallum.
Express entry was launched by the previous Conservative government as a way to fill the country's labour needs by fast-tracking permanent residency, in six months or less, for highly skilled foreign nationals.
"We must do more to attract students to this country as permanent residents," McCallum said following a meeting this week in Toronto with his provincial and territorial counterparts.
"International students have been shortchanged by the express entry system," McCallum said. "They are the cream of the crop, in terms of potential future Canadians."
Many international students have been calling on the Liberal government to give them extra points for post-secondary credentials obtained in Canada by making some changes to the system used to rank foreign nationals under express entry.
Harpreet Singh, 24, is an international student who emigrated from India in 2011 after he finished high school.
He told CBC News that he applied for express entry over a year ago and although he has obtained a two-year post-secondary degree from a college in Ontario, he still doesn't have enough points to obtain permanent residency.
"If nothing works out, I'll have to go back," Singh said in a phone interview with CBC News.
Singh is currently pursuing a four-year university bachelor's degree in business management.
Court international students 'first'
Mark Holthe, an immigration lawyer and partner at the law firm of Holthe Tilleman in Alberta, said that while the government has acknowledged that international students do make an important economic contribution to the country, a report tabled by the Department of Immigration last week fell short on details.
"There was very little within the report to suggest anything will change for international students or many temporary foreign works who were hit the hardest" by the launch of express entry.
This week, McCallum said he was committed to reforming the system "to be more welcoming to international students."
"I do know that it's become more difficult since express entry for international students to become permanent residents, and I believe that international students are among the most fertile source of new immigrants for Canada.
"By definition they're educated, they speak English or French, they know something about the country. So they should be first on our list of people whom we court to come to Canada," McCallum said on Monday.
'Other possible reforms' to express entry
McCallum also said he is reviewing the need for employers to apply for a labour market impact assessment — a document required to hire a foreign national over a Canadian one.
"I also spoke about other possible reforms, including whether there's a need for labour market impact assessments for express entry," McCallum said on Monday.
Some businesses said the assessment requirement was the biggest flaw with express entry, in a report published earlier this year by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
The chamber said the introduction of this new requirement was a "misstep" that made it "extremely challenging" for businesses to attract highly skilled workers.
The Liberals are moving forward with reversing some changes made to the Citizenship Act that were made under the Tories.
Bill C-6 proposes to count 50 per cent of the time a foreign national spends in Canada before receiving permanent residency toward Canadian citizenship — a move that would also help international students.
More details are expected to come in the Liberal government's first budget on March 22.PULLMAN, WA— The Washington State University Cougars Men’s Soccer Team is a club team that competes in the West Coast Soccer Association. While others over the years have argued the case for the Cougars to add varsity men’s soccer, the club team is busy playing it while wearing the school colors.
The first weekend in April the Cougars traveled over the mountains to take on the Oly Town Artesians and the Washington Premier South Sound FC Shock in two Evergreen Premier League preseason friendlies.
The trip was actually a year in the making. “We had attempted to schedule friendlies against South Sound FC as well as Spokane shadow last spring, but were not successful due to our schedules not matching up,” says WSU Men’s Club President Andrew Anderson. “This year we held conversations much earlier and were able to connect to South Sound FC as well as Oly Town Artesians FC. Both club were very flexible and were able to work with us in order for us to play back to back days while over on the west side.”
The Cougars came over on their own or with portions of the team. “Our guys either drove themselves or traveled with the team in vehicles that we had rented. We departed Pullman, WA on Friday and the majority of the players either stayed with teammates or at the hotel that was booked for our team.”
Anderson recaps the matches. “On Saturday we kicked off the weekend by playing Oly Town Artesian’s in Olympia. Without much information about their program, our guys entered the match with a few nerves. Those nerves however were settled when Jack Klipfel scored the opening goal to give us the lead. Jack Klipfel would get another goal before half-time, while Oly Town would get one back before half as well. The Cougs lead at half 2-1 and confidence grew throughout the team heading into the second half. Several chances were not taken advantage of on both sides early on. It would be in the 70th minute when Oly Town would get the equalizer. The game would end 2-2. We walked away from the game a bit disappointed as we felt like we had the better opportunities to walk away with a win.”
The next day the Cougars moved from Olympia to Puyallup to face one of the EPLWA’s annual contenders, Washington Premier South Sound FC. “Sunday we traveled a short distance to Washington Premier fields in Puyallup, WA,” Anderson recalls. “Several of our players have been either practice players with South Sound FC or full-time players our team was well aware of the qualities of their program. On Sunday we were only able to suite up 15 players as two of our starters had previous commitments that they needed to go back early to Pullman for. This along with having played a full 90 minutes the day before was a bit hard on our players.”
Staying close in this one was not an option for WSU, who fell back by four goals before halftime. “WPSSFC capitalized on their opportunities early on and we never really got a hold of the game. At half-time WPSSFC led 4-0 and our guys were fairly deflated,” says Andrew. “Our coach David Simone did an outstanding job of lifting the guys spirits at half-time to have them work for the next 45 minutes and not to worry about the result as much as continuing to grow as a program. Our players would do that and walk away from the game with keeping the score to what it was at half-time, 4-0.”
The Cougars players have a strong commitment to the sport of soccer. Club teams get some help from their colleges, but they also rely on student interest to thrive.
Anderson and the club are working on an expanded vision. “Our program is run by, funded by and structured by the players and our goal we are working towards currently is to structure the program so they are less functional and more tactical,” he says. “We would like our board (President, VP, Marketing etc.) to layout ideas and vision of the program, then using resources on campus such as our Sports Management Program at WSU to find individuals to set up ways to support the vision of the board. Currently we have an Operations Manager (Alyssa Gonzales) who has done an outstanding job for us.”
If the Cougars can compete around the Northwest and in the WCSA, could Pullman one day host its own men’s club in the Evergreen Premier League? Not so fast, suggests Anderson.
“As far as Pullman ever having its own EPLWA club, I personally believe that this would be a stretch. With WSU ending in early May, there would have to be enough incentive for students to stick around for the summer to compete. If we were not able to create a big enough incentive, then our only player pool would be non-existent making it impossible for us to compete at that level during the summer.”BROOKLYN (CN) — The family of a Long Island woman fatally shot in the head by a policeman during a hostage situation fired back with a lawsuit against the Nassau County Police Department, claiming it tried to cover up its officers’ constitutional violations.
Andrea and Jessica Rebello — 21-year-old twins attending Hofstra University at the time — and John Kourtesis were held hostage by convicted felon Dalton Smith on May 17, 2013 in Uniondale, N.Y.
Unaware they were confronting a hostage situation, officers and named defendants Joseph Avanzato, Nikolas Budimilic, Michael Leone and Marlon Sanders rolled up after getting a 5-second tip: “I have a guy in my house with a gun. He is holding my friends at gunpoint,” according to the May 16 federal complaint.
Jessica managed to escape and tried to tell officers what was happening inside, but her words fell on deaf ears, she says in the 69-page lawsuit.
Officer Budimilic spotted Smith at the top of the stairs, using Andrea as a “human shield” with his arm around her neck while trying to escape out the back.
Budimilic and Smith squared off, and Budimlic fired at least eight shots, the lawsuit states.
The second or third sets of shots killed Andrea Rebello, her family says.
Smith, a 30-year-old from Hempstead, was hit twice and died.
Officers did nothing to help the woman after she was hit, and stepped over her body to help their fellow officer. Budimlic lifted the woman off her assailant and leaned her onto the bottom of the stairs, her parents and sister say.
The officer then “immediately began to scream hysterically over the airwaves” that he needed help, then reversed course and told his colleagues to stay off the air “in an attempt to keep all information about the shooting” under wraps, the family says.
That’s when the cover-up began, the Rebellos say. They claim no investigation was ever conducted against the officer, and the NCPD was “selective and self-serving” when it did little to look into the matter.
The department declined to comment on the lawsuit Tuesday afternoon.
Budimlic initially told police that Smith had shot the woman. Another officer then began throwing boxes and other debris “spoliating the crime scene,” according to the complaint.
That officer ripped Smith’s bloody backpack off his body and threw it out the back door against the back fence of the house, commingling blood samples to ruin a crime scene investigation, the parents say.
They say Smith’s body was dragged to the back door and propped up. The two surviving hostages were forced to sign witness statements that all but exonerated the shooter without being allowed to read them, the family says.
Officers were not compassionate to the surviving twin. “At no point was any effort made … to comfort or provide access to treatment for the trauma [she] had experienced,” the lawsuit states. She was treated like a criminal, her family says, held in a cop car for hours and not allowed to call her parents or see them during questioning at the precinct.
After several hours of questioning, she sister was released to her parents, Nella and Fernando Rebello.
Cops showed up at the Rebellos’ house the next day to tell them their daughter had been killed by an officer.
The family says Budimlic had been involved in two previous shootings, “one of which he described as a gun battle.” He remains on the force, plaintiffs note.
Hostage procedures are clearly written in the Nassau County Police Department’s manual, the lawsuit states, but “each and every act of the defendants present at the scene … violated this policy, and no efforts to deescalate the incident were attempted by any police officer at the scene.”
Nassau County was tapped by the Department of Homeland Security in 2008 to serve as a “public safety answering point — an advance 911 center that can receive emergency calls from wireless phones,” the lawsuit against a slew of officers and detectives claims.
New York State pumped $3.4 million into Nassau County between 2008 and 2012 to help make wireless 911 calls possible and to train operators on how to deal with hostage situations.
“Said monies were never provided for said training, however, and were used for purposes other than what was required by the department of Homeland Security,” the parents claim.
Two weeks before Andrea was killed, the Union for the Police Communication Operation Operators filed court papers to force Nassau County to provide training to deal with hostage situations. The union followed up with a federal lawsuit in June 2014.
“Had the police communications operators been properly trained they would have been able to give better information to the police officers and supervisors in the field who in turn would have implemented better and more appropriate procedures for addressing hostage situations,” the lawsuit states.
“The police communication operators were not properly trained and therefore did not access or disseminate to the officers in the field … the standard operating procedure for hostage situations.”
In fact, the department was even warned by the caller: “Don’t go there. He will shoot them,” according to the complaint.
But dispatchers categorized the call as a “robbery in progress” and not a hostage situation, plaintiffs claim.
The family seeks punitive damages for civil rights violations and supervisory liability.
They are represented by David A. Roth with Roth & Roth in New York City, and Byron Lassin in Elmhurst.
Like this: Like Loading...There's a word for why we're all probably at least a little bit racist, even if we really don't want to be: Implicit bias.
It's a term that describes what's happening when, despite our best intentions and without our awareness, racial stereotypes and assumptions creep into our minds and affect our actions.
It seeps into just about every aspect of life, including areas like criminal justice that can have deadly consequences. Thirty years of neurology and cognitive psychology studies show that it influences the way we see and treat others, even when we're absolutely determined to be, and believe we are being, fair and objective.
That's why implicit racial bias has been called "the new diversity paradigm — one that recognizes the role that bias plays in the day-to-day functioning of all human beings."
Here's what you need to know about how it works, how it permeates American life from education to health to policing, and why, as Obama suggested, it can be even more insidious than the kinds of racism that are most familiar to us.
What is implicit bias?
The first step in understanding how implicit racial bias works is to understand the general concept of implicit bias, which can shape the way we think about lots of different qualities: age, gender, nationality, even height.
You can think of it generally as "thoughts about people you didn't know you had."
Two of the leading scholars in the field, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, capture it well in the title of a book they wrote about the concept. It's called Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.
You can think of it generally as "thoughts about people you didn't know you had"
What do these "blind spots" look like, and how do they shape behavior? Well, if you have a stereotype about Asian people that labels them as "foreign," implicit bias means you might have trouble associating even Asian-American people with speaking fluent English or being American citizens. If you've picked up on cultural cues that women are homemakers, it means you might have a harder time connecting women to powerful roles in business despite your conscious belief in gender equality.
The effects aren't always negative: if you have a positive attitude about your alma mater, implicit bias could mean you feel more at ease around someone who you know also graduated from there than you do around people who went to other schools.
But there are a couple of things that make implicit bias especially fascinating and potentially insidious:
First, since our thoughts often determine our actions, implicit bias can lead to discriminatory behaviors (more on those below). Second, it is impossible to detect without taking a test. In other words, you can't sit down and do introspection about your biases, and you can't just decide not to let them affect your attitudes and actions. Implicit bias lives deep in your subconscious, and it is largely separate from the biases you know you have.
How does implicit racial bias affect the way we think about race?
Implicit bias comes from the messages, attitudes, and stereotypes we pick up from the world we live in, and research over time and from different countries shows that it tends to line up with general social hierarchies.
Studies have shown that people have implicit biases that favor Germans over Turks (in Germany), Japanese over Koreans (in Japan), men over women (when it comes to career-related stereotypes), youth over elderly, and straight people over gay people.
So it's no surprise race is a prime area for implicit bias, and if you live in America, you can probably make an educated guess about some of the ways it tends to play out: among other things, there's a widespread preference for light-skinned over dark-skinned and white over black.
How is this related to regular old racism?
Implicit racial bias tends to work against the same groups that are the victims of the type of overt racism that you hear from white supremacists or the subtler bigotry of people who believe that racial minorities suffer from cultural pathology or who actively defend racial and ethnic stereotypes.
But it can also affect the minds of people who would say — honestly — that they are horrified by these types of attitudes. That's because the implicit associations we hold often don't align with our declared beliefs.
The implicit associations we hold often don't align with our declared beliefs
As Cynthia Lee, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, has explained, "The social science research demonstrates that one does not have to be a racist with a capital R, or one who intentionally discriminates on the basis of race, to harbor implicit racial biases."
In all areas touched by implicit bias, including race, we tend to hold biases that favor the group that we belong to (what researchers call our "ingroup"). But research has shown that we can also hold implicit biases against our ingroup. So yes, white Americans generally have implicit biases against other races, but racial minorities can hold implicit biases against themselves, too. These results are rarely reflective of conscious attitudes.
How do you figure out whether you have implicit racial bias?
To evaluate implicit bias, scientists mostly use tests that measure reaction time and rely on the idea that if we closely associate two concepts in our minds, they'll be easy for us to sort together. And if we don't associate them, they'll be harder, and take more time, to sort together.
The most popular of these tests is the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues invented it in the mid-1990s. An organization called Project Implicit, maintained by Greenwald, Mahzarin Banjai, and Brian Nosek, allows people to take it online. The test is basically a video game that you play on a computer, the object of which is to sort categories of pictures and words.
Here's an example of how it measures implicit racial bias: in the black-white race attitude test, test takers are asked to sort pictures of white and black people's faces, and positive and negative words, by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard. It turns out that most people are able to do this more quickly when the white faces and positive words are assigned |
of goals. He was also poor at right back Saturday in the Impact’s 3-0 loss in Chicago.
“Where he plays will be a question, whether he plays right back or centre-mid, but he’ll want to beat us, no doubt,” said Robinson, who maintains that Reo-Coker, whom he talked with on the weekend, is a “great guy.”
But asked on Monday what he thought Reo-Coker imparted on Teibert, Robinson did let slip that there was “good and bad.” He quickly added, though, that the Englishman, along with now-departed veteran striker Kenny Miller, did help Teibert mature into a solid professional.
“He’s still got room for improvement,” Robinson said of Teibert. “But he’s a joy to work with day-in, day-out.”
Wednesday night’s game is the first of five in a row on the road for the Caps, while the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup takes over BC Place. Vancouver also faces the Galaxy in Los Angeles on Saturday, takes a weekend off and then comes back for games in New York, New England and Colorado.
“We don’t really look at it as five games on the road,” said Teibert. “You take it one game at a time.
“(The media) were saying we weren’t playing as well at home and we were playing better on the road. So I don’t think it’s a challenge. We’ve just got to be mentally focused, do the same things we’ve done on the road earlier on this season. If we do that, we’ll be successful.”
THREE THEMES
TIME TO GRIND
No team in MLS is as different at home and on the road than the Whitecaps. They have scored 13 goals at BC Place and given up 11 while going 4-3-1. On the road, they have scored just three goals and given up only two while going 3-2-1. “Good teams are able grind and dig out results away from home and we’ve done that so far this year,” says Caps’ head coach Carl Robinson, whose team plays five in a row on the road, starting tonight in Montreal. “But it can change at the drop of a hat. We know that. We’re a decent team on the road, hard to beat. If we do all the small jobs very well, we will create chances. Whether we take our chances... “
HEADS UP
Whitecaps centre back Pa-Modou Kah was left pounding the turf Saturday after a header miss off a corner. “It just slid off my head,” he said, pointing to his sloped forehead. “Maybe if I had a four-cornered head it would have gone in.” He and fellow centre back Kendall Waston at least got to more balls on Saturday. With Kah set to be rested and the six-foot-three Diego Rodriguez drawing in alongside the six-foot-five Waston Wednesday night, could we finally see a season first, a goal off a corner. “We’re getting there,” says Robinson, noting that the delivery was better on Saturday. “We’ll continue to work on it and, when we need it, hopefully it will come up big for us.”
BANGED UP
Goalkeeper David Ousted stayed off the field at practice on Monday, choosing to work with the team physios inside. But he is expected to make his 62nd consecutive regular season start Wednesday night. “He’s got a sore hip, but he’s fine,” said Robinson. More doubtful is right fullback Steven Beitashour, who also didn’t practice on Monday after he took a nasty knock to the back of the head on Saturday and is following concussion protocols. Robinson has a couple of options in young South African Ethan Sampson or Tim Parker, this year’s first-round draft pick. Sampson played the full 90 minutes for WFC2 on Sunday, while Parker played just 45 at centre back.
PLAYERS TO WATCH
DIEGO RODRIGUEZ, Whitecaps
It’s been a tough first season in Vancouver for the young Uruguayan centre back. He played well in his debut, a 1-0 win in Orlando on March 21, but a two-game suspension for grabbing Aurelien Collin’s crotch and a nagging quadriceps injury have limited him to just 15 minutes since. Finally healthy again, he says his confidence is high after playing 45 minutes with WFC2 on Sunday. “I’m ready, healthy, ready to play.” He’s set to start tonight in place of Pa-Modou Kah, the soon-to-be 35-year-old who has played more than anticipated this season.
IGNACIO PIATTI, Impact
Montreal has been decimated by injuries. In fact, 27 players have already seen minutes in just eight MLS games. The Impact’s best player has been Piatti, a 30-year-old Argentinian midfielder, who joined the Impact late last season. He has two goals and two assists in MLS play and also scored two goals during the Impact’s impressive run through CONCACAF Champions League in the spring. “He’s unbelievable,” says defender Bakary Soumare. “He’s as good as they come in this league. We rely on him offensively. He draws a lot of players, draws a lot of fouls, scores goals. He’s just fantastic for us.”
gkingston@vancouversun.com
CANADA CALLS ON TEIBERT
Teibert earned a call up from Canadian national team head coach Benito Floro for a two-game World Cup qualifying series this month against Dominica.
But he will likely have to earn playing time in a different position with Canada.
“Russell is a special player,” Floro said on a conference call on Tuesday. “We need to define his position because he can play as a winger or as a midfielder. For our style of play, it will be better for us he plays as a winger.”
It won’t be an uncomfortable position for Teibert, who played mostly as a winger for Vancouver in 2013 when he earned a team-high nine assists.
Eight MLS players were named to Canada’s 23-man roster, including Portland Timbers’ midfielder Will Johnson, who returns after a lengthy absence due to injury and sickness. Strikers Cyle Larin, the MLS first overall draft pick by Orlando this year, and FC Dallas’ Tesho Akindele, the MLS rookie of the year in 2014, also were called up.
Akindele attended a U.S. camp in January, but the former Calgary resident, born to a Canadian mother and a Nigerian father, now has committed to Canada.
“I just thought I was born a Canadian citizen... I should just go with what I’ve always felt my whole life,” Akindele told Canadian Press on Tuesday.
Canada, ranked 115th in the world, faces Dominica, ranked No. 165 on June 11 in Roseau, Dominica, and June 16 at BMO Field in Toronto.
The winner enters a July 25 draw to determine third- and fourth-round qualifying in CONCACAF. Floro said there is a lot at stake against Dominica.
“I hope my players understand the situation, because it will be very bad if we don’t play well.”
gkingston@vancouversun.comThis is the second political post I've written today. Earlier today, we posted about a controversial new Municipal Waste t-shirt that offended some of their conservative fans because it depicted Donald Trump shooting himself in the head. To keep things fair, here's a post that will surely rile up the liberals/progressives in our readership.
A few days ago, U.S. President Obama gave a speech where he announced an executive order for gun control. While discussing the Sandy Hook massacre that left 20 children dead, Obama started tearing up. There was criticism from conservatives that ole Barry O' was faking the tears. And it seems as though Crowbar founder Kirk Windstein seems to agree with that sentiment. In a Facebook post reminiscent of Disturbed's David Draiman love of caps lock, Kirk wrote:
OBAMA'S FAKE TEARS ARE THE WORST FUCKING ATTEMPT I HAVE EVER SEEN AT CARING…HE HAS DESTROYED THIS COUNTRY, AND WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO, UNTIL THE DAY HE LEAVES OFFICE. I AM NOT A GUN OWNER, NOR AM I A REPUBLICAN. JUST A DRUG FREE, TAX PAYING CITIZEN.
If you haven't seen the speech, you can judge for yourself:
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Related PostsUses for Wood Ash
Before starting each fire in our woodstove I run a piece of paper towel under water, wring it out and then dab it in the ashes and scrub off the glass on the stove…it removes all the black soot like magic! The same method as above also works great for cleaning the glass doors in shower stalls. After wiping rinse and scrub down to remove any ash residue. We live on a slope making getting from the house down to the horses and sheep a bit of a challenge when things are icy. Sprinkling ashes works better than any salt or sand product we’ve tried. In early spring sprinkle some ashes on top of the snow on your vegetable garden. The black ashes will help speed up the melting process and the potash (in small amounts) is good for the soil. Add ashes to the compost pile just before spreading it on the garden for best results. Some people argue that adding it to the compost while it’s still active prevents it from doing what it needs to do to break down. I apologize for the lack of science behind that statement! Ashes are alkaline and since our soil in the Peace already tends to be on the alkaline side don’t overdo it in the garden. Sprinkle ashes around plants such as hostas or brassicas to deter slugs. Sprinkle ashes around fruit trees; apple trees in particular benefit from an application every spring. The potash encourages firmer fruit. If you are having an aphid infestation wet the foliage and then dust the leaves with ashes. The next day rinse the ashes off. One application is usually all that is needed, but rinse and repeat in a week or so if necessary. Dry ashes can be dusted on plants as a preventative measure. Works well with tomatoes in particular. If you dye your own hair and get some hair dye on your neck, paper towel dabbed in ash will take it right off. The dye, not your neck. Spread a layer of ashes in the bottom of your cat’s litter box and then cover with kitty litter. The ashes help absorb odor. Same method as above works great in chicken houses too. Put down a layer of ashes (Cold of course! You don’t want to burn down the hen house) on the bottom and then top with straw. Chickens enjoy ashes for winter dust baths and some say it keeps them from being bothered by mites and lice. Put the charcoal chunks from the ash box into an old sock, pulverize with a hammer and hang in a crawlspace or shed to help absorb excess moisture and odors. You can also fill a coffee can with crushed charcoal, punch holes in the plastic lid and use in the same manner. Put aside the charcoal chunks to use in your barbecue come summer. If you spill oil or paint on cement dump some ashes on top, let it sit for awhile until the ashes have absorbed the mess and then sweep it up. And finally, like many Peace Country Pioneers, you can mix ashes with water to make lye which in turn can be mixed with fat to make soap. But you’d have get a book on how to do that. Or talk to a pioneer…
Ashes should be stored in metal containers with a lid, such as a garbage can. If they get wet all the nutritional value will be lost. Always make sure the ashes are cold before transferring them from the stove to the container.
Do you know of any other uses for wood ashes? Please feel free to share!
Interested in fun flora facts and folklore? Visit Garden TriviaImage copyright Pacemaker Image caption DEL Minister Stephen Farry said the combination of grants and loans for part-time tuition fee support was unique in the UK
Part-time students in Northern Ireland will be able to get top-up loans to pay for tuition fees under a new scheme.
The Department for Employment and Learning (DEL) has said about 20,000 students in universities and colleges could potentially access the loan.
It will become available next year. Students with lower incomes will still be able to access existing grants.
The DEL minister said grants were often not enough to cover the full cost of tuition and were also means tested.
"In reality, most part-time students are ineligible to receive any support and the vast majority must self-fund their studies," Stephen Farry said.
"Following a public consultation exercise, I am now pleased to announce a new, non-means tested, 'top-up' tuition fee loan for part-time students.
"Students from lower incomes will continue to be able to access the existing grants, but they will also be able to top them up with a loan for their tuition fees should they need to, providing them with the same level of tuition fee support over the lifetime of their course as their full-time counterparts.
"Students ineligible to receive the existing fee grants will also be able to access these new loans.
"This combination of grants and loans for part-time tuition fee support is unique within the UK."Man Wearing "Full Face President Obama Mask" Robs New Hampshire Bank Share
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A man wearing a “full face President Obama mask” robbed a New Hampshire bank this morning, according to police who apprehended a suspect shortly after the 10:30 AM incident.
Aided by witnesses, Merrimack Police Department officers arrested John Griffin Jr., 52, in connection with the Bank of America robbery.
As seen in the above bank surveillance photo, the masked robber wore a suit coat, white shirt, power red tie, and black gloves. He also carried a Walmart bag, presumably for robbery proceeds.
Upon arresting Griffin, cops discovered he was carrying a loaded handgun (which he apparently did not brandish during the robbery).
Seen at right, Griffin, a Newport, New Hampshire resident, was booked into the local lockup for robbery. He is being held in lieu of $75,000 cash bail in advance of a September 20 Circuit Court hearing.
Last year, a gunman wore an Obama mask during the armed robbery of a McDonald’s in Riviera Beach, Florida.Apr 2, 2017; Cleveland, OH, USA; Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James (23) drives against Indiana Pacers forward Paul George (13) in the first overtime at Quicken Loans Arena. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports
Paul George and LeBron James matchup for Part IV of their playoff saga and it’s exactly what the NBA and this Indiana Pacers-Cleveland Cavaliers series needs.
It’s been 3 long years since Paul George and LeBron James went head-to-head in the NBA playoffs. The last time the 2 frenemies played a post season game against one another; Barack Obama was president, Ebola was a thing, and @Yg_Trece was still @King24George on Twitter.
Feel old yet?
Times have changed but the stakes remain high. Indiana is rolling into the playoffs behind Paul George’s phenomenal play. The Eastern Conference Player of the month averaged 32.8 ppg, 8.2 apg and 4.5 rpg in April. The Pacers are winners of 5 of their last 6 and are peaking at the right time of year as a team.
Conversely, Cleveland is limping into the post season. The Cavaliers are 10-14 March 1st and the chosen one has chosen to sit out the final 2 games of the regular season, despite Cleveland competing for home court advantage.
So here we are. A king sits on his throne ready to do battle against a worthy competitor. It’s a story we’ve read time and again but this outing is unlike before.
The History
Paul George led the Pacers into battle against the LeBron James led Miami Heat 3 straight years in 2012-2014. Every series was a battle, included a 7 game war in the 2013 Eastern Conference Finals. During the 2013 ECF series, George averaged 19.4 points a night on 40.2 minutes per game.
Fans will recall the 23-year-old George burst on to the national scene after nailing a buzzer-beating 3 point heave to send Game 1 of the 2013 conference finals into overtime
Big time players make big time plays. The very next season, George was the best player on the best team in the NBA. The Pacers made another conference finals appearance versus Miami but would be thwarted in 6 games.
All told, King James has beaten King George 3 times in 3 tries. But it’s been 3 years since the last duel and the NBA needs another classic playoff battle.
“Good For the NBA.”
In their most recent battle on last Sunday, James posted a triple-double behind 41 points, 16 rebounds and 11 assists. Not to far behind, George recorded 43 points, 9 rebounds and 9 assists in the Pacers loss.
For whatever reason, Paul George is at his absolute best when he matches up against James. George spoke about the effect James has on his game following the April 2nd loss in Cleveland:
“It’s fun,” George said of facing James. “I know his game and he knows mine. It’s always fun competing against LeBron. He’s going to get the best out of me every time we play. It’s a good matchup, good for the NBA.”
Good for the NBA is right.James has gone to an unprecedented 6 straight NBA Finals. Paul George is playing the best basketball of his life and entering the prime of his career. This is the classic tale of the resident champion vs number 1 contender.
James has gone to an unprecedented 6 straight NBA Finals. Paul George is playing the best basketball of his life and entering the prime of his career. This is the classic tale of the resident champion vs number 1 contender.
It’s the type of storyline the association lives for. LeBron is 33 years old and has logged over 41,000 minutes in his 14-year career. For better or worse, King James is on his way to losing his throne in the near future.
Paul George believes he is the best player in the world. But to be the best, you have to beat the best.
“We’ve got to go out and challenge them,” George said. “It’s going to be tough. They’ve been struggling of late, but they’re still one of the best teams in this game and have one of the best players in the world. It’s going to be a fun matchup. I’m looking forward to it. If you ask me, it’s who I’ve wanted to matchup against.”
These are the words of a superstar ready to take the league by storm. Paul George has had enough talk, it’s time for action.
Paul George is King. Long live King George.When Marvel Comics started publishing superhero comic books, you didn’t have black lead characters. They wouldn’t get distributed. The distribution system basically banned such a thing. The emergence of Black Panther as a superhero character in The Fantastic Four, on the covers no less, was a radical thing – but it helped that his costume covered him head to toe.
The Black Panther gave the Marvel Universe a history with the country of Wakanda, a hidden high-tech African city. And a number of writers including Don McGregor, Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin and now Ta-Nehisi Coates have explored that further.
But what about America? There has been a few attempts to create a greater diversity in Marvel superheroes in their past as well as their present. Bob Morales wrote Truth, the series that established Isiah Bradley as a survivor of a series of experiments on black Americans in the 1940s to replicate a Captain America. Agents Of Atlas established Blue Marvel as a black scientist superhero from the sixties, who was made to retire from his role by a racist society.
And today we get another attempt to excavate Marvel’s past with Black Panther & The Crew by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Butch Guice, telling the story of Ezra Keith, a civil rights leader who has died in police custody. But who had a much greater impact on the Marvel Universe, by creating his own Crew back in the nineteen fifties in New York. And one that took on the gangsters of the day.
And giving us new fifties superheroes Flare, Brawl, The Gates and Gloss.
And as the modern Crew gathers again, fresh from their antics in the main Black Panther series, so it looks as if more of that history is about to be unearthed…
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
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None foundWhile waiting at a red light a few days ago, a pickup truck decked out in Confederate flags pulled up in the lane adjacent to mine. The driver had two flagpoles attached to his truck bed, each adorned with the flag of the Confederacy, along with Confederate flag bumper stickers and a Confederate flag license plate frame.
I was in New Hampshire, mind you — not South Carolina — and the pickup truck’s license plate was from the Granite State. The only logical explanation left for the driver’s loud display of the Confederate flag after that flag has been universally condemned as a symbol of hatred and racism is that the driver is endorsing the same.
I didn’t ask the pickup truck driver who he supported in the primary, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he favored Donald Trump, based on his recent surge in the polls and outspoken bigotry. As Republican presidential candidates begin to set their sites on New Hampshire, they will need to come to grips with the party’s racial animosity that Trump’s surge represents.
In May, before announcing his campaign, Trump was polling at only 3 percent. Even after he was widely condemned in headlines for his June remarks accusing almost all Mexican immigrants of being drug dealers and rapists, Trump doubled down on his remarks, and weeks later, he quadrupled his polling position, putting him just behind Jeb Bush. Trump’s popularity has since skyrocketed among Republican primary voters. According to polling data from July 17, Trump held the lead with 18 percent of Republicans preferring him, compared to 15 percent for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and 14 percent for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. A Monmouth University poll of Tea Party supporters revealed that Trump had flipped a 55-percent net negative to 56 percent approval since June, when he made his racist remarks. This kind of immediate swing in the wake of such comments isn’t necessarily an endorsement of Trump, but an endorsement of the hateful values he openly espouses.
Trump is able to win over that core group of Republican supporters by speaking to their sense of loss in an era of white privilege slowly but surely coming to an end. Census data from the 2012 election revealed that white voters — the GOP’s largest demographic – will no longer play a major role in deciding future presidential elections. It’s also estimated that by 2045, whites, who currently account for 62 percent of the population but 78 percent of deaths, will be a minority in America. When combining this reality with an electorate that elected and re-elected the first African-American president, aging white Republican voters are feeling outnumbered, and are looking for a candidate willing to say all the things they secretly think about President Barack Obama and America’s growing immigrant population.Profile
The University of Mississippi, known as Ole Miss, is a public research institution in Oxford, MS. Chartered in 1844, today it is the state’s largest university. Ole Miss has 15 schools and colleges, and the most popular fields of study are business and health. Its Chinese language flagship program was established 15 years ago with a grant from the National Security Education Program. Nearly one third of students are involved in 32 Greek organizations. Ole Miss prides itself on its sustainability efforts including a composting program that collects food waste from campus dining halls. The Ole Miss Rebels’ football team has won six SEC titles and three national titles, and prominent NFL alumni include Archie and Eli Manning. William Faulkner, John Grisham, and Donna Tartt all attended Ole Miss. More »A Georgian mansion in rural Warwickshire owned by the Church of England is set to become home to dozens of Syrian refugees, it has emerged.
Offa House, a listed 18th Century former retreat house in the village of Offchurch near Leamington Spa, has been earmarked as a possible reception centre for new arrivals by the local Diocese of Coventry following a call from bishops for empty church buildings to be offered as housing.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, has offered a cottage in the grounds of Lambeth Palace to house refugees while parishes across the country have been collecting lorry-loads of clothes and gifts for asylum seekers in Calais.
But the 27-bedroom mansion, which has a chapel, conference suite and coach house, is by far the biggest single property set aside as part of the Church’s response to the refugee crisis – an issue which has increasingly put the Church on a collision course with the Government.
Photo: ANDREW FOX
The diocese originally put the building up for sale after its closure two years ago, marketing it as a potential country hotel, private school or grand nursing home, but took it off the market and is now seeking planning permission for the new use.
A planning application submitted to Warwick District Council earlier this week includes plans of the building and outhouses and requests authorisation to use it for the next five years as “short-term residential accommodation for refugees”.
• Theresa May's immigration speech is dangerous and factually wrong
• Theresa May is right: Britain does not need more immigrants
Senior clerics have openly disagreed with Downing Street over the UK’s response to the crisis which many in the Church have dismissed as inadequate.
Earlier this week the Church of England allowed a private letter to Mr Cameron signed by more than 80 bishops to be published, challenging the Government to increase the number of refugees the UK will take from just 20,000 over five years to 50,000 and set up a national welcome board to help resettle people.
The letter was originally written last month but bishops decided to make it public after getting no response and amid anger over the tone of Theresa May’s party conference speech in which she claimed there was “no case in the national interest” far large-scale immigration.
Originally built in the as a grand rectory, Offa House was converted to serve as a retreat centre in the early 1960s, a role it fulfilled for 50 years.
A spokesman for the diocese said discussions are still at an early stage.First volume of graphic novel trilogy in stores in March
Roche limit: in astronomy, the minimum distance to which a large satellite can approach its primary body without being torn apart by tidal forces. -Encyclopedia Britannica
The Roche Limit Colony lies at the cusp of an energy anomaly in the Andromeda Galaxy, and on top of a cache of an alien mineral deposit used to make the drug “Recall.” It has become a magnet for greed, crime, a place where people disappear — both because they want to or someone else wants them to. In ROCHE LIMIT, VOLUME 1, the March graphic novel by Michael Moreci (HOAX HUNTERS, HACK/SLASH: SON OF SAMHAIN) and Vic Malhotra (The X-Files: Year Zero, Thumbprint), Sonya Torin wants to find one of those who have disappeared, her sister Bekkah, who came to Roche Limit to help Recall addicts.
Sonya’s only help on the corrupt, lawless colony in finding her sister is Alex Ford, a shifty drug manufacturer with his own set of pursers who are after his Recall formula. As the search for Bekkah leads Sonya deeper into Roche Limit’s underbelly, they move ever closer to a burgeoning spiritual movement with the energy anomaly at its center.
“Both noir and sci-fi are perfect genres to employ for Roche Limit because both have deep underpinnings in existentialism/fatalism,” said writer Moreci in an interview with Comic Bulletin. “I’ve always contended that the best sci-fi examines who we are as humans, particularly in the context of our social mores... Noir is similar, but a bit more personal…. I want to explore that intersection of existentialism and popcorn fiction as only genre fiction can.”
Artist Malhotra inhabits Roche Limit with weary denizens who move through a lived-in, often dilapidated and grimy setting. “I find it really tough to get my imagination going with stories set in sleek sci-fi settings. The sense of history is lost,” he said in the Comics Bulletin interview. “That’s why it’s more fun to draw old buildings rather than new ones or an old tennis shoe rather than a brand new one.”
ROCHE LIMIT, VOLUME 1, the first book in a planned trilogy, will be in comic book stores on March 25 and in bookstores on April 7. It is available for pre-order now.
ROCHE LIMIT, VOLUME 1 by Michael Moreci and Vic Malhotra
ISBN 978-1-63215-199-5
Diamond Comic order code DEC140688
136 pages, paperback, full color
$9.99
Collects ROCHE LIMIT #1-5
Rated Teen Plus (16 and up)
In comic book stores March 25, bookstores April 7
Retailers, librarians, and reviewers may request a PDF galley from Jennifer de Guzman, Director of Trade Book Sales, jenniferdeguzman@imagecomics.com
Praise for ROCHE LIMIT:
“Moreci and Malhotra are… succeeding at upending expectations of a science fiction story and regaling us with their tale the way they want to tell it. Through great art comes questioning of perception or simply exciting experiences. This artistic team has succeeded at both.” –Keith Dooley, Multiversity Comics
“Moreci’s skilful world-building and Malhotra’s uniquely expressive artwork combine here to create something truly memorable; a noir-soaked sci-fi masterclass complete with twists, turns and dramatic, character-driven moments.” –Michael Bettendorf, Comics Bulletin
“This is a series that demands and deserves to be read by any and all sci-fi, comic, and storytelling fans.” –Zac Thompson, Bloody DisgustingRecently, I was catching up with a former colleague. He mentioned a service that I wrote years ago, and how it has since become known as the Career Killer. Basically everyone who touched the Career Killer ended up leaving the company. If the company wanted to have > 0 developers, the only solution at this point was to take a few months and refactor this service completely.
I have two things to say about this. First, that code was at 85% unit test coverage when I left so don't go blaming me. Second, this huge refactoring? It's not going to work.
Every codebase has at least one component that is widely hated and feared. It does too much, it has too many states, too many other entities call it. When it comes time to pay down technical debt, you should definitely focus on this component. However, if you have an incomplete understanding of this component and you stop everything to completely rewrite it, your odds of success are low. That component, as scary and complex as it appears, is actually way more scary and complex than you think.
How do you think that component got into this unfortunate shape? Is it because the company hired a nincompoop and let him run wild in the codebase for years? Or is it because the component was originally a sound abstraction, but its scope of responsibilities had grown over the years due to changing requirements? (For the sake of my ego, I'm hoping the Career Killer is the latter.) In all likelihood, this component arrived at its current, scary state via smart people with good intentions. You know what you are right now? Smart people with good intentions. If you proceed with a big refactor, you'll trade one form of technical debt for another.
In order to truly pay this debt down, you need to untangle the complexity around the problem. You need to spend time looking at all the clients calling this component. You need to spend time talking with your colleagues, learning more about the component's history and how it's used. You need to make a few simplifying changes around the periphery of the component and see what works. Each week, you spend a little more time and untangle the problem just a little bit more. Given a long enough timeframe, you'll eventually untangle all of the complexity and brought a teeny bit of order to the universe.
Practically speaking, what do you do here? Rather than 3 full months on a complete refactor, spend 25% of your time over the next year. It's the same time commitment either way, but with the 25% plan, you get time to analyze and plan. You get time to untangle.The combine is right around the corner and draft season is in full swing. These players aren’t necessarily drafted in the order they are on my big board but more or less to fit certain schemes and a prediction of what I think will happen. Of course, there is going to be some reaches and some players falling cause that’s what happens on draft day. This mock is in favor of the defensive side of the ball, mainly at the corner and Edge positions. I believe the most talent lies on defense so this mock followed suit. Feel free to share your thoughts on twitter or in the DFF forum.
1. Cleveland Browns – Myles Garrett, Edge, Texas A&M
The Browns need to draft someone that can make an impact for years to come and help put their first round woes to rest. Garrett is an elite pass rusher and has the ability to make an impact in his first year like Joey Bosa did for the Chargers. The NFL is a passing league and putting pressure on opposing quarterbacks is a high priority. Not only is Garrett a great pass rusher he is well rounded and very impactful when playing the run. Don’t overthink this one.
2. San Francisco 49ers – Reuben Foster, LB, Alabama
Foster is an elite prospect. The 49ers have steadily built up their defensive line over the past few years and adding a linebacker of Foster’s pedigree would immediately bolster their defense. He is a force in the middle, and the young core on their line should help keep Foster clean allowing him to make a number of plays. During the 49ers success of recent years, they were best known for an outstanding linebacker core, and I think it would serve them well to re-establish that position in a huge way.
3. Chicago Bears – Jamal Adams, SS, LSU
I think if the board falls this way the Bears will trade back and address their DB need a few picks later. They could really use a corner or a quarterback, but Jamal Adams is a very special talent and can make a huge impact right away. Pairing Adams with Amos looks very good on paper. Adams is my number 2 prospect and his ability to diagnose plays along with his tackling skills really makes this a promising pick for the Bears.
4. Jacksonville Jaguars – Malik Hooker, FS, Ohio State
The Jaguars signed Tashaun Gipson last year, and he has not quite been the player most had hoped. Hooker has elite range and ball skills that should help the Jaguars pass defense tremendously. They could go a number of different ways with this pick but when a player who possesses the type of talent Hooker does it will be hard to pass up. Their defensive line should come together nicely this season and help relieve some pressure off the back end which will ultimately be policed by Hooker. Having two young elite type players in Hooker and Ramsey in their secondary should serve them well for years to come.
5. Tennessee Titans (from LAR) – Mike Williams, WR, Clemson
The Titans lack a true number one wide receiver, and I believe Mike Williams gives them just that. I feel if they wait until their second pick they will miss out on the two WR1 types in this class, so it will serve them better to pull the trigger now rather than later. Mariota has shown what he can do with his current pieces and adding Williams to the mix will make that offense very potent.
6. New York Jets – Marshon Lattimore, CB, Ohio State
With the decline of Darrelle Revis, the Jets do not have a true lock-down corner on their roster. Lattimore has excellent ball skills and coverage ability. His athleticism and knack for mirroring opposing wide receivers make a strong case for him to be the first corner off the board. I think he fits well in a number of schemes and the Jets can rely on him to make an impact in his first year.
7. Los Angeles Chargers – Deshone Kizer, QB, Notre Dame
After watching the quarterbacks in this class more closely, I think it is safe to say Kizer has the best traits to work with at the next level. Rivers continues to play at a very high level but his time as the franchise QB is coming to an end. Landing on the Chargers gives Kizer time to refine his skills while sitting for a year or two and eventually when his time comes the franchise will be in good hands.
8. Carolina Panthers – Jonathan Allen, DE, Alabama
It is not very likely that Allen falls this far in the draft but if he does he will be a great fit for the Panthers. They are aging on the DL and have a few free agents that they might need to let go. Allen is ranked third on my board and opposing lines will have a very hard time containing him. He plays the run extremely well and loves to get after the passer. His presence will be needed in a division that has QBs like Ryan, Brees, and Winston.
9. Cincinnati Bengals – Solomon Thomas, DE, Stanford
Bengals fans can rejoice. Thomas and Jonathan Allen are neck and neck for me. Thomas absolutely wrecked the Tar Heels in their bowl game, and it burst him onto the scene for a lot of Draft Twitter. He is a 4-3 DE type that looks rocked up and moves very well. His strength at the point of attack and ability to move OL aside is very impressive. He has a great skill set and looks to be a very high impact player from the moment he is drafted.
10. Buffalo Bills – Corey Davis, WR, Western Michigan
The Bills need a ton of help this offseason, especially on the offensive side of the ball. Their questions at QB loom heavily on their decision with Tyrod Taylor. Whether they choose to keep him or not Corey Davis will be an excellent addition to their offense. Depending on what you look for in a WR Davis and Williams are interchangeable at WR1. Davis is an absolute playmaker who runs very good routes and has a knack for gaining yards after the catch. When Sammy Watkins is not available the Bills pass catch |
just them”) is in many ways a fiction that allows “real SHIELD” to absolve itself of the violence committed in its name– including the violence that the Winter Soldier represents. His erasure/reversion therefore becomes also a means of wiping away the visible, troubling reminder of SHIELD’s history.
When I say “his erasure,” also, I mean this in a very complicated way. There is no “real” Bucky Barnes waiting to be released from the “fake” prison of the Winter Soldier. (The comics did not handle this particularly well, and I’m interested to see how the films will deal with it.) The insistence on “undoing” the Winter Soldier in an effort to “heal” Bucky is an insistence on denying the legitimacy of those experiences because they are unpalatable or horrifying to a certain audience. This is very similar to rehabilitation efforts that insist trauma must be “overcome” or “conquered” rather than integrated into the self. And it is, of course, very similar to new-neoliberal efforts that insist unpalatable desires and beliefs are illegitimate and must, in the same manner, be excised from the self. The Winter Soldier is troubling, disturbing, literally haunting. What the heroes of this story want is his destruction, but they frame this as his salvation.A week before the summit in which EU leaders expect to close a deal with the UK on EU reforms, the process remains "very fragile", European Council president Donald Tusk said on Wednesday (10 February), with benefits and the banks being the main difficulties.
As central European countries continue to express concerns about the plan to limit in-work and child benefits for EU workers in the UK and other countries, France pointed out on Wednesday that it opposed proposals on financial issues.
French finance minister Michel Sapin said some proposals in the draft agreement "could suggest there would be a difference of treatment" between London and other EU financial centres.
"That is not possible. The treatment must be as identical as possible," he told French MPs at a parliamentary hearing.
Sapin echoed concerns expressed by the French Banking Federation in a letter to French president Francois Hollande.
The proposed arrangements about relations between the eurozone and non-eurozone countries "raises major problems of principles concerning the integrity of the internal market, the financial stability of the European Union and fair competition between financial players", the head of the federation, Frederic Oudea, wrote in the letter, according to Reuters.
UK 'cannot dictate'
Oudea, who is also the head of the Societe Generale bank and of the European Banking Federation, pointed at the proposal to exempt non-euro and non-banking union countries from paying for the rescue of eurozone countries or institutions.
"If that provision was to be maintained, the banking sector suggests to demand reciprocity for the eurozone," he wrote in his letter to Hollande.
He also said that banking union rules applying only to credit institutions located in the eurozone would be a violation of the internal market for the financial sector.
Sapin told MPs that the "unity of the market, particularly financial markets" was a "red line" for France in the discussions ahead of next week summit.
In a debate at the national assembly also on Wednesday, French prime minister Manuel Valls warned Britain that it could not "dictate" the terms of the agreement.
"It is up to Britain to recall that is is fully a country in the EU. We don't dictate our conditions, we are in a partnership and we go forward together," he said.
He added that France would be "particularly vigilant" on guarantees that the eurozone would still be able to integrate further.
"When you are not a member of the eurozone, you cannot dictate conditions to the eurozone," he said.
To alleviate French concerns before the summit, Tusk will go to Paris to meet Hollande. The meeting will be part of a series of talks with leaders, announced by Tusk on Wednesday, in order "to secure a broad political support for [his] proposal" for an agreement.
He said that in addition to Hollande, he would meet German chancellor Angela Merkel, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis and the Belgian, Greek and Czech PMs, Charles Michel, Alexis Tsipras and Bohuslav Sobotka, respectively.
Sobotka currently chairs the Visegrad group that gathers his country together with Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. The group has been the main critic of the plans to limit benefits for EU workers.
In an opinion article published by EUobserver on Wednesday, Czech state secretary for European affairs Tomas Prouza said that "the situation of EU citizens working in another member state cannot be more disadvantageous than that of citizens of third countries".
"We still have a week left before the European Council to find the final compromise that everybody can agree with," Prouza wrote. "If we want to find an agreement, we cannot open Pandora’s Box and include issues of other member states in the discussion."
EU ambassadors and national EU advisers will meet this Thursday for a second round of talks to prepare the final draft for the summit.
Ahead of this meeting and of his tour of Europe, Tusk sent an updated proposal to the 28 capitals on Wednesday.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the draft limits the use of the so-called immigration emergency brake, the mechanism to limit benefits to countries that opened their labour markets to new EU member states in 2004.
The updated proposal also specifies that the plan to reduce child-benefit payments to EU workers in Britain would not be extended to other “exportable” benefits, like old-age benefits.Share the News
Actor Kevin Spacey has been identified as the mystery buyer of the $5.65 million Pier Home at Harborview that sold earlier this year, according to local real estate agents and others familiar with the transaction.
Real estate agents disclosed in February that a buyer paid cash for the five-level residence at the eastern end of a pier that juts into the water as part of the gated Harborview community.
The sale price of the pier home, 622 Ponte Villas North, is one of the highest ever sums paid for an Inner Harbor residence. (Writer Tom Clancy paid $12.6 million in 2009 for several combined penthouses at the Ritz-Carlton Residences.) In this sale, the buyer’s identity has not been made public.
Charlie Hatter of Monument Sotheby’s International Realty, the listing agent, declined last week to identify the buyer. But others familiar with the Baltimore real estate market say the person is rumored to be Spacey, who stars in the “House of Cards” television series filmed in Maryland.
“Real estate agents talk to each other,” said one knowledgeable source, noting that other property owners along Ponte Villas North also have identified Spacey as the buyer.
Designed by Marks, Thomas Architects, the residence is actually two properties combined into one. The seller was the estate of developer Leroy Merritt, who died in 2010 and lived there briefly. It was originally listed for $8.5 million. Before the sale, it was rented by Orioles third baseman Manny Machado.
The 9,000-square-foot house contains six bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, three half-bathrooms, a theater, an elevator, two garages, a billiard room, a sauna and a rooftop deck with a 360-degree view. The red neon Domino Sugars sign is visible directly across the water.
Spacey’s real name is Kevin Spacey Fowler. Since 2013, he has played Frank Underwood in “House of Cards,” a role that brought him to Maryland. He could not be reached for comment.
Demolition Underway in Mount Vernon-Belvedere
Demolition is well underway on a low-rise office building at 9 E. Mount Royal Avenue that is being razed to make way for a seven-story, 64-unit apartment building.
Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation last week approved the design for the replacement structure by Kann Partners. Zahlco Development, headed by Yonah Zahler, is the developer of the project, which also includes renovation of the adjacent building at 11 E. Mount Royal Avenue.
Maryland Nonprofits to Facilitate “Dialogue” Regarding Sale of Baltimore Clayworks Properties
Maryland Nonprofits Inc., formerly MANO, will facilitate meetings between the Baltimore Clayworks Board of Trustees, which has launched an effort to sell the group’s two buildings in Mount Washington, and the Clayworks Community Campaign, a group that doesn’t want the sale to proceed.
The dialogue was proposed by state Del. Sandy Rosenberg at a Capital Budget Subcommittee hearing on Baltimore Clayworks, which was called by Dels. Maggie McIntosh and Adrienne Jones and held in Annapolis on May 2.
More than 800 people have signed a petition seeking to prevent the sale of the Baltimore Clayworks properties at 5706 and 5707 Smith Avenue. Fifty people rallied outside a Clayworks fundraiser in late April to express their opposition to the sale.
Arts Center Planned for Bel Air
The Maryland Center for the Arts announced that Gov. Larry Hogan and the Maryland State Legislature have approved $1 million for the planning, design and construction of the center’s proposed arts campus in Bel Air. Hogan included the project in his state budget for the 2018 fiscal year.
The Maryland Center for the Arts is dedicated to establishing a campus to nurture art, artists and the surrounding community. The center hopes to provide a range of creative experiences through arts education, presentations and exhibitions in music, dance, theater and other visual forms.
A groundbreaking is expected later this year.
This column has been corrected to reflect that the actual sale price of the Inner Harbor home was $5.65 million, not $6.25 million, according to tax records.“This technology is going to revolutionize the way we live, learn, work, and play.”
Visionary device: Sergey Orlovskiy, CEO of Russian game maker Nival, uses the developer version of Oculus Rift.
Palmer Luckey’s rhetoric is evangelical, persuasive, and also somehow familiar. His ardent belief that virtual reality headsets are set to alter humanity’s technological horizons is reminiscent of the 1990s, when the film Lawnmower Man painted in somewhat crude pixels a vision of the future in which virtual reality (VR) dominated life. The vision quickly disappeared, not only from our movie screens but also from our cultural understanding of where technology might be taking us. Although for a few short moments our world seemed poised to retreat into the dark realms of possibility inside a helmet lined with tiny screens, soon enough that came to be seen as little more than the stuff of science fiction, like flying cars and ubiquitous jetpacks.
But this time, according to Luckey, designer of the forthcoming virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, we’re ready. The 20-year-old, who gathered the world’s largest collection of head-mounted displays (HMDs) when he worked as an HMD designer at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, speaks in an endless stream of quotable sound bites. Here’s one: “This is not just a new medium—in many ways, it is the ultimate medium.” And another: “It is only a matter of time until VR becomes ubiquitous.”
Luckey’s belief in his product is infectious—so infectious, in fact, that in the 36 hours after a demonstration of the Oculus Rift prototype at the E3 video game conference in June 2012, his company raised more than $1 million in Kickstarter funding, four times as much as was asked for. When the campaign closed, the total was nearly $2.5 million. He’s gone on to convince the suspicious tech mavens of Silicon Valley too, raising $16 million in Series A funding in recent months. The world, it appears, may at last be ready for VR.
Perhaps it’s a question of managing expectations. Arguably where the original VR dream faltered was in failing to live up to the anticipation of its users. We expected to be transported through the helmet into a new dimension, full of restless color and life, but the virtual reality we experienced fell some way short. Even in its current non-HD version, Oculus Rift seems to deliver. Veteran video game developer Cliff Bleszinski was so impressed with the hardware that he became an investor shortly after playing. Meanwhile, a YouTube video of an astonished 90-year-old grandmother using the kit has garnered more than two million views.
Luckey, who was yet to be born when W Industries launched the first mass-market HMDs designed for video games in 1991, designed the Oculus Rift prototype “as a one-man team in my garage.” At the time, he had some experience working on VR projects at ICT’s mixed reality lab but was pursuing a degree in journalism. The results of his early tests were so positive that he quit the course to concentrate full time on the project.
Luckey was obsessed with VR as a child. “I grew up with influences such as Snow Crash, Lawnmower Man, and The Matrix,” he says. “Growing up with those influences, I had always dreamed of being able to play video games using VR technology.” Initially, Luckey assumed that there was a VR headset somewhere in the world that could do what he wanted. “Searching for the headset became an obsession,” he says. “As I purchased more and more HMDs, it became clear that VR was in a sorry state as far as consumer products were concerned. Even in the professional market, where headsets cost many tens of thousands of dollars, they weren’t even close to the performance I wanted. So I started tinkering in my garage, hoping that I could make something better. Initially, it was purely for myself.”
Luckey’s goal with those early designs was to create an HMD with as little lag between head movement and video image as possible, and a wide field of view. “I wanted something that made it feel like you were inside of the game, not just looking at a screen strapped to your head,” he says.
At E3 2012 he loaned his sixth prototype, now dubbed the Rift, to John Carmack, the American video game programmer whose innovations in 3-D graphics set the landscape of contemporary video games. Carmack showed the technology to the press running an updated demo of his game Doom 3, which he had modified to work with the new hardware. The response was, to use Luckey’s word, “massive.” What he had presumed would be of niche interest to virtual reality enthusiasts turned out to have broad appeal. “The virtual reality community was tiny at the time,” he says. “It was a happy surprise to see that so many ‘normal’ gamers were interested in it too.”
Within a month of E3, Luckey’s prototype had become a business. Video game industry veterans Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov, and Nate Mitchell joined Oculus VR as CEO, lead software architect, and vice president of product respectively, and an initial development kit production run was planned in China.
What could make the product so compelling is the combination of price and performance. At $300 for a developer kit, studios used to spending thousands of dollars on video game development hardware are likely to see it as a relatively small gamble for a piece of technology that could have a big impact on the tech landscape. (Indeed, when development kits were put up for sale on the Oculus website in September of last year, they sold at a rate of four to five per minute.)
But Luckey concedes that the product’s gestation has not been without problems. “Taking something from the lab and turning it into a real product is difficult, especially for a VR headset,” he says. “With some technologies, a single advance is enough to build a product on. VR requires many complex technologies to work together flawlessly, and if you don’t get it right, everything falls apart and the immersion is lost.” It’s this particular challenge more than any other that has held the Oculus team back from announcing a firm release date.
There are also the potential side effects for users. Minecraft creator Markus Persson (see “Innovators Under 35: Markus Persson”) wrote earlier this year: “Oculus Rift integration is extremely easy. The only problem is nausea.”
Indeed, disorientation and dizziness are common complaints among new users. “The device itself is not always the root cause,” says Luckey. “Even if the hardware perfectly replicates how humans view reality, there will always be situations that make users feel poorly.” Problems particularly arise in experiences where there is a mismatch between what players see on screen and what they feel in the inner ear, where the sense of balance is controlled. “VR does not change the fact that a roller coaster or fighter jet ride are liable to make some people feel ill,” he says. “But one positive thing our user testing shows is that even people who suffer side effects tend to acclimate themselves over time; people who use the Rift on a regular basis are much less likely to have problems.”
Newbies’ problems aside, the results, if everything continues on its current trajectory, could prove transformative. “What’s surprised me is that it’s not just people interested in technology and video games that are excited,” he says. “The Rift is being used for all manner of non-gaming applications like telepresence, architecture, CAD, emergency response training, phobia therapy, and many more.”
With no fixed release date, though, Luckey and his team must balance costs against sticking to a schedule and using available technology. A 1080p version of the device was demoed in public just over a year after the original prototype’s public debut, but Luckey is aware that he cannot keep adding to the device’s scope ahead of release. “We want to ship the best technology possible, but that has to be balanced with schedule,” he says. “We can’t delay forever, no matter how good the parts are just a few months down the road. On top of that, you need to keep the price reasonable. If a device costs too much, it may as well not exist.”
Where once Luckey was concerned only with creating a product that would meet his own needs, today his ambition is far more wide-ranging. “Virtual reality is going to revolutionize life,” he says. “As the content library grows and the price diminishes, it is going to be a very attractive technology for consumers in all walks. Virtual reality provides more freedom for content creators than any other form, and allows us to simulate other art forms like movies, books, or traditional games. In that sense, it is the ultimate medium.”Paris St-Germain players celebrate winning the 2016 Ligue 1 title after an emphatic 9-0 win at Troyes
With eight matches and 62 days to spare, Paris St-Germain have been crowned champions of France for the fourth time in a row.
A 9-0 victory at bottom club Troyes on Sunday gave Laurent Blanc's side an unassailable 25-point lead over nearest rivals Monaco.
No team in Europe's big five leagues - the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 - has won the title with more games left.
PSG broke a record held by Bayern Munich, who won the Bundesliga in 2014 with seven matches remaining.
Here, we take a look and some other weird and wonderful title wins in Europe.
Undefeated but still not champions
Galatasaray won 20 of their 36 league matches in the 1985-86 season but missed out on the title
Galatasaray went through the Turkish league season unbeaten in 1985-86, but Istanbul rivals Besiktas took the title on goal difference despite losing two of their 36 games.
Gala are not the only team to go through a season without losing yet miss out on silverware.
Perugia went undefeated in Serie A in 1978-79 and still finished second - three points behind AC Milan. They had drawn 19 of their 30 matches.
A year earlier, Porto pipped undefeated Benfica to the Portuguese title on goal difference.
The best - on average
In 1951, both Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb finished the Yugoslavian season on 35 points, with Red Star awarded the title by virtue of a superior goal average.
Their 50 goals for and 21 against gave them a goal average of 2.381, just 0.013 better than Dinamo.
The unexpected title wins
There are plenty to choose from... here are just three.
England manager Roy Hodgson was 28 when he took charge of Swedish strugglers Halmstads BK in 1976. Hodgson won the league in his first season as a manager with a team that had almost been relegated the season before.
A 1-0 defeat of Iraklis on 1 May 1988 ensured Larissa took the Greek title with a game to spare - the first club from outside Athens or Salonika to finish top of the pile.
Earliest title wins in terms of games played in Europe's top five leagues League Winners Season Games Date Premier League Manchester United 2000-01 33/38 14 April Serie A (since 94-95) Inter Milan 2006-07 33/38 22 April La Liga (since 97-98) Barcelona 1997-98 34/38 18 April Bundesliga (since 63-64) Bayern Munich 2013-14 27/34 27 March Ligue 1 (since 94-95) Paris St-Germain 2015-16 30/38 13 March
Montpellier's Ligue 1 title success in 2012 was a big surprise in France, as Paris St-Germain had already received an injection of funds following the Qatari takeover.
Future Arsenal forward Olivier Giroud finished the season with 21 goals - one more than Eden Hazard, who joined Chelsea that summer, and five more than Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, then of St Etienne and now at Borussia Dortmund.
Most titles?
They might have fallen on hard times in recent seasons but Rangers still have a staggering tally of 54 Scottish titles - that's 34 more than England's most frequent title winners Manchester United.
In Northern Ireland, Belfast-based Linfield have 51.
Most consecutive titles in Europe's big five leagues? That honour belongs to Lyon, who were crowned champions of France seven times in a row from 2002 to 2008.
League Team Consecutive titles English top flight Huddersfield, Arsenal Liverpool, Man Utd 3 Serie A Juventus, Torino, Inter Milan 5 La Liga Real Madrid 5 Bundesliga Bayern Munich, Borussia Monchengladbach 3 Ligue 1 Lyon 7
Last-day dramas
When Manchester United's 2011-12 season ended, they were top of the Premier League - but one of the most dramatic conclusions to any season denied them the title.
A 1-0 win at Sunderland had taken the Red Devils to 89 points, and Manchester City - needing to match United's result - had only pulled level with Queens Park Rangers thanks to an injury-time goal from Edin Dzeko.
But there was still time for Sergio Aguero to win City their first title for 44 years - denying their fiercest rivals on goal difference in the sweetest fashion.
Media playback is not supported on this device Man City lift Premier League trophy
But what about the last-day events that unfolded in the Netherlands five years earlier?
Heading into the final day, AZ Alkmaar, Ajax and PSV Eindhoven were all level on 72 points.
AZ Alkmaar, who started the day top on goal difference, were beaten 3-2 by struggling Excelsior.
With 13 minutes remaining Ajax, leading 2-0 at Willem II, were top on goal difference before PSV scored a fifth goal to beat Vitesse Arnhem 5-1 and win the title.
Back in England, there was plenty of drama on the final day of the Women's Super League in October 2014.
Liverpool started the day third - three points behind leaders Chelsea, who lost 2-1 at Manchester City.
Birmingham, who began the day two points behind Chelsea, could only draw 2-2 against Notts County.
Media playback is not supported on this device Liverpool win dramatic WSL title
That opened the door for Liverpool - and goals from Natasha Dowie, Lucy Bronze and a penalty from Fara Williams saw them retain the title in dramatic fashion.
But the final day of the season has not always provided Liverpool with happy memories.
The date 26 May 1989 will forever be a painful one for Reds fans.
The venue was Anfield and Arsenal needed to win the game by at least two goals to snatch the title from Liverpool's grasp.
With Arsenal leading 1-0 and the clock ticking down, Michael Thomas burst through to win the match - and the title - for the Gunners.And not worth it, maybe: The invasion of privacy, the savagery of cross-examination, the dismantling of a woman’s character.
It helps to love the law, as Justice Anne Molloy clearly does, in fraught cases such as this. The law pivots on a presumption of innocence even for those accused of sexual assault, just as it applies in any other criminal offence. Amidst competing testimony and conflicting evidence, it was the Crown’s responsibility to prove the case brought against Constables Leslie Nyznik, Sameer Kara and Joshua Cabero. The prosecution failed, as it so often does, when one person’s word is pitted against another person’s word and the alleged offence is sexual.
And one lone voice yelping out a “Yeah!” in the courtroom as the verdict was delivered — the sister of a defendant unable to contain her relief. But even that interjection sounded heavily inappropriate in this setting and was abruptly stilled.
There was just a judge — a wise, widely respected female judge — palpably gritting her teeth, on the bench reading aloud and in her written decision issued, which found the defendants not guilty of forcing sexual acts upon a nonconsenting female parking officer.
Whether deserving of it or not, these police officers are the beneficiaries of a sound, centuries-old justice system that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Although the slogan ‘Believe the victim’ has become popularized of late, it has no place in a criminal trial,” Molloy wrote. “To approach a trial with the assumption that the complainant is telling the truth is the equivalent of imposing a presumption of guilt on the person accused of sexual assault and then placing a burden on him to prove his innocence. That is antithetical to the fundamental principles of justice enshrined in our Constitution and the values underlying our free and democratic society.”
There was too much doubt, much of it emanating from the complainant’s lengthy appearance in the witness stand, subjected to unconscionable character assassination. Some of those lapses were trivial and insignificant. Others were more problematic, especially when placed against the evidence of a toxicology expert who testified that the complainant’s alcohol consumption, based on her own recollection of drinks imbibed, was inconsistent with the symptoms of blackouts, nausea and immobility which purportedly ensued.
The complainant — whose identity is protected by a publication ban — maintained that her body was unresponsive, her mental will useless, such that she was unable to fend off the unwanted simultaneous sexual acts by all three accused — intercourse and fellatio — inside a room at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel in the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 2015, following a night of pub crawling.
A blood-alcohol concentration — estimated and projected, given the complainant’s account, her height and weight — of between 65 milligrams and 90 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood, “would not come close to” the level of impairment required to cause memory blackouts and loss of consciousness. The complainant leaned heavily on that scenario to explain away inconsistencies in her testimony.
Such symptoms could only be contributable to the ingestion of a drug, which was the complainant’s firm belief, although she could not point to an instance where her drink might have been spiked and there’s no evidence of that occurring in the surveillance tapes available. Further, as the expert from the Centre of Forensic Sciences testified — a Crown witness — had the culprit been GHB or ketamine (common rape drugs), the effects would have been felt within 15 to 30 minutes of ingestion, peaked and then disappeared within half an hour. No memories, rather than patchy memories, would have resulted from that blackout period.
AB (the initials made up by the judge) did have memories from that sordid hotel room encounter. Also, upon arrival at the Harbour Castle, she is seen on video getting out of the cab without problem, then conversing normally with two of the accused as they wait for an elevator.
“That does not mean that AB was lying about these symptoms,” Molloy observed. “It is possible she has an inaccurate or unreliable memory of her symptoms. It is also possible... that she has reconstructed a memory of her own participation in the hotel room and believes it to be true.”
Throughout the month-long trial, defence lawyers — and Nyznik, the only accused to take the stand — insisted that the sexual episode was consensual and that, in fact, AB was the one who initiated it.
If eyes rolled at Nyznik’s under-oath version of events — with AB the succubus, preying on a trio of men (one of them, her friend, Kara, sleeping off his colossal drunk when she got to the room) — there was precious little to hang a conviction on. That is the nature of such trials and why it takes a brave complainant to go the prosecution route.
Molloy made no bones about her skepticism regarding Nyznik’s evidence, boldfacing that section in her decision: I Do Not Necessarily Believe Mr. Nyznik.
Indeed, Molloy agreed with most of the Crown’s submissions that the testimony was scripted and missing in details except for those aspects that the prosecution characterized as “rehearsed.”
“However, making a determination that someone has lied under oath is not an easy task. There are certainly aspects of Mr. Nyznik’s testimony that I did not find convincing.” Some of his account — describing how AB had pulled down his zipper and taken his penis into her mouth with no assistance or prior discussion, for example — was “unlikely.” Parts of his evidence “simply did not ring true.” But Molloy was stuck with what was presented.
“I do not find Mr. Nyznik’s version of the events to be compelling and I am not able to say I necessarily believe him. However, neither am I in a position to say that I reject his evidence as untruthful. I simply do not know whether or not he is telling the truth about the critical issue — the consent of the complainant to the acts he described.”
A jury, possibly, with lesser appreciation of the law, might have come to a more gut-instinct conclusion. But Molloy, in a judge-alone trial, didn’t have the luxury of instinct over evidence. She clearly went as far as she could go, adhering to the constraints of law.
That included, quite notably, an entire section on: Irrelevant Evidence and Things I Have Not Taken Into Account.
This, I believe, was an admonition to the defence team for getting down and dirty in their rape-myth maligning of the complainant’s character: The allegation she’d told Nyznik and Kara, beforehand, that she planned to wear a short skirt to “Rookie Buy Night,” for “easy access” (Molloy was not satisfied the comment had been made and it didn’t matter to whether she consented to sex several days later); the insignificance of what AB was wearing that night (“What a woman wears is no indication of her willingness to have sexual intercourse, nor can it be seen as even the remotest justification for assuming she is consenting to sex”); AB’s willing accompaniment of Kara and Nyznik to a strip club, or whether she “invited herself” to their hotel room afterwards; her initial reluctance to report the alleged assault and her erratic behaviour in the days that followed.
“In particular, a woman who has been the victim of a sexual assault will not necessarily exhibit immediate symptoms of trauma. She might, or might not, be weepy. She might, or might not, be depressed and withdrawn. She might, or might not, be hysterical. Or she might cover up any of those kinds of emotions with an exterior of jocularity....
“There is simply no ‘normal’ or typical.’ I have not taken any of this conduct into account in reaching my decision.”
May not feel that way, in this moment, but that’s a win for victims of sexual assault.
It gives them back their dignity.BACK in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Dante Barksdale was playing the game in Baltimore—dealing drugs, toting guns, making some money—there was a process to killing people. “You couldn’t shoot someone without asking permission from a certain somebody,” muses the former gangster, on a tour of the abandoned row-houses and broken roads of West Baltimore, the most dangerous streets in America. “It’s become like, “I’m going to kill whoever’s got a fucking problem with it.”
Mr Barksdale, who spent almost a decade in prison for selling drugs, speaks with authority. His uncle, Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale, was a big shot in the more hierarchical Baltimore gangland he recalls. Avon Barksdale, a fictional villain in “The Wire”, a TV crime drama set in Baltimore, was partly inspired by him. The younger Mr Barksdale was himself fleetingly portrayed in it. (“‘The Wire’ was a bunch of bullshit,” he sniffs. “I got shot in the fourth episode and I didn’t get paid.”) Now employed by the Baltimore health department, in a team of gangsters-turned-social workers known as Safe Streets, he uses his street smarts to try to pre-empt murders by mediating among the local hoodlums. This also gives him a rare vantage onto the city’s latest upwelling of violence, which is concentrated in poor, overwhelmingly black West Baltimore—and is horrific.
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Hours after Mr Barksdale conducted his tour of some of Baltimore’s most troubled streets on June 12th, they witnessed another six murders. That raised the number of killings in the city to 159, the highest recorded so early in the year at least since 1990, even though the city’s population was much bigger then than it is now. If weighted to reflect the fact that the murder rate always climbs in the hot, fractious summer months, this suggests Baltimore may see more than 400 murders this year. That would smash the existing record of 344 killings, which was set in 2015, fuelled by violent rioting over the death in police custody of a drug peddler called Freddie Gray.
This is catastrophic. A 50-minute drive from Washington, DC, black men aged 15 to 29 are as likely to die violently as American soldiers were in Iraq at the height of its Baathist insurgency. Yet there is no sign of Maryland or the federal government taking the sort of emergency action such a disaster would seem to justify. Instead of bolstering law enforcement in Baltimore and a few other violent cities, including chiefly Chicago, but also St Louis and Milwaukee, Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, has tried unsuccessfully to row back a modest federal-government intervention devised by his Democratic predecessor. Meanwhile he has used the violence in those places to misrepresent the much more pacific state of America at large.
“The murder rate is up over 10%—the largest increase since 1968,” Mr Sessions said last month in testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. He neglected to clarify that, notwithstanding that rise, the murder rate is at close to its lowest level in a quarter of a century. In most places, Americans have never been less likely to be murdered; the homicide rate in New York is below the national average. More than 55% of the increase last year was accounted for by Chicago, where 781 people were murdered—more than the total for New York and Los Angeles combined.
America is not experiencing a crime wave, in short, but rather historic progress marred by a few exceptionally bleak places. That does not justify Mr Sessions’s campaign for harsher custodial sentences across the board, which would not cut violent crime much or at all in Baltimore or anywhere. The attorney-general would do better to fathom what is causing the bleak spots, starting with a few stark truths.
As American as cherry pie
Most murder victims in America are black people shot dead by other black people. Blacks represent 13% of America’s population, yet in 2015 they represented 52% of the slain. The toll on black families and communities is appalling; between 1980 and 2013, 262,000 black men were murdered in America, more than four times America’s total number of casualties in Vietnam. If black Americans were murdered at no more than the national rate, America would still be an unusually violent developed country; its murder rate would fall from the current level of 4.9 per 100,000 people, which is similar to that of some African countries, to 2.4 per 100,000. That would make America merely three times as dangerous as Germany.
Criminologists have for decades argued about what makes young black men so much likelier to commit murder than young men of other ethnicities. The answer lies in some combination of poverty, family instability, epidemics of drug use in the wretched inner-city districts into which many blacks were corralled by racist housing policies, and bad, or non-existent, policing. The last of these, which may be the most important, extends far beyond occasional instances of police brutality. In America’s overtly racist past, the killers of black Americans were less likely to be caught than the killers of whites because black lives were valued less. These days, inadequate resources, recruitment and training of inner-city police officers are bigger problems. Yet the outcome is the same. In the 1930s, Mississippi solved 30% of black murders; in the early 1990s, Los Angeles County, then in the grip of a violent crack-cocaine epidemic, solved 36%; in 2015 the police in Baltimore solved 30.5% of murders, most of which involved blacks.
Where murderers operate with a sense of impunity, they are likely to commit more murders. “I probably know ten dudes right now who have shot people and never been arrested,” says Mr Barksdale. Another grim indicator of impunity is that, while the number of fatal shootings has soared this year, the number of non-fatal ones has hardly increased. “Instead of taking a shot and running away, the gunmen are walking up and taking multiple shots to leave no witnesses alive,” says Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher into gun violence at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health. In the absence of effective policing, friends and relatives of murder victims are also more likely to take the law into their own hands—and so the virus spreads.
The same pattern has been noted in other poorly policed societies, especially those experiencing upheaval or trauma |
completely different and unrelated to the Japanese one. The Japanese bio is based on Star Sabre’s appearance in Transformers Victory, where he was — character-wise — basically a clone of Optimus Prime (re: flawless heroic saviour archetype). The English bio is based on IDW Star Sabre, where Star Sabre is an incredibly dark character. In the Japanese booklet, Star Sabre’s function is “Autobot Supreme Commander.” For the Hasbro version, his function has been changed to ‘Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord’ (at times abbreviated to ‘Tyrest Accord Enforcer’ or just “Autobot Enforcer” in different parts of the booklet). Japanese G1 tech specs don’t have mottos, and I only had access to the booklet and not the tech specs card (so I have no idea if TakaraTOMY have newly created a motto for him), but the motto I created for the Hasbro version is “Quidquid facio sancitur divinitus.”, which is Latin for “Everything I do is divinely sanctioned.” — and yes, I have written the motto in both Latin and English (as I did for Stinger ). More reveals to come.
It’s always interesting to get these first hand accounts so we thank GP for sharing. In case you aren’t familiar with the Star Saber character, you can check out his entry on the TF Wiki. And as always, you’re encouraged to join in our ongoing discussion and engage with other fans in the Star Saber topic on our forums.
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Like this: Like Loading...NEW YORK -- The Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, who own the first and second overall selections, respectively, in NBA Draft 2017 presented by State Farm, will square off at NBA Summer League 2017 on Saturday, July 8 at 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
The matchup between the potential top two picks in the June 22 draft was announced today as the game and broadcast schedules for NBA Summer League 2017 were unveiled. The 11-day, 67-game competition tips off with a tripleheader on NBA TV on Friday, July 7 and continues through Monday, July 17 at the Thomas & Mack Center and Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas.
A record 24 NBA teams will participate in a tournament-style format that culminates with a Championship Game on July 17 at 10 p.m. ET, broadcast for the first time on ESPN. Last year’s event, won by the returning champion Chicago Bulls, set records for total attendance, single-day attendance, combined viewership across ESPN and NBA TV, and traffic to the NBA’s social media platforms.
ESPN will present all 67 games from Las Vegas across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and the ESPN App, including 35 on its linear television channels. NBA TV will air 28 games, starting with the league’s opener on July 7, when the Toronto Raptors meet the New Orleans Pelicans at 6 p.m. ET. In total, 63 games from Las Vegas will air across ESPN and NBA TV’s linear channels – a Summer League record.
The field features the teams that hold the top five overall picks in NBA Draft 2017 presented by State Farm: the Celtics (No. 1), Lakers (No. 2), Philadelphia 76ers (No. 3), Phoenix Suns (No. 4) and Sacramento Kings (No. 5). In total, eight of the top 10 picks in this month’s draft belong to teams that will play in Las Vegas.
The Lakers will be part of the opening-day schedule on Friday, July 7 at the Thomas & Mack Center as they face the L.A. Clippers, who are appearing in the NBA Summer League for the first time since 2014 (8:30 p.m. ET, ESPN). The second day of action is scheduled to include the top three selections of NBA Draft 2017 presented by State Farm, with ESPN’s matchup between the Celtics and Lakers followed by ESPN2’s telecast of Philadelphia vs. the Golden State Warriors at 10:30 p.m. ET.
On Monday, July 10, NBA TV presents a doubleheader beginning with a 2017 NBA Finals rematch between the NBA Champion Warriors and finalist Cleveland Cavaliers at 8:30 p.m. ET, followed by a 10:30 p.m. ET game between the Lakers and Kings.
Teams will play three preliminary games between July 7-11 before being seeded in a tournament that starts on July 12 and concludes with the Championship Game on Monday, July 17. Each team will play a minimum of five games in Las Vegas.
Tickets for NBA Summer League 2017 are on sale now. Fans can purchase tickets by visiting NBATickets.com.
Below is the complete schedule for NBA Summer League 2017.
NBA Summer League 2017 Game Schedule
>> All times listed are PACIFIC
Friday, July 7
Cox Pavilion
3 p.m. – Toronto vs. New Orleans (NBA TV)
5 p.m. – Brooklyn vs. Atlanta (NBA TV)
7 p.m. – Houston vs. Denver (NBA TV)
Thomas & Mack
3:30 p.m. – Milwaukee vs. Cleveland (ESPN2)
5:30 p.m. – L.A. Clippers vs. L.A. Lakers (ESPN)
7:30 p.m. – Phoenix vs. Sacramento (ESPN2)
Saturday, July 8
Cox Pavilion
1 p.m. – Washington vs. Memphis (ESPNU)
3 p.m. – Portland vs. Utah (ESPNU)
5 p.m. – Miami vs. San Antonio (ESPNU)
7 p.m. – Houston vs. Cleveland (ESPNU)
Thomas & Mack
1:30 p.m. – Dallas vs. Chicago (NBA TV)
3:30 p.m. – Toronto vs. Minnesota (NBA TV)
5:30 p.m. – Boston vs. L.A. Lakers (ESPN)
7:30 p.m. – Philadelphia vs. Golden State (ESPN2)
Sunday, July 9
Cox Pavilion/
1 p.m. – Atlanta vs. New Orleans (NBA TV)
3 p.m. – Milwaukee vs. Brooklyn (NBA TV)
5 p.m. – Utah vs. L.A. Clippers (NBA TV)
7 p.m. – Memphis vs. Sacramento (NBA TV)
Thomas & Mack
1:30 p.m. – Phoenix vs. Dallas (ESPN)
3:30 p.m. – Minnesota vs. Denver (ESPN2)
5:30 p.m. – Portland vs. Boston (ESPN2)
7:30 p.m. – Philadelphia vs. San Antonio (ESPN2)
Monday, July 10
Cox Pavilion
1 p.m. – Atlanta vs. Chicago (ESPNU)
3 p.m. – Brooklyn vs. New Orleans (ESPNU)
5 p.m. – Denver vs. Toronto (ESPNU)
7 p.m. – L.A. Clippers vs. Milwaukee (ESPN2)
Thomas & Mack
1:30 p.m. – Miami vs. Washington (NBA TV)
3:30 p.m. – Houston vs. Phoenix (NBA TV)
5:30 p.m. – Golden State vs. Cleveland (NBA TV)
7:30 p.m. – L.A. Lakers vs. Sacramento (NBA TV)
Tuesday, July 11
Cox Pavilion
1 p.m. – San Antonio vs. Portland (NBA TV)
3 p.m. – Chicago vs. Washington (NBA TV)
5 p.m. – Miami vs. Dallas (NBA TV)
Thomas & Mack
1:30 p.m. – Utah vs. Memphis (ESPNU)
3:30 p.m. – Philadelphia vs. Boston (ESPN2)
5:30 p.m. – Golden State vs. Minnesota (ESPN2)
Wednesday, July 12
Seeds 9-24 will play in 8 games at the below times and locations:
Cox Pavilion: 1 p.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Thomas & Mack: 1:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, July 13
Seeds 1-8 will play against the winners of July 12th games at the below times and locations:
Cox Pavilion: 1 p.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Thomas & Mack: 1:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m.
Friday, July 14
Losers from games on July 12th and July 13th will play at the below times and locations:
Cox Pavilion: 1 p.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. (ESPN Family of Networks)
Thomas & Mack: 1:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m. (NBA TV)
Saturday, July 15 - Quarterfinals
Winners from games on July 13th will play at the below times:
Thomas & Mack: 1 p.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. (ESPN2/ EPSNU)
Sunday, July 16 - Semifinals
Winners from games on July 15th will play at the below times:
Thomas & Mack: 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. (ESPN2)We are just a few issues away from the final issue in this run of The Wake.
I say This Run.
Because I hope that Snyder and Murphy are going to continue.
There is just too much still to discover.
I’ve a feeling issue 10 is going to end an an almighty cliff-hanger.
But back to issue seven.
This issue opens with a flashback of Leeward’s childhood.
Reminding us that even the most bad ass characters once wore dolphin socks.
And got scared.
Interestingly, we also get a rather more subtle flashback to Governor Vivienne’s childhood.
Collecting the bodies of dead birds.
Sliding down the enormous piles of their bodies.
Angry at the stupidity of their blind hope that a beacon would save them.
Which makes me think that there might be a real solution to the Mer problem.
But the people in power are concealing it.
After all a terrorised populace are easier to control.
And that’s the great thing about this series so far.
Subtle storytelling.
Coupled with fantastic action.
Sean Murphy’s art is so dynamic, exciting and intriguing.
From the retro-fitted cruise liners to the design of the Arm uniforms.
Every detail is superbly realised.
It is also a great example of retro-future in sci-fi storytelling.
Last night I went to the National Museums of Scotland Museum Lates event.
The theme was retro-future.
Which got me thinking about about this whole concept of the past in the sci-fi genre.
It happens a lot.
We imagine what the future is going to be like we turn to the past for inspiration.
Just a few examples:
Firefly – cowboys in space.
Tron Legacy – the 1980s in the future.
Blade Runner – the 1950s in the future.
The trick is to create a retro-future that still feels original.
That has enough to distinguish it.
In Firefly Joss Wheedon added Mandarin Chinese to the dialogue.
Allowing nerds worldwide to swear with impunity.
“Ching-wah TSAO duh liou mahng!”
The Wake stands out from the crowd with the terrifying Mers.
And with some very interesting pirates who we’ll be meeting in issue 8!Rookie quarterback EJ Manuel played the entire first half of the Buffalo Bills' 44-20 win Sunday against the Indianapolis Colts, finishing the half 16-of-21 passing for 107 yards and a touchdown.
Veteran quarterback Kevin Kolb, who is competing with Manuel for the starting job, dressed but served as the emergency quarterback in the preseason opener after missing most of the week of practice.
Manuel did not throw an interception, but was credited with a fumble on a botched hand-off to running back C.J. Spiller that was recovered by the Colts.
However, Manuel led the Bills on a 95-yard drive with less than two minutes left in the first half, going 9-for-9 passing. Manuel's 17-yard touchdown pass to tight end Dorin Dickerson to cap the drive gave the Bills a 20-13 lead going into the second half.
"Here you are right before a half, 1:50, three timeouts left, and you're making decisions. Are we going to try to run out the clock? Are we going to go 2-minute? Hey, let's go 2-minute," Bills coach Doug Marrone said. "To do that is very impressive, no matter who you are."
EJ Manuel played the entire first half Sunday against the Colts, finishing 16-of-21 passing for 107 yards and a touchdown. AP Photo/Michael Conroy
Manuel also rushed for 28 yards on three carries, including a 24-yard scramble in the first quarter.
"My main thing was I wanted to operate the offense like coach (Nathaniel) Hackett has taught us and get all the other guys in position," Manuel said. "The veterans have done a great job of bringing me along and things like that. The main thing is just continuing to go out there and execute."
Jeff Tuel replaced Manuel at quarterback for the start of the second half.
Rookie wide receiver Marquise Goodwin had two long kickoff returns for the Bills, including a 107-yard return for a touchdown in the second quarter.
Defensive end Mario Williams (foot) and defensive tackle Kyle Williams (Achilles) both started for the Bills and played two series. Mario Williams sacked Colts quarterback Andrew Luck for a 10-yard loss on the Colts' second possession.
Luck finished 4-of-6 for 51 yards during his time in the game.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.A Chinese woman recently got each of her twenty boyfriends to buy her an iPhone 7, then turned around and sold them all to buy a house. Wow. I don't even have three friends and this lady has twenty boyfriends. No word if she's a sociopath, but I have my suspicions.
The BBC reports that it's a tough buyer's market for houses in China, making Xiaoli's accomplishment a source of pride for people who know her. Xiaoli "is not from a wealthy family. Her mum is a housewife and her dad is a migrant worker, and she is the oldest daughter. Her parents are getting old and she might be under a lot pressure hoping to buy them a house... But it's still unbelievable that she could use this method!"
Wait, so were these like online boyfriends or what? Because having twenty real-life boyfriends sounds like a lot. You're definitely going to call one of them by the wrong name eventually. And then what? "Replace him with another one." Ice cold!
Thanks to Alyssa, who agrees having enough boyfriends to build a house out of iPhones is really where it's at.Jamaican security forces are fighting with gunmen as the government attempts to take control of an alleged drug lord's stronghold in the capital.
Gunfire erupted as troops and police stormed the Tivoli Gardens area to search for Christopher "Dudus" Coke, who is wanted in the US.
A soldier was killed. It follows two police deaths on Sunday.
Supporters of Mr Coke are fighting to stop his extradition to the US on drug and gun-running charges.
TIVOLI GARDENS Located on Jamaica's south-eastern coast, far from tourist hub in north
Built in late 1960s on grounds of a cleared dump known as the Dungle or "dung hill"
Warren-like public housing project with population of about 25,000
One of Jamaica's notorious "garrison" slums - described as "a state within a state"
Power base of Prime Minister Bruce Golding's West Kingston constituency
Invaded in 2001 by security forces in search of illegal weapons; 25 people killed in three-day stand-off
Four residents died in a similar operation in 1997 Jamaica unrest: Your stories Kingston under siege
So far there is no indication that the security forces have been successful in tracking down their target in the warren-like slum.
Gunmen in the area are reported to be heavily armed. There are unconfirmed reports of civilian victims.
Mr Coke, who insists he is a legitimate businessman, enjoys the support of many impoverished Kingston residents who see him as a benefactor and have vowed to protect him at any cost.
There are also reports of violence in other parts of the capital, raising fears that the unrest is spreading.
A state of emergency remains in place in parts of Kingston.
The restrictions were imposed on Friday after several police stations were attacked following an announcement by the prime minister agreeing to the extradition of Mr Coke.
Heavy resistance
The BBC's Nick Davis in Kingston says the operation started about noon on Monday, when large numbers of soldiers were seen heading to the poor Tivoli Gardens area.
AT THE SCENE Overnight the central streets of this capital city echoed to the occasional boom of an explosion, or the sharp retorts of a gun battle. Grey smoke billowed from two areas in the impoverished Tivoli Gardens neighbourhood. There have been deaths. First-hand reports are hard to come by, but Jamaicans who have spoken to people living in the area say they are confined to their homes, and desperate to find a safe way out. They are squeezed between the army and police on the one hand, and gunmen trying to protect the local big man - Christopher Coke, known here simply as Dudus.
Plumes of smoke could be seen coming from the area as helicopters buzzed overhead.
Security Minister Dwight Nelson said the soldiers, in a joint operation with police, had broken down the barricades around Tivoli Gardens and were conducting a house-to-house search for Mr Coke.
"The purpose of the operation is to execute the warrant for extradition and to detain [Coke] so he can appear in court," he told the BBC.
He insisted the police were "doing everything in their power to ensure the city remains safe".
But some reports said police had met heavy resistance from gunmen as they tried to enter Tivoli Gardens.
Residents in the area were advised to remain indoors but the streets were already quiet as Jamaica observed its Labour Day holiday.
The US State Department said the fighting had intermittently blocked the road to Kingston's international airport and forced the cancellation of some flights.
Benefactor
Tivoli Gardens, the constituency represented in parliament by Prime Minister Bruce Golding, is the stronghold of Mr Coke, 41, who describes himself as a community leader.
His supporters see him as a man who is fulfilling a role that the government does not, such as giving them money to support their children.
Image caption Christopher "Dudus" Coke is accused of being a gang leader Profile: Christopher "Dudus" Coke In pictures: Jamaican unrest
Before the fighting, they staged protests and barricaded streets to stop his arrest and extradition.
One resident of Kingston, Suzanne, rang the BBC to say Mr Coke provided a valuable service to the community - unlike the politicians.
"If your grandmother dies, you go to him and he buries her," she said.
"Okay, that's a fact. If you're a politician you're not going to find him, especially Bruce [Golding], you're not going to find him anywhere in the constituency, so you go to him [Dudus].
"You need your child to go to school - you go to him, and this is how it's been, this kind of patronage."
Life sentence
The US justice department accuses Mr Coke of being one of the world's most dangerous drug barons.
He is said to lead a gang called the Shower Posse - owing to the volume of bullets used in shootings - and operate an international smuggling network.
He faces a life sentence if convicted on charges filed against him in New York.
The gang has also been blamed for numerous murders in Jamaica and the US.
The trouble started last week when Mr Golding said he was prepared to send Mr Coke to the US on drugs and weapons trafficking charges.
The decision reversed nine months of opposition to his extradition.
Mr Golding had argued that the evidence against Mr Coke was obtained illegally by intercepting mobile telephone calls.
But he changed his mind in the face of growing public discontent, and questions about his possible ties to Mr Coke.
He has denounced the unrest as a "calculated assault on the authority of the state that cannot be tolerated".NEW DELHI: Eighteen states, including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telengana and West Bengal, have set the ambitious target of making 400 cities and towns free of open defecation (ODF) by December. Only the New Delhi Municipal Council area in the national capital aims to achieve this target in the same time frame.To work out the strategy to meet the deadline, Centre has called a two-day brainstorming session of municipal heads and commissioners from 42 towns and cities in Delhi. According to government records, at present about 13 per cent urban households in India have no toilets and 7 per cent of urban population use public toilets.“Since ODF is one of the most crucial benchmark for any urban area to be clean, there is special focus on ensuring everyone has access to toilets for both individual households and public,” said a ministry official.He added that besides toilets, a proper mechanism is needed to process and dispose off human and liquid waste. “That’s a bigger task, which will be discussed in detail,” an official from the ministry of urban development said.The latest Global Report on Urban Health released by UN Habitat and World Health Organisation says, “The perils of poor water, sanitation and hygiene are most egregious in informal settlements. A survey of New Delhi’s slums found that 44 per cent faced water scarcity, 90 per cent reported that the drains were overflowing and 99 per cent reported that the nearby dumpsters were emptied less than once a month. A toilet audit in these same communities found that 83 per cent of toilets had faecal material, or significant amounts of other waste lying around the facilities, and only 16 per cent had soap or sanitary fluid for washing.”"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." -The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution
Late last night, a report was released about the Congressional investigation of unprecedented domestic spying and wiretapping programs secretly implemented by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. For any human being concerned about privacy, information security, U.S. history and constitutional law, the revelations are hair raising.
One of the cardinal virtues of a psychotherapist is privacy. We have a duty and an ethical responsibility to safeguard the private information revealed to us in our practices. There are a certain limitations to a blanket level of secrecy (signed release from a patient, court order of records, disguising in conversations for teaching/training/supervision, co-ordination with care providers during a life-threatening emergency, and the duty to warn appropriate authorities when we have information that a patient proposes an imminent threat of harm to self or others). But generally, what happens in, stays in therapy. Just like Vegas...
...except that just before January 2004, what happened in Vegas did NOT stay in Vegas.
In mid-2007, FRONTLINE aired a program titled "Spying on the home front". The program is available to view free online, and I highly recommend watching it. The report detailed how the Bush administration yielded unprecedented executive authority to obtain warrantless collection of information without due process about American citizens with no probable cause for activity. For example, following a hunch on same vague chatter about Al-Qaeda having "a possible interest" in Las Vegas in for the 2004 New Year's celebration, the FBI confiscated hotel, airline, rental car, casinos and more on every single person who visited Vegas at the time. Were you visiting then? The FBI had your number.
The Congressional report issued last night revealed that wiretapping and datamining programs such as this were extensive, were carried out without Congressional oversight at the National Security Agency, were drafted through the White House Office of Legal Counsel (with Justice Department lawyer John Yoo overwriting more Constitutional law than a whole bench full of "activist" supreme court justices), and were not effective in yielding actionable intelligence.
Again, I'd urge you to check out the Frontline report (Frontline yielded some incredibly fascinating and informative programming during the end years of the Bush administration), but here's an abbreviated tour through the history of privacy protections:
Let's have a tea party!
Way back around the 1750s...like way back before they had iPhones and people mostly had to use Walkmens and stuff...the British monarch King George II had a habit of writing orders to have his lackeys poke into your stuff to try and get more tax money off you and maybe even take some of your stuff away if you didn't pay that money. But then the King died and his grandson King George III had to re-sign those orders or else they would expire. A few folks had a problem with this (I think they didn't want officers checking under their white wigs or something) and made a law to ban the king's direct orders unless a judge or legal authority decided that there was a good legal reason for these searches and seizures. That law was overturned, however, because it's good to be the King, and if King George, who was quite the decider, says so...it must be done.
Around then, a lot of people in Boston started to get a little cranky (maybe the weather was bad...it was getting closer to winter...in Boston!). They weren't thrilled with George III's grand-daddy George II, but this George III was just unbearable. Even though these Bostonians were angrier than when the Yankees are in town, they were still civilized folk. So they banded together in general bonhomie, and threw themselves a nice Tea Party. A few years later, they wrote up this set of laws called a Constitution...(writing laws was how they told other people about stuff before blogs,, and twitter) including the Fourth Amendment which went along the effects of "thou shalt not search for, nor drink my beer without proper legal recourse, and if thou is allowest access to said beer, only for a specific and limited amount of time".
The gambler who used pay phones (because they're kinda like slot machines)
Almost 200 years later (but still before YouTube!), a guy named Charles Katz of California was arrested for illegal gambling. His Blackberry Storm must not have been working because he used a pay phone to place bets across the country (some of those bets were in Boston...shout out to Beantown again!). The FBI had used wiretaps on those phone booth calls as evidence to arrest him. In Katz v. United States 1967, the Supreme Court overturned Katz's conviction on the ground that the FBI wiretaps constituted illegal search and seizure.
The justices made three major points: the fourth amendment covers a "reasonable expectation of privacy"; the fourth amendment protects the privacy of people and not places so your electronic communication is protected; and that warrants must be obtained for wiretapping or search/seizure which are sufficiently limited in scope or duration.
Nixon was just trying to get a Frosty and cheeseburger from Watergate
Then there was this guy Richard Nixon, who became President of the United States. He was kind of a paranoid sort, always worried that people were out to get him. He was a guy who wanted to keep his close and keep a close ear on his enemies. Of course, he believed that many of his enemies weren't just foreign powers, but people actually living inside the United States. He made a lot of tape recordings and had the CIA and FBI do a lot of spying etc., etc. It turns out that Nixon's room service at the Watergate hotel was not very good, so the Senate opened up the Church Committee (led by Sen. Frank Church) to investigate the CIA's and FBI's intelligence gathering methods. The then director of the CIA, William Colby, was brought in to testify about CIA activities in front of Congress. Colby felt that the CIA should be accountable to the legislative branch, even though a number of former Nixon staff tried to block his testimony. Donald Rumsfeld, not surprisingly, was one of these players trying to keep Congress out of the President's business.
The Church committee decided that the U.S. needs to have security on two fronts. First, we need to be safe from foreign powers and enemies, some of whom have agents in the U.S. Second, we need to be safe from ourselves; we can't sacrifice too many of our own personal freedoms under the banner of homeland security. To hold this difficult balance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was created. Also, William Colby was replaced as head of the CIA by....George H.W. Bush.
If you thought your VISA terms were complicated, wait until you see FISA
FISA created a "secret court"...sort of like you did in that backyard clubhouse with your friends as a kid. This secret FISA court makes rulings about whether or not the U.S. is authorized to conduct surveillance on foreign enemies both abroad and in the U.S. Since we are on the web here, let's talk about electronic surveillance...this means phone calls, emails, electronic records, etc. The terms have many different scenarios built in, but the main thrust of the FISA code is that the President may authorize warrantless electronic surveillance for the period of up to one year if it is certified by the Attorney General, if the surveilled is directly related to a foreign power, and IF "there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party", or it is only for the first fifteen days of a war declared by Congress. Otherwise, the FISA court must issue a warrant for such surveillance.
When all is said and done, United States law seems to spell out that a sustained blanket surveillance of United States citizens' electronic communication without a court order is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights.
Then came George the Fourth
After 9/11/01, United States government changed drastically. Essentially, the US adapted an act first, ask later stance. We went from due process trials to enemy combatant prisons. We went from prosecuting crimes to trying to prevent them. From defense to pre-emptive strike. Our goal became to "stop this from ever happening again". Trauma creates hypervigilance. After a event, people try to observe and control their circumstances to prevent from ever being harmed again. But we cannot constantly prevent all harm, and eventually this intensely active vigilance fueled by traumatic fries neurons and saps energy, leaving one more vulnerable to attack than ever before...and thus trauma cycles on.
As exemplar, on December 16 2005, the New York Times reported:
"Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials."
From yesterday's report we learned that those eavesdropping programs were widescale, had little oversight, and were of little value in preventing terrorist activities.
Paul Wachtel is a psychologist who describes mental illness as a cyclical psychodynamic pattern that is maintained through anxiety. In essence, people are often tragic figures who serve as their own worst enemies. For example, a man so afraid of being left by his romantic partner excessively seeks reassurance, becomes depressed at any separations, and is of time spent apart. Such a person is hardly a great boyfriend, his overbearance leading his loved one to pull away. Her withdrawal raises his anxiety and fuels a vicious cycle of greater anxiety, rejection and abandonment. Shakespeare's work is famous for writing these kind of tragic characters as seen in public figures and political leaders....King Lear, Richard III, Othello, Julius Caesar.
This country's greatness is founded on a set of precious freedoms from tyranny and oppression. In the methods we seek to maintain these freedoms as a country, we must not become the tyrannical, intrusive, and oppressive enemies of ourselves.
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Comment below or email correspondence to jareddefifept@gmail.comInternet service providers BT and TalkTalk have lost their appeal against the UK's Digital Economy Act. The ISPs had argued that the legislation was incompatible with EU law, but this morning the Court of Appeal decided otherwise and dismissed their appeal. While the decision was welcomed by copyright holders, Internet account holders now face warnings, disconnections and speed throttling.
For almost a year the UK’s Digital Economy Act has been in limbo after two of the country’s largest Internet service providers challenged the legislation. BT and TalkTalk had argued that the controversial law was incompatible with EU legislation and in March 2011 the High Court began a judicial review.
In April 2011 the High Court sided with the government and said that copyright holders have the right to tackle unlawful file-sharing, but in October the ISPs were granted leave to appeal on the grounds that the DEA might breach several EU directives.
Just minutes ago judges Lady Justice Arden, Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Patten declared that the ISPs have lost their appeal and the Digital Economy Act will stand.
TalkTalk described the ruling as “disappointing” and along with BT say they are now considering their options. Groups representing copyright holders have welcomed the Court of Appeal ruling.
“The ISPs’ failed legal challenge has meant yet another year of harm to British musicians and creators from illegal filesharing,” said Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI.
UK Internet service providers will now be required to send warning letters to customers who the music, movie and software industries claim are infringing their copyrights on file-sharing networks.
After a year of sending letters, communications regulator Ofcom must report on the results of the campaign. In the event it has been ineffective in reducing file-sharing, so-called “technical measures” can be put in place – a euphemism for Internet disconnections and/or Internet throttling.
Open Rights Group, who have been campaigning against the legislation, said the Court of Appeal ruling has shortcomings.
“There is one thing the court cannot tell us: that this is a good law. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport had no evidence when they wrote this Act, except for the numbers they were given by a couple of industry trade bodies. This is a policy made on hearsay and assumptions, not proper facts or analysis,” ORG’s Peter Bradwell said in a statement.
“So significant problems remain. Publicly available wifi will be put at risk. Weak evidence could be used to penalize people accused of copyright infringement. And people will have to pay £20 for the privilege of defending themselves against these accusations. The Government needs to correct these errors with a proper, evidence-based review of the law.”
In comments to the BBC, Adam Rendle, a copyright lawyer at international law firm Taylor Wessing, said he expected BT and Talk Talk to take their appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court.America’s largest combat veterans group is worried the creation of a new medal for drone strikes and cyber-warfare could bestow higher honor on those using a joystick to kill terrorists than soldiers wounded on the battlefield.
The Distinguished Warfare Medal, announced Wednesday, would rank higher than the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, which is given to servicemembers killed or wounded in battle. The new medal would rank immediately below the Distinguished Flying Cross.
But to some, like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, creating a non-combat medal is turning into a major Pentagon misfire.
“It’s a boneheaded decision,” VFW spokesman Joe Davis told FoxNews.com. “This is going to affect morale and it’s sending troops in the field a horrible message.”
By Thursday afternoon, more than 800 responses had been posted on the VFW’s Facebook page. Many said the medal’s high ranking on the military medal hierarchy would hurt an already-bruised U.S. military morale.
One dubbed the medal the “Geek Cross” and suggested that the country was close to handing video-gamers Purple Hearts for animated wounds.
The Pentagon defended its decision and noted several medals rank above the newly created award.
[pullquote]
"Those furthest from the fight/risk are not eligible for a higher award than those engaging the enemy and risking their lives each day,” Defense spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen said. “There are several existing medals that may be awarded to members who incur risk associated with valorous acts (Medal of Honor, Service Crosses, Silver Stars).”
On Wednesday, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the creation of the medal to recognize “extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but do not involve acts of valor or physical risks that combat entails.”
Panetta said the medal recognizes the reality that drones and cyber warfare “have changed the way wars are fought.” Under the Obama administration, drone strikes have become an integral part of America's counterterrorism strategy.
John Hamilton, the VFW’s commander-in-chief, said in a statement that his organization “fully concurs that those far from the fight are having an immediate impact on the battlefield in real-time,” but added that “medals that can only be earned in direct combat must mean more than medals awarded in the rear.”
The organization says that at a time when the Defense Department is being hit with budget cuts and entire military towns are bracing for the effects of the upcoming sequester, announcing a new medal that honors members who aren’t fighting on the front lines sends a bad message.
“It’s like, ‘Why am I slogging through the mud, dirt and sand when someone who can go home every night to their family gets recognized?’ Davis said. “The people in the Pentagon should ask themselves how this is going to play out. The government didn’t do this to the troops. The Pentagon did it to themselves.”This article was updated on March 7 at 10pm in Hong Kong.
Indian government officials banned “India’s Daughter,” a BBC documentary about the Delhi gang rape of 2012, from broadcast in India this week, citing a danger to women’s safety. But it still circulated on YouTube inside and outside the country after the ban, until Google complied with the government’s requests and blocked copies of the film on the video-sharing site in India.
Now the BBC has launched a much more severe, global ban—the broadcaster has asked Google to remove all copies of the documentary, viewable anywhere in the world, from YouTube, citing copyright infringement. (It is viewable on the BBC’s iPlayer within the UK.) Would-be viewers now see messages that say some |
it was not.
We sat there talking for hours and next thing I knew Brian told me it was after three am and asked if I should be getting home, I told him that my husband was probably either not home yet or passed out either way I would tell him I went out with a friend after work and we lost track of time.
We both we nervous because we could feel the passion between us sparking with each word we said even talking about mundane stuff, work related things the passion was there just under the surface but we tried to hide it since we did not know what was going on at that point and we were trying so hard to remain simply co- workers.
I had my answer he was not immune to me and he wanted more so why was I so damn desperate to stay there with him it was late but I was hesitant for the evening to end but end it must he drove me back to my car and when we got there he walked me to my car door even though he parked next to it and said to me “Since you are married and I will never be able to hold your body the way I want to so desperately can I have a hug?” he smiled
I agreed to the hug but did not expect passion to flare up, I looked at him while we were hugging I guess to say something to him but as our eyes met so did our mouths and our lips and tongues doing that age of dance of love and lust that quickens the breath and makes the heart beat faster. Our hands began to wander and the kiss deepened, our bodies began to move against each other faster and faster as the kiss began to get out of control we both broke it off at the same time out of breath and in total shock at the magnitude at what just took place.
“Oh God I am so sorry” we said in unison “That should not have happened” We looked at each other helplessly and agreed that we would not see each other like this again since now we knew what could happen and we knew that if we saw each other more that things would only get hotter and any hotter and we would burst into flame.Your smartphone could be telling advertisers about your spending habits–what stores, restaurants, and attractions you and others around you visit and how you spend.
JiWire‘s new Location Graph, which launches today, is one of the first social graph-like products expressly for mobile. By using the new platform, the mobile advertising firm hopes clients will be able to discover lucrative hidden connections in phone users’ everyday lives–and to sell more customers on the benefits of mobile phone advertising.
JiWire’s proprietary service, which is patent pending, is powered by more than 3 billion location tags (similar to what users see in Yelp or Foursquare), with more than 16 million added per day. Information from these location tags is cross-referenced with information on phone users’ demographics triangulated from location-based apps or public wifi hotspots. JiWire claims to be able to demographic information such as whether users have children or their income range through thee process. Also equally important in a future-techy sort of way is the ability to keep tabs on what restaurants customers of certain stores tend to frequent.
The mobile ad industry, dominated by a few large players like Google’s AdMob, is currently at the toddler stage. Although advertisements have become ubiquitous in many apps, mobile ad firms and advertisers are finding it difficult to straddle the fine line between eyecatching, revenue-generating, and creepy. JiWire’s social graph can help advertisers through providing information on the percentage of visitors with children to zoos, and what restaurants those visitors with children frequent. The location graph can also offer advertisers discrete information on data sets like “moms who go to beauty salons” and the number one banks of Peet’s Coffee customers (Wells Fargo) vs. Starbucks Coffee (Bank of America) customers.
Hooking advertisers on mobile is the primary reason JiWire embarked on this ambitious project. Revenue streams for the Location Graph will be derived from sharing information and correlations between locations with clients; the company will also create audience mapping for mobile advertising clients. “We want to help brands move confidently into mobile,” JiWire interim CEO David Staas told Fast Company. JiWire also has initiative to embark on ambitious new projects: Their lucrative advertisement contract with free wi fi provider Boingo Wireless is expected to end in December 2012.
According to JiWire, their Location Graph meets TRUSTe standards for mobile standards. TRUSTe is also partnering with JiWire in their ongoing TRUSTed Mobile Ads program. According to TRUSTe CEO Chris Babel, the partnership will offer “highly relevant advertising in a privacy-friendly fashion” to customers.
JiWire’s advertising network reaches approximately 55 million unique users monthly to deliver mobile ads based around users’ physical locations. According to the company, Comcast and Microsoft have already taken advantage of data gathered during beta testing for Location Graph.Boundary dam, a power plant in Estevan, Saskatchewan, is the first commercial coal-fired plant to capture carbon dioxide from its emissions, compress the gas, and bury it underground. The plant demonstrates that so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) can work at a large scale—a crucial achievement given that CCS could play a significant role worldwide in reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
Right now only two other CCS power-plant projects are under construction, both of them in the United States. That’s because CCS carries a hefty price tag: SaskPower invested $1 billion to equip one of the four generators at its Boundary Dam site for carbon capture. What’s more, the process reduces the 160-megawatt plant’s electricity output by about 20 percent, meaning it may cost SaskPower more per kilowatt-hour to run CCS than the 12 cents it gets for selling the electricity.
1. Coal from a nearby strip mine is pulverized for burning.
2. Ductwork (bottom left) carries flue gas to an adjacent carbon capture facility. There, it bubbles through a 52-meter-high column filled with a solution containing chemicals called amines, which absorb 90 percent of the carbon dioxide. The rest vents from the facility.
3. The carbon-rich amine solution (RAC) is piped to a heater that removes CO2; the lean solution (LAC) is piped back to repeat the process.
4. Cooling water travels through the green pipes into a chamber that helps cool carbon dioxide as part of a compression process.
5. The carbon dioxide is turned into a supercritical liquid inside this 15-megawatt compressor. Approximately 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide is captured and compressed every day.
6. A gauge at the CCS plant indicates the flow rate of carbon dioxide.
7. Most of the carbon dioxide travels 65 kilometers to an oilfield (shown here), where it’s injected to help boost production. But some is injected at SaskPower’s site.
8. At the SaskPower site, a wellhead delivers carbon dioxide to its resting place, a saline aquifer 3.4 kilometers underground.
SaskPower makes up for this in large part by selling much of the captured carbon dioxide to the Calgary-based oil producer Cenovus, which uses it to boost output from its maturing oil wells nearby.
CCS should get cheaper over time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the panel of climate scientists convened by the United Nations, projects that technology upgrades and economies of scale should reduce the price of adding CCS to coal plants to just one-third of what SaskPower spent at Boundary Dam. If so, CCS-equipped coal plants could deliver electricity more cheaply than some other low-carbon sources, including offshore wind power and large solar farms.
SaskPower says that with the lessons it’s learned so far, it could now build a similar CCS project for $200 million less, and that it may soon go forward with CCS at two other aging coal generators at Boundary Dam. It also hopes to help other power companies develop expertise in the technology.
Still, coal plants around the world generally have little incentive to follow suit. In SaskPower’s case, Canadian regulations helped force the company’s hand; that fact, plus the availability of a local buyer for carbon dioxide, makes SaskPower’s effort somewhat unusual. What might be needed elsewhere is a way for utilities to pass along CCS costs to customers, just as many do now to pay for renewable energy sources. Another approach would be to tax carbon dioxide emissions, creating an incentive to bury the gas instead.
The technology must also be proven to work over the long term. SaskPower buries some gas in a saline aquifer on its site. To make sure it stays put, the company has installed above-ground gas sensors plus a seismic sensing array to track subsurface movement.
The United Nations climate panel says similar technology must be installed at all 7,000 existing coal power plants worldwide by 2050 to keep warming below 2 °C, a widely cited threshold for avoiding severe climate change. Meanwhile, new coal plants are still being built, especially in China and India. With coal plants expected to provide one-quarter of the world’s energy supply in 2040, SaskPower could help test the feasibility and safety of burying billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions.Rightscorp, a piracy monetization company that works with Warner Bros. and other prominent copyright holders, has been sued for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Two victims filed a complaint at a Georgia federal court accusing the company of placing intimidating robocalls and text messages.
Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has made headlines over the past year, often because of its aggressive attempts to obtain settlements from allegedly pirating Internet users.
Among other tactics the company sent DMCA subpoenas to smaller local ISPs in the United States, urging them to reveal the personal details of subscribers.
While the legitimacy of these requests is in doubt, most Internet providers complied. This is also true for the City of Monroe, Georgia, which offers cable Internet to its residents.
Rightscorp used the personal information of the Monroe residents to offer the alleged copyright infringers a settlement. The offers start with a snail mail letter, but if these are ignored things get worse.
In a complaint (pdf) filed at a federal court in Georgia, Melissa Brown and Ben Jenkins accuse Rightcorp and its clients of using intimidating robocalls and text messages to solicit settlements.
“Once Rightscorp obtains a consumer’s contact information, it commences autocalls and text messages in an attempt to intimidate the consumer into settlement,” the complaint reads.
The victims, who deny having downloaded any infringing material, note that they never gave Rightcorp permission to contact them. On the contrary, after requesting that the letters, calls and texts stop, Rightscorp continued to press for settlements.
“Jenkins sent Rightscorp numerous emails instructing Rightscorp to cease their calls, text messages, emails and letter solicitations to him and Brown. Regardless, Rightscorp continued to place calls and text messages to Plaintiffs’ cellular and home phones.”
The complaint accuses Rightscorp of willfully violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which forbids companies from contacting people through robocalls and text messages without their consent.
Brown and Ben Jenkins demand damages for each violation, which may run into the thousands of dollars, and hope that this will also stop the intimidating settlement requests.
This is not the first legal battle Rightscorp has been involved in recently. A few weeks ago the company and its clients were sued for fraud, harassment and abuse for their controversial settlement scheme.
If the piracy monetization firm loses, it’s not unlikely that other accused file-sharers will follow the example.In a database study of nearly 26,000 beneficiaries of Tricare, the military health system, those taking statin drugs to control their cholesterol were 87 percent more likely to develop diabetes.
The study, reported online April 28, 2015, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, confirms past findings on the link between the widely prescribed drugs and diabetes risk. But it is among the first to show the connection in a relatively healthy group of people. The study included only people who at baseline were free of heart disease, diabetes, and other severe chronic disease.
"In our study, statin use was associated with a significantly higher risk of new-onset diabetes, even in a very healthy population," says lead author Dr. Ishak Mansi. "The risk of diabetes with statins has been known, but up until now it was thought that this might be due to the fact that people who were prescribed statins had greater medical risks to begin with."
Mansi is a physician-researcher with the VA North Texas Health System and the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas.
In the study, statin use was also associated with a "very high risk of diabetes complications," says Mansi. "This was never shown before." Among 3,351 pairs of similar patients--part of the overall study group--those patients on statins were 250 percent more likely than their non-statin-using counterparts to develop diabetes with complications.
Statin users were also 14 percent more likely to become overweight or obese after being on the drugs.
Mansi points out that other studies have arrived at a similar finding through different research methods.
The study also found that the higher the dose of any of the statins, the greater the risk of diabetes, diabetes complications, and obesity.
A key strength of Mansi's study was the use of a research method known as propensity score matching. Out of the total study population, the researchers chose 3,351 statin users and paired them with non-users who were very similar, at baseline, based on array of 42 health and demographic factors. The only substantial difference, from a research standpoint, was the use of statins. This helped the researchers isolate the effects of the drugs.
"This approach helps us to make comparisons that are fair and balanced," says Mansi.
On a wider scale, looking at the overall comparison between the study's roughly 22,000 nonusers and 4,000 users, and statistically adjusting for certain factors, the researchers found a similar outcome: Users of statins were more than twice as likely to develop diabetes.
The researchers examined patient records for the period between October 2003 and March 2012.
About three-quarters of the statin prescriptions in Mansi's data were for simvastatin, sold as Zocor.
Mansi stresses that the study doesn't definitively show that statins cause diabetes, nor does it mean people should stop using the drugs, which are widely prescribed to help people lower their cardiac risk factors.
"No patient should stop taking their statins based on our study, since statin therapy is a cornerstone in treatment of cardiovascular diseases and has been clearly shown to lower mortality and disease progression," he says. "Rather, this study should alert researchers, [clinical] guideline writers, and policymakers that short-term clinical trials might not fully describe the risks and benefits of long-term statin use for primary prevention."
Primary prevention refers to warding off disease in the first place.
Mansi urges further trials, similar to his group's, to better understand the long-term effects of statin use.
Overall, besides driving further research, Mansi says he hopes the results will help inform conversations between patients and providers about the risks and benefits of statins.
"I myself am a firm believer that these medications are very valuable for patients when there are clear and strict indications for them," he says. "But knowing the risks may motivate a patient to quit smoking, rather than swallow a tablet, or to lose weight and exercise. Ideally, it is better to make those lifestyle changes and avoid taking statins if possible."MUMBAI: N Srinivasan was on Monday dethroned as the ICC Chairman after the BCCI decided to recall him and nominate its recently-elected President Shashank Manohar as the chief of the world body.The decision to remove Srinivasan was taken at the BCCI's 86th Annual General Meeting here today, virtually signalling the end of his hold on Indian cricket.Also in the meeting, as expected, BCCI cracked the whip on the conflict on interest issue with Indian team director Ravi Shastri ousted from IPL governing council and Roger Binny, who was the national selector from the South Zone, too have been replaced by MSK Prasad. Roger's son Stuart Binny is part of the Indian cricket team. In the senior selection committee, Rajinder Hans has been replaced by Gagan Khoda.It is learnt that the resolution favouring replacing Srinivasan with Manohar was passed at the AGM. In case, Manohar cannot attend the ICC meetings, Sharad Pawar will be India's representative. Former India international and bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad has been appointed chairman of the junior selection panel.The Tamil Nadu strongman will thus lose his grip on Indian cricket for good after having already been ousted as the BCCI President owing to the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal in which his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was held guilty of betting charges.Although Srinivasan was not personally indicted for the damaging scandal but the Supreme Court-appointed R M Lodha committee had chided him for not acting on the elements which corrupted the IPL.With his sacking as ICC chairman, Srinivasan now only remains the president of Tamil Nadu Cricket Association. His company India Cements had owned the IPL franchise Chennai Super Kings, which was suspended for two years after its officials were held guilty of betting.In 2014, an outbreak of whooping cough (pertussis) broke out in the San Diego area. Of the 621 individuals who were infected, nearly all of them were completely up to date on all preventive vaccinations. If vaccines are given to protect from disease, how could this happen?
San Diego public health official Dr. Wilma Wooten argued that the cause was related to a decrease in the protection offered by vaccines after the first year. This answer is most revealing, in that it speaks to the actual efficacy of vaccines. It also shows that the concept of herd immunity is largely myth—and completely misunderstood.
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The theory of herd immunity states that when a critical mass of the population (usually stipulated at 95%) is vaccinated against a disease, the possibility of outbreaks is eliminated. This is the main argument that is used to shame parents who wish to refuse certain vaccinations for their children: by not vaccinating, they put the health of the “herd” at risk.
However, if vaccines start losing effectiveness after the first year, as Dr. Wooten says, then constant revaccination would be required, since the immunity offered is only temporary for most vaccines. Achieving the required rate of protection is virtually impossible under this paradigm.
Of course, if we look back over the decades and note the lack of rampant epidemics in our nation, while remembering that vaccine protection is in perpetual decline, the myth of herd immunity quickly unravels. Our society has never achieved this level of herd immunity, yet not a single major outbreak of disease has occurred.
Noted author and neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, MD, offers this analysis:
It was not until relatively recently that it was discovered that most of these vaccines lost their effectiveness 2 to 10 years after being given. What this means is that at least half the population, that is the baby boomers, have had no vaccine-induced immunity against any of these diseases for which they had been vaccinated very early in life. In essence, at least 50% or more of the population was unprotected for decades.
After a recent outbreak of measles at Disneyland, the state legislature in California took the extraordinary measure of rescinding religious and philosophical exemptions for vaccinations, even for children at higher risk of vaccine injury. State Sen. Richard Pan, who led the fight, argued that it was imperative to public health to maintain herd immunity among the general population, and that to ensure 95% compliance, vaccination had to be mandatory. The law he authored, which risks the health of many vulnerable children, accomplishes nothing—because herd immunity is a myth.
The argument for herd immunity was actually developed out of observations of natural immunity, not vaccination. Statisticians observed that populations were protected when sufficient members contracted the wild form of a disease, and subsequently acquired lifelong immunity. With vaccines, however, evidence shows that unvaccinated children may catch infectious diseases from vaccinated children. What is true of natural immunity is not true of vaccination.
The herd immunity argument has always been inconsistent. On the one hand, the theory goes, people who cannot receive vaccines for whatever reason are protected from the disease through a high level of vaccination in the rest of society. On the other hand, the theory continues, parents who don’t vaccinate their children put the health of wider society at risk. How can a handful of people not getting vaccinated be protected from getting sick, while at the same time being so disease-ridden that they make others sick? This doesn’t make sense.
While herd immunity may not exist, herd mentality most definitely does. Health authorities, media commentators, and schools and their parent–teacher associations waste no opportunity in perpetuating this myth. Proponents have done such a thorough job of convincing the public that a parent who questions it is treated like someone who thinks the earth is flat or believes climate change is a conspiracy. On the contrary: an unprejudiced view of the science about vaccines, and an examination of history, clearly show that the herd immunity theory is—and always has been—flawed.
Vaccines may have a place in our medical arsenal, but they are not the silver bullet they’re portrayed to be. Year after year the pharmaceutical industry, looking for lucrative new profit centers, churns out new vaccines. They use pseudo-science to convince the public that these products are safe and effective, and they use public shaming to convince the citizenry that non-compliance is a public health threat. This entire racket completely falls apart with a close examination of the herd immunity myth. Until we are honest in our assessment of both the safety and efficacy of vaccines, kids will continue to be hurt, rights will continue to be trampled, and mythology will continue to trump science.
Gretchen DuBeau is Executive Director of Alliance for Natural Health USA.
The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.Mobilicity is facing a hazy future after the federal government rejected Telus Corp.'s second attempt to purchase the cash-strapped wireless carrier.
Industry Minister James Moore confirmed Wednesday the proposed sale was denied, following a report on The Globe and Mail's website. Ottawa's main concern is enforcing a federal ban on the transfer of new-entrant wireless licences to major carriers before 2014. Its decision will force Mobilicity to explore other options as it bides its time until the restriction expires in February.
"That transaction has not been approved," Mr. Moore told reporters in Ottawa when asked about a proposed sale to Telus.
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Although the small carrier is saying nothing about its future plans, its court-appointed monitor, Ernst & Young Inc., previously indicated in court filings that the company would likely rely on a new $30-million financing as it considers "its other alternatives."
In rejecting the proposed sale, Ottawa did not impose any new restrictions on Mobilicity's ability to transfer its spectrum to an incumbent after the standstill period runs out, which had been a key concern for note holders, according to court documents.
But Mobilicity's longer-term prospects remain in doubt. The Vaughan, Ont.-based carrier has only until Dec. 20 before the "stay period," during which it is shielded from legal action from creditors, runs out.
Outgoing president and chief operating officer, Stewart Lyons, declined comment on Ottawa's decision, noting that "conversations with IC [Industry Canada] are private and ongoing." Mr. Lyons plans to leave Mobilicity this week.
When Mobilicity won a court order on Sept. 30 granting it protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, its executives said the startup carrier needed time "to advance and complete a going-concern transaction" that was before Industry Canada for approval.
But sources have since confirmed that Mobilicity did not present Industry Canada with an actual deal to approve or deny. Rather, the company sought an informal, non-binding assessment from the government under the spectrum transfer framework about a potential sale to Telus.
Last week, an Ontario judge gave Mobilicity more time to complete that deal and win government approval after being told that talks were in progress with Industry Canada.
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"Regardless, we believe that either the government will be forced to change its mind and Mobilicity will be acquired by Telus, or it will cease to operate – either scenario is positive for the incumbents and negative for the government," wrote Dvai Ghose, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity, in a note to clients.
Mobilicity, which is legally known as Data & Audio-Visual Enterprises Holdings Inc., declined to identify its potential buyer. But sources say the small carrier was in talks with Telus to rekindle a sale that Ottawa rejected in June.
Telus's original $380-million offer to buy Mobilicity was similarly blocked due to the current prohibition on wireless newcomers transferring spectrum licences to large carriers. Telus, however, was lobbying Ottawa to ease those rules. The Vancouver-based company declined to comment for this story.
Last week, however, Telus secured Ottawa's blessing to acquire another struggling new entrant carrier, Public Mobile, for an undisclosed amount. Public Mobile, though, never faced any restrictions on selling its spectrum because the type it purchased is considered less valuable.
With files from ReutersCHICAGO -- After the Cleveland Cavaliers were blown out Monday night in San Antonio, Kyrie Irving was so frustrated by his performance that the only thing he could think of to do was go back onto the court and shoot.
"I had to face it, had to face the music," Irving said Wednesday after the Cavaliers practiced in Chicago ahead of a game against the Bulls on Thursday. "I think we all had to do it. But me more importantly, I had to look in the mirror and just wasn't doing enough. I need to demand more out of myself and do it at a high level."
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Irving tied a career-worst plus-minus rating of minus-29 as he scored just eight points on 4-of-13 shooting against the Spurs.
Afterward, Irving came into the Cavs locker room, buried his feet in a bucket of ice and covered his head with a towel as he had an extended and emotional conversation with LeBron James in front of his locker. Wednesday he declined to elaborate on the nature of the conversation with James, saying it was "private."
But he acknowledged the Cavs' recent struggles -- Cleveland has lost four of its past six games to drop out of first place in the Eastern Conference for the first time since mid-November -- have worn on him. Irving said he's holding himself responsible for reintegrating Kevin Love and J.R. Smith back into the system, after both missed extensive time with injuries.
"I have to do my best as a point guard to integrate J.R. and K-Love and get our starting five back to having the continuity. It hasn't been perfect, to say the least," Irving said. "There's definitely been some ups and downs and disagreements. But as adults and professionals we just have to figure it out. I think it just starts with our practice habits and what we demand out of each other. Just holding each other accountable."
The Cavaliers are looking for answers during this uneven part of their season. Ken Blaze/USA TODAY Sports
Irving said he is particularly sensitive to anything that resembles complacency at this point in the season.
"You can't rely in just thinking that one championship is enough," Irving said. "It's natural for human beings to just get comfortable. To rely on just having won a championship. But if you a muthaf---- you want two, you want three, you want four, like you say you do. And I want more. I'm going to go take it. My job as one of the leaders on the team is to bring my guys with me."
Asked how coming back from this recent run of poor play compares with coming back from down 3-1 in the NBA Finals, Irving said there was no comparison.
"The emotion is different. Everyone has grown," he said. "Everyone has kind of gone their own way and now we come into a head where we've got to figure it out."
What's disappointing, Irving said, is that the Cavs have largely the same core as the team that rallied to win Cleveland's first title in 52 years last year.
"We know we have the culture here. We know we have the guys," he said. "We know when we're not playing up to our level. We just allow it to pass and pass and it turns out to kind of be a s--- show.
"We need it. It's just a wake-up call, so. Whatever you want to call it, we know what to expect from one another, we've done it at a high level. Now we gotta do it at an even different level."Protesters in Washington DC (AFP)
Personal information belonging to thousands of anti-Trump and anti-racist protesters has been released by pro-Trump users on the 4chan message board, BuzzFeed News reports.
The thread, which was posted on Thursday under the subject line “ANTIFA GETS DOXXED,” links to an organized Pastebin database full of information about the places of employment, home addresses, telephone numbers, emails and social media accounts of thousands of people involved in anti-Trump protests.
The Pastebin database, the report noted, has been making the rounds in pro-Trump circles online since at least April, when they released the information of roughly 3,000 people. Now, there are thousands more on the list, which has “easily tripled in size.”
The information appears to be gathered from a range of sources, including RefuseFascism.org, an organizing platform for anti-fascists, the BAMN pro-immigrant coalition and ShareBlue, a social publishing platform run by former Hillary Clinton staffer Peter Daou.
The text of the database claims that many of the “antifa” whose information they hacked are “predominantly school teachers, programmers and professors.” They also claim many are associated with “a major Bolshevik organization,” likely referring to people associated with large socialist organizations like Democratic Socialists of America or the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Claims of a singular “antifa” organization or of “Bolshevik” groups are “basically gibberish,” BuzzFeed notes, as there is no unified or centralized group of anti-fascist organizers. This description does, however, push “a popular conspiracy theory on far-right messageboards that anti-fascist activists are actually well-organized agents working for a cabal of globalist elites.”
As BuzzFeed notes, “the pastebin file being shared this week seems to actually be part of a larger harassment campaign against anti-fascists and anti-Trump protesters,” which includes “leaked” audio claiming to have been recorded at “antifa” meetings and admissions of people infiltrating art and political spaces.The Peruta dominos continue to fall. In an earlier decision in Baker v Kealoha, a District Court refused to rule in favor of the plaintiff, Christopher Baker. Baker had moved for an injunction against various Hawaii state agencies that had denied him a carry license. As a Ninth Circuit panel summed up the District Court’s rationale, the District Court denied the motion because, “Baker was not likely to establish that Hawaii’s restrictions on carrying firearms in public were unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, and therefore, Baker was not likely to succeed on the merits.” But that was pre-Peruta...
Today, though, a Ninth Circuit panel has ruled that,
In light of our holding in Peruta, the district court made an error of law when it concluded that the Hawaii statues did not implicate protected Second Amendment activity. Accordingly, we vacate the district court’s decision denying Baker’s motion for a preliminary injunction and remand for further proceedings consistent with Peruta.
So while there are still some formalities involved, the Peruta decision that is transforming California appears likely to have the same effect on the Aloha State. Just another day in paradise.
[h/t Danny C.]Why do we have a bad economy? This is a simple question with a complex answer. If you ask Obama or Romney campaigners, the answer is simple: the other guy.
If only the answer was that clear.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, and many theories about the causes of our poor economic situation: greedy corporations moving jobs overseas, Wall Street shenanigans, Bush administration policies, Obama administration policies, job-taking illegal immigrants, and oppressive government regulation of business.
Where do white working-class Americans point their fingers? How about white college-educated Americans?
Surprisingly, they agree on several causes. Over two-thirds of each category say that a cause is corporations shipping American jobs overseas, according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute that we’re discussing since Monday. About six of ten members of both groups say that Bush administration policies caused the problem.
White working-class Americans are more likely to cite excessive government regulation of business, compared to college-educated whites. They also are more likely to blame the current administration.
College-educated whites are more likely to blame Wall Street, with over eight of ten citing this cause of the recession. About seven of ten working-class whites agree.
The biggest difference concerns illegal immigrants. Over half (57%) of the white working-class say the problem is illegal immigrants stealing American jobs, while only 37% of college-educated whites agree.
All week, we’ve discussed the many differences (and some similarities) between two large segments of the American population: working-class versus college-educated white Americans. How will all this play out in the November elections? Tomorrow, we end the week talking about the voting preferences of these groups.
Where do you point the finger of blame for our bad economy?
Which of the causes listed here is the number one culprit?
Please, leave a Comment below.
Originally published at www.OurValues.org, an experiment in civil dialogue about American values.Story highlights Iraq's Prime Minister plays down the threat of a potential breach at the country's largest dam
ISIS militants briefly seized the dam in August 2014
(CNN) Iraq's Mosul Dam is facing a "serious and unprecedented risk of catastrophic failure with little warning," the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad warned on Sunday.
At the same time, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi played down the threat of a potential breach at the country's largest dam.
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"A catastrophic breach of Iraq's Mosul Dam would result in severe loss of life, mass population displacement, and destruction of the majority of the infrastructure within the path of the projected floodwave," the U.S. government said in a fact sheet.
It stressed it had "no specific information that indicates when a breach might occur," but said it was providing recommendations now "out of an abundance of caution."
Read MoreMegaBigPower has announced that it will begin purchasing preowned bitcoin mining ASICs as part of a plan to acquire as much as 10 megawatts worth of hardware.
Under the buyback program, the US-based bitcoin mining company will purchase certain types of hardware, with an emphasis on models sold by mining manufacturers Spondoolies-Tech and Bitmain.
Founder Dave Carlson framed the program as a simpler alternative for miners looking to sell their equipment online, telling CoinDesk:
“Due to our extremely low power cost, we can still return funds to miners who may have gotten in just before the market fell. Going this route is a lot less hassle than trying to sell on eBay or Craigslist.”
The buyback program comes amid a difficult environment for those in the mining space owing to the combination of falling revenues, growing costs and a rising network difficulty.
Hardware purchases have reportedly plunged, and bad conditions as a whole have resulted in a number of bankruptcies.
ASIC acquisitions
Carlson noted that some types of hardware, including HashFast and Butterfly Labs ASICs, as well as independently designed mining rigs, will not be accepted, as will any machine incapable of being underclocked.
“We are not familiar with all the products out there, but we are willing to look at what people have,” he said.
Interested parties should submit an online form on the company’s website, after which time MBP will review the submission and make an offer if applicable. Shipments, Carlson explained, take place after an offer has been made and a purchase agreement between the prospective seller and MBP is signed.
Sellers will also recoup shipping costs, Carlson said. He added that he hoped the program would enable some former miners the chance to recoup losses they may have experienced as the price of bitcoin fell and profitability dwindled as a result.
“I’m hoping this program will keep enthusiasts and investors involved with bitcoin on a positive note and not leave them feeling burned,” said Carlson.
Image via ShutterstockNorth Korea will put a US citizen on trial for "committing crimes" against the country and aiming to topple the regime, the North's official news agency has said.
On Saturday, amid soaring tensions between Pyongyang and the West, the KCNA said US citizen Pae Jun-Ho had admitted to the charges and would soon face "judgment".
He has been in prison in the North since November.
"In the process of investigation he admitted that he committed crimes aimed to topple the Democratic People's Republic of Korea with hostility toward it," the report said. "His crimes were proved by evidence".
Pae was arrested in November as he entered the northeastern port city of Rason, which lies inside a special economic zone near North Korea's border with Russia and China.
"He will soon be taken to the Supreme Court of the DPRK to face judgment," according to the report, which did not say what the charges were based on.
South Korean media in December identified the detainee as a 44-year-old Korean-American tour operator.
He was travelling with five other tourists and was detained when a computer hard disk was found among the group's belongings, according to the South Korean newspaper Kookmin Ilbo.
"We are aware of reports that a US citizen will face trial in North Korea. Welfare of US citizens overseas is a critical priority of the Department of State," State Department spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said.
"The Embassy of Sweden in Pyongyang acts as our protecting power for issues involving US citizens in North Korea.
"We are working in close coordination with representatives of the Embassy of Sweden. The Embassy of Sweden in Pyongyang visited the US citizen on Friday, April 26. We have no additional information to share at this time."
Former UN ambassador Bill Richardson delivered a letter regarding Bae to officials during a trip to North Korea in
January, although he was unable to meet Bae.
Americans held
The announcement follows a months-long standoff on the Korean peninsula stoked by the North's nuclear test in February, which prompted the UN Security Council to impose fresh sanctions on the isolated nation.
The move also came hours before US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns was due to meet South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se in Seoul for talks on standoff on the Korean peninsula.
Several Americans have been |
have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.
“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
That’s a big claim. In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
It is hardly surprising that the new study is generating alarmist headlines, such as “STUDY: US IS AN OLIGARCHY, NOT A DEMOCRACY,” from, of all places, the BBC. Gilens and Page do not use the term “oligarchy” in describing their conclusions, which would imply that a small ruling class dominates the political system to the exclusion of all others. They prefer the phrase “economic élite domination,” which is a bit less pejorative.
The evidence that Gilens and Page present needs careful intepretation. For example, the opinion surveys they rely on suggest that, on many issues, people of different incomes share similar opinions. To quote the paper: “Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for economic elites) want the same things from government.” This does get reflected in policy outcomes. Proposals that are supported up and down the income spectrum have a better chance of being enacted than policies that do not have such support. To that extent, democracy is working.
The issue is what happens when some income groups, particularly the rich, support or oppose certain things, and other groups in society don’t share their views. To tackle this issue, Gilens and Page constructed a multivariate statistical model, which includes three causal variables: the views of Americans in the ninetieth percentile of the income distribution (the rich), the views of Americans in the fiftieth percentile (the middle class), and the opinions of various interest groups, such as business lobbies and trade unions. In setting up their analysis this way, the two political scientists were able to measure the impact that the groups have independent of each other.
This is what the data shows: when the economic élites support a given policy change, it has about a one-in-two chance of being enacted. (The exact estimated probability is forty-five per cent.) When the élites oppose a given measure, its chances of becoming law are less than one in five. (The exact estimate is eighteen per cent.) The fact that both figures are both below fifty per cent reflects a status-quo bias: in the divided American system of government, getting anything at all passed is tricky.
The study suggests that, on many issues, the rich exercise an effective veto. If they are against something, it is unlikely to happen. This is obviously inconsistent with the median-voter theorem—which holds that policy outcomes reflect the preferences of voters who represent the ideological center—but I don’t think that it is a particularly controversial claim. A recent example is the failure to eliminate the “carried interest” deduction, which allows hedge-fund managers and leveraged-buyout tycoons to pay an artificially low tax rate on much of their income. In 2012, there was widespread outrage at the revelation that Mitt Romney, who made his fortune at the leveraged-buyout firm Bain Capital, paid less than fifteen per cent in federal income taxes. But the deduction hasn’t been eliminated.
One of the study’s other interesting findings is that, beyond a certain level, the opinions of the public at large have little impact on the chances a proposal has of being enacted. As I said, policy proposals that have the support of the majority fare better than proposals which are favored only by a minority. But, in the words of Gilens and Page, “The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”
The paper is a provocative one, and there’s sure to be a lot of debate among political scientists about whether it wholly supports the authors’ claims. One issue is that their survey data is pretty old: it covers the period from 1982 to 2002. (On the other hand, it hardly seems likely that the influence of the affluent has declined in the past decade.) Another issue is that, in a statistical sense, the explanatory power of some of the equations that Gilens and Page use is weak. For example, the three-variable probability model that I referred to above explains less than ten per cent of the variation in the data. (For you statistical wonks, R-squared = 0.074.)
Even in this sort of study, that’s a pretty low figure. Gilens and Page, to their credit, draw attention to it in their discussion, and suggest various reasons for why it’s not a big issue. They also acknowledge another possible objection to their conclusions:
Average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support… But we tend to doubt it.
Me, too. There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort policy in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the majority: the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.
Photograph: Ryan HeffernanHere is yet another fine example of the “talent” CNN has on their airwaves. Anthony Bourdain who goes around the world eating food was asked if he would cater a Trump dinner and what would he serve. CNN Anthony Bourdain said he would serve “hemlock” in order to poison Trump. This is CNN.
But then the TMZ stringer asked what Bourdain would serve if he was asked to cater a dinner for President Trump.
Bourdain answered simply, “Hemlock,” appearing to admit he would poison the president if given the chance.
The TMZ reporter also asked about what the TV chef thinks of the president’s tweets, but all Bourdain gave was a shrug of his shoulders.
This isn’t the first time the TV food personality spoke about dining with the president. Last year, Bourdain said he would “absolutely f*cking not” dine with Trump.
Also in 2016, Bourdain insisted that he would boycott the restaurant in Trump’s Washington D.C. hotel.
“I will never eat in his restaurant,” Bourdain said right after Trump won the White House. “I have utter contempt for him, utter and complete contempt.”Chelsea won the title - and received almost £151m from the Premier League
Chelsea were paid £150.8m by the Premier League after winning the 2016-17 title - 50% more than the top earners in 2015-16.
The 2016-17 season was the first of the latest TV deal and saw a total of almost £2.4bn paid to the 20 clubs - up from £1.6bn last season.
Bottom club Sunderland got £93.471m - more than the £93.219m 2015-16 winners Leicester pocketed the previous season.
The figures are based on broadcast and commercial deals plus prize money.
Funds from the Premier League's central commercial deals and overseas broadcast rights are shared equally - as is half of the domestic broadcast income.
A quarter is paid out in prize money based on each club's league position and the other quarter in "facility fees" for each game broadcast on UK television.
Arsenal were the top earners in 2015-16 with £100.9m - but only the three relegated sides of Hull, Middlesbrough and Sunderland were paid less than that figure in 2016-17.
The ratio between the highest and lowest totals paid by the Premier League to its clubs in 2016-17 was 1.61 to 1, the lowest among Europe's top leagues, which means the Premier League is more equal when it comes to sharing revenue than its rivals.
The Premier League also paid out nearly £220m to Aston Villa, Cardiff, Fulham, Newcastle, Norwich, QPR, Reading and Wigan in parachute payments.
Villa, Newcastle and Norwich - the relegated sides in 2016 - got almost £41m each.
Premier League payment to clubs 2016-17 Club (UK live TV appearances in brackets) Prize money (£s) Total payment (£s) Prize money determined by finishing position - data from Premier League website Chelsea (28) 38,832,180 150,811,183 Spurs (25) 36,890,571 145,461,325 Man City (28) 34,948,962 146,927,965 Liverpool (29) 33,007,353 146,112,439 Arsenal (25) 31,065,744 139,636,498 Man Utd (28) 29,124,135 141,103,138 Everton (18) 27,182,526 127,800,699 Southampton (15) 25,240,917 122,450,841 Bournemouth (13) 23,299,308 118,237,066 West Brom (11) 21,357,699 114,023,291 West Ham (15) 19,416,090 116,626,014 Leicester (16) 17,474,481 115,820,488 Stoke (10) 15,532,872 107,062,381 Crystal Palace (14) 13,591,263 109,665,104 Swansea (10) 11,649,654 103,197,163 Burnley (10) 9,708,045 101,237,554 Watford (13) 7,766,436 102,704,194 Hull (10) 5,824,827 97,354,336 Boro (13) 3,883,218 98,820,976 Sunderland (10) 1,941,609 93,471,118 Total 407,737,890 2,398,515,773
Full table broken down into all categories on the Premier League website.I was pondering a modern parable recently. I can’t remember where I first heard it, but the gist of it is this:
Once upon a time, a rich businessman and his entourage visited a harbor examining some ocean-front property to buy and develop. Their business concluded, he was about to return to his helicopter and take off when he noticed a plainly-dressed middle-aged man sitting on a chair near the docks, smiling and looking out over the ocean.
The businessman approached the other and asked him what he did for a living that allowed him to simply sit back and relax even though it was only early afternoon. He replied that he was a fisherman, and that he had already caught enough fish for the day, so he was just relaxing and taking in the view.
The businessman pointed out that he could go back out and catch even more fish and make more money. The fisherman asked what that would gain him.
The businessman pointed out that he could save up enough money to buy an additional boat & crew and catch even more fish and make even more money. The fisherman again asked what that would gain him.
The confused businessman replied that he could build an even larger fleet and hire captains & managers to run it. Once again the fisherman asked what that would gain him.
The businessman told him that then he would be able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ocean. The fisherman smiled and replied, “But that’s what I’m doing now.”
The parable came to mind as I read a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. In “Are Boys Irrational,” James Taranto analyzes an issue brought up in an earlier article by Kay Hymowitz: why are men increasingly opting out of higher education, career advancement, and raising families? Ms. Hymowitz concluded that a lack of father figures in their lives was causing these men to act irrationally and miss out on these important parts of life. Mr. Taranto, on the other hand, suggests that these men are not necessarily behaving irrationally at all. He writes:
Except perhaps in very conservative communities, men with sufficient social skills can find sex and companionship without need of a matrimonial commitment (and for those who lack social skills, a willingness to marry is unlikely to provide much compensation). The culture’s unrelenting message–repeated in Hymowitz’s article–is that women are doing fine on their own. If a woman doesn’t need a man, there’s little reason for him to devote his life to her service. Further, in the age of no-fault divorce, “reliable husbands and fathers” not infrequently find themselves impoverished by child support and restricted by court order from spending time with their children. As for education, the story of Joshua Strange ought to be enough to give any sensible young man second thoughts about enrolling in college. And work? Not all jobs, including those that require a college degree, are as rewarding as writing for an intellectual magazine (or, we hasten to add, a newspaper). Men traditionally sought to “better themselves” not because working in an office or on an assembly line was itself a source of delight, but because being a workingman enabled them to earn respect and made possible the joys of domestic life.
The far more interesting question is this: where does this ambition come from and what is its purpose?
So why did this make me think of the fisherman’s tale? The point of the parable is presumably to question the wisdom of the kind of masculine ambition that leads a man to build, advance, and produce more than what he needs for himself, but the far more interesting question is this: where does this ambition come from and what is its purpose? Consider: if you think about the characters in the parable, it is not hard to guess which of the two men is more likely to be married. The businessman would certainly be a better catch in the eyes of most women, and the fisherman isn’t scaling back his hours to spend more time with a wife and kids. His highest aspiration is to simply relax and enjoy life whenever he is able. We are just speculating here, and it is certainly possible that the fictional businessman is just in it for greed, but even then, it is interesting that family is the single most likely factor to determine whether or not his ambition is truly greedy.
Mr. Taranto’s analysis of the matter is essentially that these underemployed young men are making the fisherman’s choice. Sure, sitting on the beach is replaced with casual sex and video games, but the principle is the same: for a man without ambition, the fisherman’s choice is not really irrational.
Civilization depends on the tendency of men to produce more than they consume for themselves—it depends on that masculine ambition.
But there is a point at which the fisherman’s choice does become irrational, and it is probably this realization that has been alarming many people like Ms. Hymowitz. What makes good sense on a personal level can make less sense on a societal level. Civilization depends on the tendency of men to produce more than they consume for themselves—it depends on that masculine ambition. In the parable, the fisherman feeds himself. Following the businessman’s ambition, however, could mean feeding himself & his workers, along with any family they might have. His ambition could be a huge boon to society. Take that away, and you have a bunch of men doing what they need to do to stay comfortable, but nothing more—nothing for any women or any increasingly hypothetical children.
This leads some folks to call the disinterested men lazy and shame them on an individual level into manning up to provide for society. However, if the irrationality is at a societal level, perhaps the critique should also be leveled at society. Permanent and chaste marriages along with the legitimate children they produce are a social feature that traditionally cultivated masculine ambition by rewarding it and channeling it towards benevolent ends. Men tend to love their wives and children, take satisfaction in working on their behalf, and used to gain commensurate social respect for doing so.
And yet, this kind of marriage is precisely what has been taken away from men in our society. Instead, our elites have sought to structure the family around child support instead of marriage. The mother has custody of the children, but she receives much of the necessary resources from elsewhere. This could be from her husband, but it could just as easily be from her ex-husband, her boyfriend, or the taxpayer. Where it comes from doesn’t matter so long as the child has resources and the woman is freed from any moral or social obligation towards these men.
Men have done this so far because that’s what’s been expected of them, but more and more are realizing that they have no incentive to do so.
This rickety new system has sort-of worked so far, but only on inertia. While it may not matter whether the resources come from a husband, ex-husband, boyfriend, or taxpayer, the system does hinge on there being husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and taxpayers who are producing more than they consume for themselves. Men have done this so far because that’s what’s been expected of them, but more and more are realizing that they have no incentive to do so. Sure, they could try to marry and start a family, but half of marriages end in divorce, a supermajority of divorces are unilaterally inflicted by wives on their husbands, and the wife is all but guaranteed custody of the family along with most of its property and a large chunk of the husband’s future earnings. This is a pretty big hurdle to jump, and a man can hardly be considered irrational for declining the risk. The more that men are alienated from their families, the less stake they have in society or future.
Mr. Taranto concludes his article: “Boys and young men are no less rational, or capable of adapting to incentives, than girls and young women are. They are, in fact, adapting very well to the incentives for female power and independence–which inevitably also serve as disincentives to male reliability and self-sacrifice.” In a way, he is entirely correct. Strong independent women in control of their own lives need no men and offer men no incentive to an ambition that benefits society. However, if that independence were as real as people pretend, there would be no alarm over men giving up those ambitions. Truly independent women would not need all the welfare, alimony, child support, paid maternity leave, government sponsored daycare, and so forth that other people (men) are supposed to provide for them. But if society truly does need such things from men, perhaps society should also honor and reward men for their contribution instead of pretending they are unnecessary. Perhaps they should make their ambition rational again.
Reintroducing permanent and chaste marriage would be a good start. Unfortunately, getting our society from B to A has become an endeavor too complicated to explore here in depth. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out some low hanging fruit. Under our contemporary family court system, it is disproportionately possible (and common) for a wife to take her husband’s home, family, and income away from him for any reason at all. So while a groom honors his bride by making a legally enforced commitment of his future, a bride is not given a similar opportunity to honor her future husband. This lopsidedness has, in part, come about through attempts to help women in unfortunate circumstances, but surely it is not the best or only way of doing so. After all, encouraging men to opt out of civilization isn’t helpful for women either.
Matthew’s writing may be found at The 96th Thesis.Colin Higgins was a British actor who appeared briefly as Wedge Antilles in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. While his character was never called by name during the Battle of Yavin briefing scene, the script and novelization identified him as Wedge Antilles, who was played by Denis Lawson in all other scenes. Because this inconsistency went unexplained for so long, the character who says, "That's impossible, even for a computer," is sometimes nicknamed by fans as "Fake Wedge."
The fact that Denis Lawson did not play Wedge in the briefing scene sparked some discussion between fans who wanted to know who did. The speculation eventually revolved around two actors: Jack Klaff (who played John D) and Colin Higgins. It was thought by the majority of those concerned that Klaff was "Fake Wedge." However, Pablo Hidalgo confirmed in 2004 that Colin Higgins was the actor in question when he released the information through the Homing Beacon email newsletter and then later in 2013 on his weblog.
Colin Higgins made his first Star Wars-related appearance at Celebration IV, where he confirmed that he was, in fact, hired for the role of Wedge Antilles. According to his story, he had never worked on an American film before, resulting in several misunderstandings and mishaps. One of the biggest was his flubbing of his lines in the briefing scene. According to Higgins, his infamous line was actually supposed to be much longer, but he couldn't remember how it went. After wasting a lot of time trying to say it right, he ended up going with the shortened version quoted above. This and other things led to his being fired shortly after filming the scene. At this point, Denis Lawson was chosen to take his place, which is why Wedge Antilles is played by Lawson in all remaining scenes, as well as the following films.
Higgins's other roles have mostly been on British television, including a role as "Tak" in an episode of Blake's 7 which helped Hidalgo identify him.
Higgins passed away in December 2012.[1] Five years after his death, his brief appearance as Wedge was retconned into a separate character, named Col Takbright.
Bibliography EditJumoke Johnson Jr. sits in class at Brainerd High School in 2012. Johnson started college but was arrested on drug charges. Jumoke Johnson Jr. sits in class at Brainerd... Photo by Staff File Photo /Times Free Press.
Christopher Woodard, 20 was killed on Jan. 20, 2017. Christopher Woodard, 20 was killed on Jan. 20,... Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press.
A charismatic man who impressed his teachers at Brainerd High School but failed to break out of three generations of gangs and poverty was killed during a shooting and car crash on Friday night.
Jumoke Johnson, 23, climbed the ranks of the Rollin 60 Crips as a teenager. He was a smart kid, a natural leader, and was a senior in high school when he was first profiled in the Times Free Press.
Police said he was a gang kingpin, a dark thread linking shootings and drug deals throughout East Chattanooga. They said he ordered hits, participated in drive-by shootings and shot a man in the back of the head — but they couldn't prove it.
In 2012, Johnson told the newspaper he wanted to change, wanted to get on a better path, go to college, or the military, or somewhere.
After that story was published, an anonymous donor offered Johnson a free ride to a college in Alabama, and he went – but was kicked out after one semester and ended up back in Chattanooga's streets.
In 2013, he was arrested during a cocaine distribution sting that also snared more than 30 other men. In January of 2015, he pleaded guilty to a single drug charge and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Last week, Johnson escaped from a federal halfway house on McCallie Avenue and cut his GPS monitor.
On Friday, he died in a hail of bullets on E. 12th Street. Christopher Woodard, 20, was also killed.
Witnesses said one vehicle chased another down the street around 8 p.m. and gunfire was exchanged. The front car crashed and piled on top of another vehicle.
Woodard and Johnson were dead by the time police arrived — both were shot and also injured in the crash, police said. Woodard was out of jail on bond for robbery charges.
They are the first two people to be killed in Chattanooga during 2017.
The city saw 33 homicides during 2016.INTRODUCTION
Beneath the waves of the Conquering Sea, a primordial island rises and with it a new threat from an old enemy. Known as Primalrites, this monstrous race of dinosaurs were long forgotten by the monster hunters of today, but ancient fossils remain. And now, the island shudders once more as they return, seeking revenge against those that drove them to an early extinction.
You are about to embark on a rousing adventure that pits mighty hunters against monstrous dinosaurs on an island not big enough for both. These wildly fantastical hunts are recreated whenever you play the Hunters Mark adventure.
THE RULES
In order to play, you must first be acquainted with the 5e rules. The first major adventure in the Hunters World, Hunters Mark is a 5e adventure for characters of level 1-10. You can start the adventure with 1st level characters of your own creation, or, pick one or more from the cast of non-player characters. Either way, the characters should reach at least 10th level by the adventure’s conclusion.
USING THIS BOOK
The adventure here builds on the 5e foundation, exploring how characters are monster hunters, going after dangerous, often deadly prey. Think of this book as an adventure with a focus on epic boss battles and we hope it will provide you new ways to enjoy the game.
Chapter 1 provides guidance on running this adventure. Chapter 2 covers the vast landscapes of the Sunken Island, from treacherous shores and desolate volcanic hearts, to lush valleys and shadowy sprawls. Chapter 3 offers optional rules for the GM that provides new resources for running the game and streamlining hunts, all of it building on the core 5e rules.
Appendix A is a toolkit for players using monster spoils to make gear, similar to crafting systems used in video games, and Appendix B contains a gallery of hunters for the GM to quickly generate downtime activities and side quests for the campaign. Appendix C presents a step-by-step guide for players to create and use custom pets on monster hunts.
EXCERPTS
DEVELOPMENT
My name is Gary. I've spent over 18 months perfecting this 5e adventure and would like to share it with you at your game table. This is a love-letter to games like the Witcher, Dark Souls and Monster Hunter.
Since being released digitally, Hunters Mark has been well received by both GMs and players alike. This Kickstarter is to produce Hunters Mark as a limited print run of softcover and hardcover books for new fans that want to bring monster hunts to their game. To keep the Kickstarter as simple as possible, there are four pledge levels:
Hunters Mark PDF ($15)
Hunters Mark Softcover ($30)
Hunters Mark Hardcover ($55)
Hunters Mark Limited Edition Hardcover ($65)
Backing a print book gets you a copy of Hunters Mark PDF. This PDF is sent to your email and can be downloaded up to three times, allowing you to have copies across several devices. With this reward, when the books are ready, you will receive an email with a code for ordering the book from RPGNow.
ADD-ONS
For fans of tactical battles, you can get a set of gorgeous terrain battle-maps to create the perfect setting. This set of 10 maps measure 17” x 11” and usable on a virtual tabletop or easily printed for your tabletop. The add-on also includes tokens of all the Primalrites from the adventure. This add-on comes as a PDF sent to the email you provide.
If you would like to get the battle-maps as an add-on, simply add $10 to your pledge level. For example, if you pledged for the Hunters Mark Softcover ($30) and the battle-maps (+$10) you would increase your backing to $40.
FOLLOW US AND BE SURE TO ASK ANY QUESTIONSWill Ed Reed show up at Ravens training camp at the end of the month? The Pro Bowl free safety gave us another tea leaf to read Saturday evening when he sent this message to his “bosses” via his Twitter account.
“Back home with my son, he's riding his bike [and] I'm doing yard work! Tell the bosses I'm comfortable!”
Though Reed was clearly trying to catch the Ravens’ attention with the Tweet, I would caution against reading too much into one Tweet. Why do I say that? Because it’s Reed. I would caution against reading too much into anything Reed says, at least when it comes to his playing status. And that’s not meant to disrespect Reed; it's just that his actions have always spoken louder than his words.
That’s why Ray Lewis said he expects Reed to be at camp.
"I talk to him all the time. I don't expect nothing different," the inside linebacker said when Reed skipped the team's mandatory minicamp last month. "Ed is Ed and when July 25th comes up, Ed will be here and we'll be getting ready to roll."
Reed will host his annual football camp next week at Stevenson University, so we should get an update from him then about whether he is 100 percent committed to playing. He will make $7.2 million in 2012, the final year of his deal. Reed has mostly danced around questions about his contract -- instead saying he just wants respect -- though he did say three months ago that he was open to discussing an extension to “help the team.”
But at this point, nearly three months removed from the start of free agency, the best way he can help the team is by simply showing up at training camp. Few, if any, players can match Reed’s range and intelligence in the secondary, but the Ravens don’t appear to have a starting-caliber player behind him on the depth chart.
Sean Considine, whom the Ravens signed this offseason to bolster their special teams, has started 28 games in the NFL, but only five were at free safety. Fourth-round draft pick Christian Thompson is unproven, as is third-year player Emanuel Cook.
In other words, Reed might be comfortable, but his bosses will be quite the opposite if he doesn’t show up to play ball this summer.
---------
Update (5:30 p.m.) -- Reed Tweeted the following after his Tweet over the weekend became blog fodder here and on national NFL blogs such as Pro Football Talk and NFL's Around the League:
"Players that have [to] be smart business men,in a business that don't care an inch about them though we grind for that inch [not always right but real]."Autumn, Tilly, Ari, and Gwen stand behind me, smiling at my reflection. After a few hours of their help, my hair and make-up are done. I turn to them, picking at the hem of my dress. They’re so happy and I know I should be too, so I put a smile on, but I can’t shake this feeling I have. Death has been silent for weeks now, like the calm before the storm, and Alex hasn’t shown himself in months. The only good thing about lately is that Jack had been true at the beginning of the year. People eventually did get used to us and stop whispering about us. The past few months at school have actually been the most normal I’ve ever had.
“You’re so beautiful. I see so much of your parents in you.” Grandmother Gwen says, her eyes soft with the past.
“Jack will be speechless.” Autumn agrees.
“We’re so proud of you, Zoey. I know your parents would be too.” Tilly smiles.
“Prom is a night you’ll never forget.” Ari says with a wink.
I look down, touched by their words. “Thanks.”
Autumn glances towards the door and smiles. “He’s here. Let’s go.”
I nod and give Mogget a quick scratch under his chin before following Autumn, Tilly, and Gwen out of the room. As we come down the steps we’re greeted by Anton, Grandpa Elijah, Mordecai, Ellen, Dennis, and Elissa. Mordecai lets out a whistle, making Dennis and their dates chuckle.
“Lookin hot, cuz.” Mordecai teases.
“Shut up.” I grumble, butterflies in my stomach as I hear footsteps on the porch. A knock sounds on the door. Elijah opens the door and Jack walks in.
Silence.
“Hi.” I say, hoping to break the quiet.
Jack closes his mouth. “Hello Hermione.” He gives me one of his disarming smiles. “You look…” He pauses, “Amazing isn’t a good enough word and beautiful just doesn’t quiet do it either.”
“Thanks.” I blush and walk over to him. “I guess since we’re all here, we should go now.”
“Wait! I want pictures first. Group picture then couples.” Tilly says to our groaning.
We all pose for pictures quickly and efficiently so Tilly doesn’t take more than needed. After a few minutes we’re free to go. The six of us leave the house and with their excitement and Jack’s reassuring presence, my horrible feeling almost gets pushed from my mind. Almost.
The ballroom is beautiful. Balloons and tables are set up everywhere, with a clear area for dancing. Jack squeezes my hand and smiles at me. I smile back and look around again, resolving to have fun regardless of the feeling.
After we eat, the DJ turns the music up and most of us move to the dance floor. It feels like we dance for hours. I stay with Jack and the others and let the music fill my body, pushing away the nagging feeling. A slow dance comes on and Jack puts an arm on my waist and takes my hand in the other, holding me close.
“Zoey.” He whispers, his breath warm against my ear.
“Yes?” I ask.
“I…I love you.” He says.
I freeze, taking in the words, words we haven’t said yet. The three little words that terrify me to my core. ‘I love you’. I open my mouth to say them back, knowing that’s what you’re supposed to do, but I can’t say anything.
Jack steps back, confusion in his eyes. “Zoey? Are you okay? You don’t have to say it back if you’re not ready. It’s okay.”
I suck in a deep breath and step back, holding my arms. “I-I need some air.” I manage out.
Jack nods as I turn to leave the ballroom and let’s Mordecai know we’re going outside. Without waiting, I make for the doorway, feeling like the walls are closing in on me. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I say it back?
I lean against the cool wall once I’m outside, relishing the quiet of Hidden Spring’s night. I do love him, don’t I? Isn’t this what love feels like? I like being with him. He calms me down. But there’s so much fear there too. Fear of hurting him, of killing him, of him leaving. It’s complicated. Is love supposed to be complicated? Maybe I can’t say it back because I don’t know what love is. I try to remember the way mom and dad looked at each other, but it’s been so long I can only see them in the poses that they’re in in my pictures.
“Zoey, are you okay?” Jack whispers as the door closes behind him.
“Yea, I’m fine.” I put a smile on and look at him.
“Are you sure? This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.” He says.
“No, it’s not. It’s okay, really. I’m just tired. Can we go home?” I ask.
“Yea, of course. Let’s go.” He takes my hand tentatively and we begin to walk across the parking lot.
We walk, because it’s a great night out and it’s not too far. Jack has a car, but we all took a limo over. We stay quiet, each lost in our own minds. My bad feeling is back in full force now, eating away at my already tumultuous thoughts.
We reach the park near the house and walk along the path. My feet are beginning to hurt in the heels Autumn lent me but I don’t complain since we’re almost home. A heavy silence breaks me out of my thoughts and I look around. A town like Hidden Springs is normally quiet this time of night, but this was a heavy silence, thick with foreboding. Feeling uneasy, I search the street as we reach it. For a second I begin to relax, thinking I’m just being crazy, but then I see it. A car flicks it’s lights on, knowing that we’ve seen it, and speeds towards us.
Jack sees it the same time I do. He squeezes my hand and I feel him pull me to the side, trying to jump out of its way. He makes it out of the car’s path, but I don’t. I whip my head to look at him just as the car reaches me. I feel its impact with my body. With his soft blue eyes the last thing I see, the world goes black. Finally, I’ll be able to experience Death as a dying person.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tilly, Anton, Autumn, Ari, Gwen, and Elijah sit around the living room. The children’s futures on their mind. Seeing Zoey happy and integrating well gives everyone a positive outlook. Maybe things will finally be turning around for the beloved Belle heir. In the middle of their conversation, the room’s temperature drops to freezing, halting their words.
In the middle of the room, an orange ghost appears, flickering in and out of view. Only Autumn, Ari, and Elijah can see him. Tilly, Anton, and Gwen only smell smoke. He looks out to them.
“Zoey. Park.” He |
the storm still lacked a well-defined center, according to the NHC.
As the storm gradually develops, local officials are monitoring developments and staying at the ready.
"We'll be staffing the Emergency Operations Center and monitoring this, tomorrow and all through the week as we figure out what Mother Nature wants to do with the storm," Sloan said. "To us, this is what we do and why we do it."Final Fantasy XV’s Holiday Pack and update content drops December 22
Final Fantasy XV‘s first round of downloadable content is set to drop on December 22, Square Enix revealed today. Two types of content will be available with the Holiday Pack and Holiday Pack Plus – the latter available exclusively for Season Pass holders.
In addition to the Holiday Pack, fans can download a new update adding New Game Plus, and a photo frame feature for social media uploads. Both Holiday Packs will be distributed at the same time as these free updates.
New Game Plus will allow you to bring your clear data over to a new game. SNS photo framing will allow fans to attach photo frames when posting to social networks.
The Holiday Pack includes a number of optional items including accessories that make it easier to obtain items, items that eliminate stamina cost and tickets for a carnival set for late January. The Carnival Style outfit will also be available in January.
Holiday Pack Plus
A bunch of accessories helpful for playing FFXV and a pack of carnival tickets for the January event.
Accessories include:
Protect Ring
Command Booster (Only for Noctis)
Phantom Booster (Only for Noctis)
Instant Kill Victory Song
Battle Skill Victory Song
Key of Fortune
Stamina Anchor (Only for Noctis)
Carnival Style (Only for Noctis)
Photo Frame (Holiday Pack Limited Edition)
Limited Time Carnival Tickets+
Note the carnival tickets are the same ones includes with the free pack. Those who pick up the Plus pack will also be eligible for the Holiday Pack free version as well.
Holiday Pack (Free Version)
A bunch of accessories helpful for playing FFXV and a pack of carnival tickets for the January event.
Accessories include:
Level Stopper
Annihilation Victory Song
Mog Choco T-shirt (Only for Noctis)
Limited Time Carnival Tickets
And here’s a look at the costumes:
Carnival Style
Mog Choco T-shirt
Via: 4Gamer.Human-made object put into an orbit around the earth or other planet
This article is about artificial satellites. For natural satellites, also known as moons, see Natural satellite. For other uses, see Satellite (disambiguation)
"Artificial moon" redirects here. For the electric light used to simulate moonlight, see moonlight tower
NASA's Earth-observing fleet as of June 2012.
In the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an artificial object which has been intentionally placed into orbit. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as Earth's Moon.
On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. Since then, about 8,100 satellites from more than 40 countries have been launched. According to a 2018 estimate, some 4,900 remain in orbit, of those about 1,900 were operational; while the rest have lived out their useful lives and become space debris.[1] Approximately 500 operational satellites are in low-Earth orbit, 50 are in medium-Earth orbit (at 20,000 km), and the rest are in geostationary orbit (at 36,000 km).[2] A few large satellites have been launched in parts and assembled in orbit. Over a dozen space probes have been placed into orbit around other bodies and become artificial satellites to the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, a few asteroids,[3] a comet and the Sun.
Satellites are used for many purposes. Among several other applications, they can be used to make star maps and maps of planetary surfaces, and also take pictures of planets they are launched into. Common types include military and civilian Earth observation satellites, communications satellites, navigation satellites, weather satellites, and space telescopes. Space stations and human spacecraft in orbit are also satellites. Satellite orbits vary greatly, depending on the purpose of the satellite, and are classified in a number of ways. Well-known (overlapping) classes include low Earth orbit, polar orbit, and geostationary orbit.
A launch vehicle is a rocket that places a satellite into orbit. Usually, it lifts off from a launch pad on land. Some are launched at sea from a submarine or a mobile maritime platform, or aboard a plane (see air launch to orbit).
Satellites are usually semi-independent computer-controlled systems. Satellite subsystems attend many tasks, such as power generation, thermal control, telemetry, attitude control and orbit control.
History [ edit ]
Early conceptions [ edit ]
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
A 1949 issue of Popular Science depicts the idea of an "artificial moon"
"Newton's cannonball", presented as a "thought experiment" in A Treatise of the System of the World, by Isaac Newton was the first published mathematical study of the possibility of an artificial satellite.
The first fictional depiction of a satellite being launched into orbit was a short story by Edward Everett Hale, The Brick Moon.[4][5] The idea surfaced again in Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune (1879).
In 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) published Exploring Space Using Jet Propulsion Devices (in Russian: Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами), which is the first academic treatise on the use of rocketry to launch spacecraft. He calculated the orbital speed required for a minimal orbit, and that a multi-stage rocket fuelled by liquid propellants could achieve this.
In 1928, Herman Potočnik (1892–1929) published his sole book, The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor (German: Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums – der Raketen-Motor). He described the use of orbiting spacecraft for observation of the ground and described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments.
In a 1945 Wireless World article, the English science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) described in detail the possible use of communications satellites for mass communications.[6] He suggested that three geostationary satellites would provide coverage over the entire planet.
The US military studied the idea of what was referred to as the "earth satellite vehicle" when Secretary of Defense James Forrestal made a public announcement on 29 December 1948, that his office was coordinating that project between the various services.[7]
Artificial satellites [ edit ]
The first artificial satellite was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, and initiating the Soviet Sputnik program, with Sergei Korolev as chief designer. This in turn triggered the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Sputnik 1 helped to identify the density of high atmospheric layers through measurement of its orbital change and provided data on radio-signal distribution in the ionosphere. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1's success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the so-called Space Race within the Cold War.
Sputnik 2 was launched on 3 November 1957 and carried the first living passenger into orbit, a dog named Laika.[8]
In May, 1946, Project RAND had released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, which stated, "A satellite vehicle with appropriate instrumentation can be expected to be one of the most potent scientific tools of the Twentieth Century."[9] The United States had been considering launching orbital satellites since 1945 under the Bureau of Aeronautics of the United States Navy. The United States Air Force's Project RAND eventually released the report, but considered the satellite to be a tool for science, politics, and propaganda, rather than a potential military weapon. In 1954, the Secretary of Defense stated, "I know of no American satellite program."[10] In February 1954 Project RAND released "Scientific Uses for a Satellite Vehicle," written by R.R. Carhart.[11] This expanded on potential scientific uses for satellite vehicles and was followed in June 1955 with "The Scientific Use of an Artificial Satellite," by H.K. Kallmann and W.W. Kellogg.[12]
In the context of activities planned for the International Geophysical Year (1957–58), the White House announced on 29 July 1955 that the U.S. intended to launch satellites by the spring of 1958. This became known as Project Vanguard. On 31 July, the Soviets announced that they intended to launch a satellite by the fall of 1957.
Following pressure by the American Rocket Society, the National Science Foundation, and the International Geophysical Year, military interest picked up and in early 1955 the Army and Navy were working on Project Orbiter, two competing programs: the army's which involved using a Jupiter C rocket, and the civilian/Navy Vanguard Rocket, to launch a satellite. At first, they failed: initial preference was given to the Vanguard program, whose first attempt at orbiting a satellite resulted in the explosion of the launch vehicle on national television. But finally, three months after Sputnik 2, the project succeeded; Explorer 1 became the United States' first artificial satellite on 31 January 1958.[13]
In June 1961, three-and-a-half years after the launch of Sputnik 1, the Air Force used resources of the United States Space Surveillance Network to catalog 115 Earth-orbiting satellites.[14]
Early satellites were constructed as "one-off" designs. With growth in geosynchronous (GEO) satellite communication, multiple satellites began to be built on single model platforms called satellite buses. The first standardized satellite bus design was the HS-333 GEO commsat, launched in 1972.
Currently the largest artificial satellite ever is the International Space Station.
Space Surveillance Network [ edit ]
The United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN), a division of the United States Strategic Command, has been tracking objects in Earth's orbit since 1957 when the Soviet Union opened the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik I. Since then, the SSN has tracked more than 26,000 objects. The SSN currently tracks more than 8,000-man-made orbiting objects. The rest have re-entered Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated, or survived re-entry and impacted the Earth. The SSN tracks objects that are 10 centimeters in diameter or larger; those now orbiting Earth range from satellites weighing several tons to pieces of spent rocket bodies weighing only 10 pounds. About seven percent are operational satellites (i.e. ~560 satellites), the rest are space debris.[15] The United States Strategic Command is primarily interested in the active satellites, but also tracks space debris which upon reentry might otherwise be mistaken for incoming missiles.
Non-military satellite services [ edit ]
There are three basic categories of non-military satellite services:[16]
Fixed satellite services [ edit ]
Fixed satellite services handle hundreds of billions of voice, data, and video transmission tasks across all countries and continents between certain points on the Earth's surface.
Mobile satellite systems [ edit ]
Mobile satellite systems help connect remote regions, vehicles, ships, people and aircraft to other parts of the world and/or other mobile or stationary communications units, in addition to serving as navigation systems.
Scientific research satellites (commercial and noncommercial) [ edit ]
Scientific research satellites provide meteorological information, land survey data (e.g. remote sensing), Amateur (HAM) Radio, and other different scientific research applications such as earth science, marine science, and atmospheric research.
Types [ edit ]
International Space Station
Space-based solar power satellites are proposed satellites that would collect energy from sunlight and transmit it for use on Earth or other places.
are proposed satellites that would collect energy from sunlight and transmit it for use on Earth or other places. Space stations are artificial orbital structures that are designed for human beings to live on in outer space. A space station is distinguished from other crewed spacecraft by its lack of major propulsion or landing facilities. Space stations are designed for medium-term living in orbit, for periods of weeks, months, or even years.
are artificial orbital structures that are designed for human beings to live on in outer space. A space station is distinguished from other crewed spacecraft by its lack of major propulsion or landing facilities. Space stations are designed for medium-term living in orbit, for periods of weeks, months, or even years. Tether satellites are satellites which are connected to another satellite by a thin cable called a tether.
are satellites which are connected to another satellite by a thin cable called a tether. Weather satellites are primarily used to monitor Earth's weather and climate.[18]
Orbit types [ edit ]
Various earth orbits to scale; cyan represents low earth orbit, yellow represents medium earth orbit, the black dashed line represents geosynchronous orbit, the green dash-dot line the orbit of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, and the red dotted line the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS).
The first satellite, Sputnik 1, was put into orbit around Earth and was therefore in geocentric orbit. By far this is the most common type of orbit with approximately 1,886[19] artificial satellites orbiting the Earth. Geocentric orbits may be further classified by their altitude, inclination and eccentricity.
The commonly used altitude classifications of geocentric orbit are Low Earth orbit (LEO), Medium Earth orbit (MEO) and High Earth orbit (HEO). Low Earth orbit is any orbit below 2,000 km. Medium Earth orbit is any orbit between 2,000 and 35,786 km. High Earth orbit is any orbit higher than 35,786 km.
Centric classifications [ edit ]
The general structure of a satellite is that it is connected to the earth stations that are present on the ground and connected through terrestrial links.
Altitude classifications [ edit ]
Orbital Altitudes of several significant satellites of earth.
Inclination classifications [ edit ]
Inclined orbit : An orbit whose inclination in reference to the equatorial plane is not zero degrees. Polar orbit : An orbit that passes above or nearly above both poles of the planet on each revolution. Therefore, it has an inclination of (or very close to) 90 degrees. Polar sun synchronous orbit : A nearly polar orbit that passes the equator at the same local time on every pass. Useful for image taking satellites because shadows will be nearly the same on every pass.
: An orbit whose inclination in reference to the equatorial plane is not zero degrees.
Eccentricity classifications [ edit ]
Synchronous classifications [ edit ]
Special classifications [ edit ]
Sun-synchronous orbit : An orbit which combines altitude and inclination in such a way that the satellite passes over any given point of the planets' surface at the same local solar time. Such an orbit can place a satellite in constant sunlight and is useful for imaging, spy, and weather satellites.
: An orbit which combines altitude and inclination in such a way that the satellite passes over any given point of the planets' surface at the same local solar time. Such an orbit can place a satellite in constant sunlight and is useful for imaging, spy, and weather satellites. Moon orbit: The orbital characteristics of Earth's Moon. Average altitude of 384,403 kilometers (238,857 mi), elliptical–inclined orbit.
Pseudo-orbit classifications [ edit ]
Satellite subsystems [ edit ]
The satellite's functional versatility is imbedded within its technical components and its operations characteristics. Looking at the "anatomy" of a typical satellite, one discovers two modules.[16] Note that some novel architectural concepts such as Fractionated spacecraft somewhat upset this taxonomy.
Spacecraft bus or service module [ edit ]
The bus module consists of the following subsystems:
Structural subsystem [ edit ]
The structural subsystem provides the mechanical base structure with adequate stiffness to withstand stress and vibrations experienced during launch, maintain structural integrity and stability while on station in orbit, and shields the satellite from extreme temperature changes and micro-meteorite damage.
Telemetry subsystem [ edit ]
The telemetry subsystem (aka Command and Data Handling, C&DH) monitors the on-board equipment operations, transmits equipment operation data to the earth control station, and receives the earth control station's commands to perform equipment operation adjustments.
Power subsystem [ edit ]
The power subsystem consists of solar panels to convert solar energy into electrical power, regulation and distribution functions, and batteries that store power and supply the satellite when it passes into the Earth's shadow. Nuclear power sources (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator) have also been used in several successful satellite programs including the Nimbus program (1964–1978).[21]
Thermal control subsystem [ edit ]
The thermal control subsystem helps protect electronic equipment from extreme temperatures due to intense sunlight or the lack of sun exposure on different sides of the satellite's body (e.g. optical solar reflector)
Attitude and orbit control subsystem [ edit ]
The attitude and orbit control subsystem consists of sensors to measure vehicle orientation, control laws embedded in the flight software, and actuators (reaction wheels, thrusters). These apply the torques and forces needed to re-orient the vehicle to a desired attitude, keep the satellite in the correct orbital position, and keep antennas pointed in the right directions.
Communication payload [ edit ]
The second major module is the communication payload, which is made up of transponders. A transponder is capable of :
Receiving uplinked radio signals from earth satellite transmission stations (antennas).
Amplifying received radio signals
Sorting the input signals and directing the output signals through input/output signal multiplexers to the proper downlink antennas for retransmission to earth satellite receiving stations (antennas).
End of life [ edit ]
When satellites reach the end of their mission (this normally occurs within 3 or 4 years after launch), satellite operators have the option of de-orbiting the satellite, leaving the satellite in its current orbit or moving the satellite to a graveyard orbit. Historically, due to budgetary constraints at the beginning of satellite missions, satellites were rarely designed to be de-orbited. One example of this practice is the satellite Vanguard 1. Launched in 1958, Vanguard 1, the 4th manmade satellite put in Geocentric orbit, was still in orbit as of March 2015, as well as the upper stage of its launch rocket.[22][23]
Instead of being de-orbited, most satellites are either left in their current orbit or moved to a graveyard orbit.[24] As of 2002, the FCC requires all geostationary satellites to commit to moving to a graveyard orbit at the end of their operational life prior to launch.[25] In cases of uncontrolled de-orbiting, the major variable is the solar flux, and the minor variables the components and form factors of the satellite itself, and the gravitational perturbations generated by the Sun and the Moon (as well as those exercised by large mountain ranges, whether above or below sea level). The nominal breakup altitude due to aerodynamic forces and temperatures is 78 km, with a range between 72 and 84 km. Solar panels, however, are destroyed before any other component at altitudes between 90 and 95 km.[26]
Launch-capable countries [ edit ]
This list includes countries with an independent capability to place satellites in orbit, including production of the necessary launch vehicle. Note: many more countries have the capability to design and build satellites but are unable to launch them, instead relying on foreign launch services. This list does not consider those numerous countries, but only lists those capable of launching satellites indigenously, and the date this capability was first demonstrated. The list does not include the European Space Agency, a multi-national state organization, nor private consortiums.
Attempted first launches [ edit ]
Other notes [ edit ]
^ Russia and the Ukraine were parts of the Soviet Union and thus inherited their launch capability without the need to develop it indigenously. Through the Soviet Union they are also on the number one position in this list of accomplishments.
Russia and the Ukraine were parts of the Soviet Union and thus inherited their launch capability without the need to develop it indigenously. Through the Soviet Union they are also on the number one position in this list of accomplishments. France, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine launched their first satellites by own launchers from foreign spaceports.
Some countries such as South Africa, Spain, Italy, Germany, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Egypt and private companies such as OTRAG, have developed their own launchers, but have not had a successful launch.
Only twelve, countries from the list below (USSR, USA, France, Japan, China, UK, India, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Iran and North Korea) and one regional organization (the European Space Agency, ESA) have independently launched satellites on their own indigenously developed launch vehicles.
Several other countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, Romania, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Turkey and Switzerland are at various stages of development of their own small-scale launcher capabilities.
Launch capable private entities [ edit ]
Private firm Orbital Sciences Corporation, with launches since 1982, continues very successful launches of its Minotaur, Pegasus, Taurus and Antares rocket programs.
On 28 September 2008, late comer and private aerospace firm SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. This marked the first time that a privately built liquid-fueled booster was able to reach orbit.[31] The rocket carried a prism shaped 1.5 m (5 ft) long payload mass simulator that was set into orbit. The dummy satellite, known as Ratsat, will remain in orbit for between five and ten years before burning up in the atmosphere.[31]
A few other private companies are capable of sub-orbital launches.
First satellites of countries [ edit ]
While Canada was the third country to build a satellite which was launched into space,[49] it was launched aboard an American rocket from an American spaceport. The same goes for Australia, who launched first satellite involved a donated U.S. Redstone rocket and American support staff as well as a joint launch facility with the United Kingdom.[50] The first Italian satellite San Marco 1 launched on 15 December 1964 on a U.S. Scout rocket from Wallops Island (Virginia, United States) with an Italian launch team trained by NASA.[51] By similar occasions, almost all further first national satellites was launched by foreign rockets.
Attempted first satellites [ edit ]
United States tried unsuccessfully to launch its first satellite in 1957; they were successful in 1958.
China tried unsuccessfully to launch its first satellite in 1969; they were successful in 1970.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein fulfilled in 1989 an unconfirmed launch of warhead on orbit by developed Iraqi vehicle that intended to put later the 75 kg first national satellite Al-Ta’ir, also developed. [52] [53]
Chile tried unsuccessfully in 1995 to launch its first satellite FASat-Alfa by foreign rocket; in 1998 they were successful.†
North Korea has tried in 1998, 2009, 2012 to launch satellites, first successful launch on 12 December 2012. [54]
Libya since 1996 developed its own national Libsat satellite project with the goal of providing telecommunication and remote sensing services [55] that was postponed after the fall of Gaddafi.
that was postponed after the fall of Gaddafi. Belarus tried unsuccessfully in 2006 to launch its first satellite BelKA by foreign rocket.†
†-note: Both Chile and Belarus used Russian companies as principal contractors to build their satellites, they used Russian-Ukrainian manufactured rockets and launched either from Russia or Kazakhstan.
Planned first satellites [ edit ]
Attacks on satellites [ edit ]
In recent times[timeframe?], satellites have been hacked by militant organizations to broadcast propaganda and to pilfer classified information from military communication networks.[88][89]
For testing purposes, satellites in low earth orbit have been destroyed by ballistic missiles launched from earth. Russia, the United States and China have demonstrated the ability to eliminate satellites.[90] In 2007 the Chinese military shot down an aging weather satellite,[90] followed by the US Navy shooting down a defunct spy satellite in February 2008.[91]
Jamming [ edit ]
Due to the low received signal strength of satellite transmissions, they are prone to jamming by land-based transmitters. Such jamming is limited to the geographical area within the transmitter's range. GPS satellites are potential targets for jamming,[92][93] but satellite phone and television signals have also been subjected to jamming.[94][95]
Also, it is very easy to transmit a carrier radio signal to a geostationary satellite and thus interfere with the legitimate uses of the satellite's transponder. It is common for Earth stations to transmit at the wrong time or on the wrong frequency in commercial satellite space, and dual-illuminate the transponder, rendering the frequency unusable. Satellite operators now have sophisticated monitoring that enables them to pinpoint the source of any carrier and manage the transponder space effectively.[citation needed]
Earth observation using satellites [ edit ]
During the last five decades, space agencies have sent thousands of space crafts, space capsules, or satellites to the universe. In fact, weathermen make forecasts on the weather and natural calamities based on observations from these satellites.[96]
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)[97] requested the National Academies to publish a report entitled, Earth Observations from Space; The First 50 Years of Scientific Achievements in 2008. It described how the capability to view the whole globe simultaneously from satellite observations revolutionized studies about the planet Earth. This development brought about a new age of combined Earth sciences. The National Academies report concluded that continuing Earth observations from the galaxy are necessary to resolve scientific and social challenges in the future.[98]
NASA
The NASA introduced an Earth Observing System (EOS)[99] composed of several satellites, science component, and data system described as the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). It disseminates numerous science data products as well as services designed for interdisciplinary education. EOSDIS data can be accessed online and accessed through File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).[100] Scientists and researchers perform EOSDIS science operations within a distributed platform of multiple interconnected nodes or Science Investigator-led Processing Systems (SIPS) and discipline-specific Distributed Active Archive Centers (DACCs).[101]
ESA
The European Space Agency[102] has plans to launch a satellite for Earth observation. This will be equipped with an artificial intelligence (AI) processor that will allow the spacecraft to make decisions on images to capture and data to transmit to the Earth.[103] BrainSat will use the Intel Myriad X vision processing unit (VPU). The launching will be scheduled in 2019. ESA director for Earth Observation Programs Josef Aschbaher made the announcement during the PhiWeek in November 2018.[104] This is the five-day meet that focused on the future of Earth observation. The conference was held at the ESA Center for Earth Observation in Frascati, Italy.[103] ESA also launched the PhiLab, referring to the future-focused team that works to harness the potentials of AI and other disruptive innovations.[105] Meanwhile, the ESA also announced that it expects to commence the qualification flight of the Space Rider space plane in 2021. This will come after several demonstration missions.[106] Space Rider is the sequel of the Agency's Intermediate Experimental vehicle (IXV) which was launched in 2015. It has the capacity payload of 800 kilograms for orbital missions that will last a maximum of two months.[107]
SpaceX
SpaceX was scheduled to launch a multiple satellite mission on November 28, 2018 from the United States Vandenberg Air Force Base after an initial November 19 schedule. The launch is expected to be visible once the rocket heads toward the south into an Earth observation trajectory traveling over the opposites.[108] However, the second supposed launched was delayed again because of poor weather conditions and set for another date which is not yet definite.[109] The mission is known as the SSO-A Smallsat Express is another landmark for Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX which had 19 rocket launches in 2018 alone. The estimated cost of this Falcon 9 rocket is approximately $62 million. The rocket has 64 satellites with each one going separate ways.[109]
Amazon and Lockheed
Amazon Web Services (AWS)[110] and Lockheed Martin[111] entered into a strategic partnership for the purpose of integrating the AWS ground station service with Lockheed's verge antenna network. These two corporations aim to merge these highly-capable systems that will provide clients with robust satellite uplinks and downlinks. Through these systems, users can incorporate satellite data with various AWS services which include computing, storage, analytics, and machine-learning.[112]
Satellite services [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]You won't get to retire, as HBO host John Oliver says, "on stockpiled Beanie Babies." You can if you save diligently in your retirement plan, but you often have to get past conflicted financial advisers and your employer's retirement plan to get there.
"You should know that 401(k)s can be a goldmine" for financial service companies, Oliver notes, who recently trashed typical retirement advice and products being sold by big financial companies. I've been saying this for more than a decade, but Oliver will reach a lot more people with this truth.
"Fees can really add up, too," Oliver adds. "Think of fees like termites," which can eat away at your retirement funds.
Oliver, in his comic, acid delivery, bothered to do the math in nailing horrendous practices in retirement advice. He even bravely challenged his production company's 401(k) program, which was proposed by the insurance giant John Hancock. Oliver's staff added up the fees on the plan, which amounted to more than 1.6% per year. That's obscenely high, since you can easily find index mutual funds that cost less than 0.50% annually on the retail market.
The Hancock plan, covering only 35 employees, proposed intermediary fees that would cost employees more than $1 million over time. The Oliver company 401(k) proposal was offered by a broker working for Hancock, whose initial math was "off by more than $10 million."
Oliver also rightly dumped on managed mutual funds, most financial advisers and the fact that the insurance and brokerage industries are trying to annihilate a new Labor Dept. rule that makes retirement advisers work in the best interests of average investors.
It was also a fair statement in the comedian's monologue that managed mutual funds rarely beat the market. Only in rare cases do they beat a passive index of securities, yet are found in most 401(k) plans.
"Most managed funds don't do better than the market. This is not a secret," Oliver adds. "The entire financial industry is a potential minefield."
"If you don't play close attention, this doesn't have to get away from you," Oliver concluded in a tone of optimism. The Obama Administration has taken a quantum leap forward by implementing a rule that would force anyone offering retirement products to work in your best interest, that is, "fiduciaries."
Financial services companies abhor this pro-investor rule -- and have sued to prevent it from going into force next year -- because it compels them to lower fees, get rid of needless commissions and do right by future retirees. They also claim it will reduce your ability to find low-cost retirement advice. That's a bamboozlement.
You can get a plethora of low- or no-cost advice from any mutual fund company that offers index funds (Hint: Some of them are called Fidelity, iShares, SPDRs, Schwab and Vanguard, most of which manage my retirement funds).
You can also fight the industry by calling your Congressman and supporting the DOL's "fiduciary rule." Or, you can only use fiduciary advisers such as certified financial planners or demand that your employer or IRA provider only offer low-cost index mutual funds or exchange-traded funds.
In Oliver's universe, retirement investing doesn't have to be a joke. Save as much as you can and pay as little as possible for retirement products and advice. That's no laughing matter, but it's simple and works over time.The base code requires that the design of your structure meet certain requirements. The code allows for a couple of ways to meet these requirements. The first method is known as "prescriptive" wall bracing, and is built into the code as prescribed building elements that must be included at specified positions of the building. Prescriptive methods are acceptable as long as the structure's design fits within certain limitations (wall height, window size/location, etc.). The second method is to demonstrate, by engineering analysis, the forces imposed upon the structure, and the design of structural elements to withstand those forces. Whereas the prescriptive method imposes certain limitations on the design of the structure, the engineering analysis of the building allows for greater flexibility in the design, while ensuring it can withstand the actual natural forces the structure will experience.
In almost all cases, Mascord designs will require site specific engineering analysis. This analysis is required to be conducted by a professional, such as a structural engineer, who is licensed by the state in which the structure will be built. The analysis is specific to the exact building site - for this reason, we do not have "pre-engineered" plans that can be built anywhere. An engineer will need to review the plans and provide an engineering analysis report and additional drawings and specifications to go along with your plans for permit submittal. You should allow for additional time and expense to complete this process.
Some regions have additional engineering requirements, such as earthquake-prone areas of California and the Pacific Northwest, or the Gulf, Florida, & Carolina coasts that are frequented by hurricanes. Additional Wind and Seismic engineering drawings are required to accompany your home plans to obtain a building permit in most areas. These additional drawings need to be provided and stamped by a professional licensed in your state. In most cases we have working relationships established with engineers who can help you obtain the necessary drawings cost effectively, or you are welcome to source your own local engineer.
When the design includes retaining walls, these will also require engineering. Although the code provides for some prescriptive basement and concrete/masonry wall designs, these only work in limited situations. The use of site-engineered retaining walls allows for much greater design flexibility and ensures that the walls are designed specifically for the design loads, unique soils, fluid pressures, and drainage characteristics at the building site. It makes little sense to place the most expensive investment a family typically makes onto a foundation that is not designed for the unique characteristics of the land on which it is set.Ada Noda was an 80-year-old great-great grandmother when, in 2008, medical bills from her 2004 emergency open-heart surgery were more than she could ever afford. She ultimately filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Now, nine years later, the feisty widowed matriarch from St. Augustine, Fla. says her decision to do so was a “godsend.”
“I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep nights,” Noda says of the years between her operation and her bankruptcy filing. “I was independent and had always paid my bills on time.”
But, Noda says, one day, God instructed her to seek help from Legal Aid, something she had never considered before. So she called the St. Johns County Legal Aid. It was one of the best phone calls of her life, says Noda.
Attorney Bobby Wilbert sought to allay her fears. Sometimes, these things happen, he told Noda. A few days later, Wilbert drove to Noda’s home and set the stage for her return to financial clarity.
Rise in Bankruptcy for People 65+
Noda is part of a trend: Medical debt is the No. 1 source of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States and people 65 and older now make up roughly 8 percent of bankruptcy filers, up from 7 percent in 2008.
Wilbert attributes the increase to a few factors. For one, he says, the recession of 2008 “hit that demographic pretty bad.” Moreover, in some states, creditors may garnish up to 25 percent of a debtor’s disposable net income monthly, “so you have to do something,” says Wilbert.
And with wives traditionally outliving their husbands — who often oversee the family’s finances — a lack of financial literacy leads many older women to bankruptcy court.
Elaine M. Dowling, a solo bankruptcy practitioner in Oklahoma City, attributes much of the uptick in bankruptcies among her clients 50 and older to the high cost of health care. She also says Congress’ massive overhaul of the U.S. bankruptcy code in 2005 didn’t serve its stated purpose of decreasing bankruptcy filings.
“The 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act made bankruptcy more time consuming, more expensive and in some cases, more difficult. But it did not change the number of people who had more debt than they could pay,” she says.
The Anguish of Hearing From Debt Collectors
Making matters worse for older people facing heavy debtloads: tough, and sometimes unscrupulous, debt collectors.
A recent report from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that debt collection was the most-complained about product or service for consumers over 62.
“The older they (bankruptcy clients) are, the more anguished they are to be getting these calls about debts they know they can’t pay,” Dowling says.
More Than Just a Clean Slate
While bankruptcy provides a path to a clean financial slate, Wilbert says it often means more than that to his older clients.
“Bankruptcy brings emotional relief. The biggest benefit of bankruptcy is mental health,” he says.
Dowling agrees. “I have found so often that getting the case filed relieves so much of their (client’s) stress,” she says. “I have even had clients contemplating divorce, so they look at getting their debts taken care before. But, after the bankruptcy, they don’t get divorced. Turns out the debts were the major cause of their stress.”
Noda’s advice for others struggling with huge debt and contemplating bankruptcy? “Don’t feel guilty. Filing bankruptcy was an emotional lifesaver for me,” she says.
By Tami Kamin Meyer @girlwithapen Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer who tweets as @agirlwithapen.
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passing, and he should have had two assists in the first half as his through balls put both Kaká and Cerén alone on goal, only to see both of their efforts saved by Bahia goalkeeper Marcelo Lomba.
Overall, Orlando City looked dynamic and dangerous as it pushed forward. Kaká and Molino worked closely under Cyle Larin, who also had a pair of chances he should have finished but couldn't get on frame. Shea looked good overlapping on the left side and caused problems for Bahia, while Ribeiro was a threat driving forward out of the mdifield. Hines' goal-scoring was an amusing note in the preseason finale, but also a sign of Orlando City's development on set pieces in its second season.
The measurement of the team's growth truly begins next Sunday.
ptenorio@orlandosentinel.comBillionaire investor Carl Icahn, who resigned as President Donald Trump’s special adviser on regulations on Friday, did so just hours before The New Yorker magazine published a critical article that detailed his potential conflict of interest and questioned whether he had acted illegally.
Icahn, an early endorser of Trump’s presidential bid and longtime acquaintance, said in a letter he was resigning from the adviser’s post because he “did not want partisan bickering” to distract from the president’s agenda. He also denied any conflict of interest, stating that he “never had access to nonpublic information or profited from my position.”
The New Yorker, however, reported on Friday that Icahn had been pushing to overturn an environmental regulation the investor considered onerous and one that had been costing him hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Under the rule in question, passed by Congress during President George W. Bush’s administration in order to promote biofuels and renewable energy, oil refineries are required to blend ethanol into their products, or, alternatively, to purchase credits known as Renewable Identification Numbers. Icahn in 2012 bought a controlling stake in one such refinery, Texas-based CVR Energy, whose business had depended on buying so-called RINs. Their cost had fluctuated so much by 2016, however, that it had seriously depressed the company’s stock price.
Several weeks after Trump’s victory last November, Icahn was named as an adviser to the president and CVR’s stock doubled on the expectation that the regulation would be repealed, according to The New Yorker.
In February, news leaked that Bob Dinneen, who runs the Renewable Fuels Association, a leading ethanol trade group, had struck a deal with Icahn to change the ethanol blending requirement. The development surprised observers and industry experts because the association had long opposed such a change, the magazine said.
Dinneen told The New Yorker that Icahn had told him that Trump would change the rule through executive order whether or not the ethanol lobbyist objected. Dinneen agreed to the change because he “apparently felt that his only option was to secure whatever concessions he could for his industry,” according to the magazine article.
Trump administration officials denied that any such ethanol executive order was in the works. But one official, speaking anonymously to The New Yorker, said the draft of such an order “was something Icahn sent to us.”
The suggested order was never acted upon, according to the administration officials, in part because changing the congressionally approved regulation is a complex process. But the episode raises questions as to whether Icahn had used his position inappropriately; whether, as The New Yorker puts it, Icahn thought “that he could bluff his way to a change in federal regulation.”
In his statement on Friday, Icahn stressed that he did not use his title and association with the president for personal gain.
“Indeed, out of an abundance of caution, the only issues I ever discussed with you were broad matters of policy affecting the refining industry,” he wrote to Trump. “I never sought any special benefit for any company with which I have been involved, and have only expressed views that I believed would benefit the refining industry as a whole.”
Richard Painter, who served as the Bush administration’s ethics lawyer from 2005-2007, suggested to the magazine that the Justice Department’s public-integrity division investigate Icahn’s actions as a Trump adviser.
“If he was advising on a matter where he had an interest, then Icahn was in direct violation of the criminal statute,” Painter said."I am pro-life. I believe deeply in the sanctity of innocent human life and believe governments have a duty to protect human life. The more our society embraces a culture of life for all people, the better country we will have. Over the course of my 20-year career in elected office, I have been glad to play a leading role in putting in place common-sense policies that protect and defend innocent human life in the Commonwealth. One of those bills was Virginia's informed consent statute, of which I was the chief patron in the House of Delegates, finally seeing its passage in 2001. This session, the General Assembly is now considering amending this informed consent statute to include a requirement that any woman seeking an abortion receive an ultrasound in order to establish the gestational age for appropriate medical purposes, and to offer a woman the opportunity to voluntarily review that ultrasound prior to giving her legal informed consent to abortion.South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison is withdrawing from the race to chair the Democratic National Committee and throwing his support behind former Labor Secretary Tom Perez.
“Despite strong performances at the debate and DNC regional forums, the votes are simply not there for me to secure victory on Saturday,” Harrison said in a Thursday statement announcing his decision. “We have a candidate for DNC Chair who can unite the Democratic Party behind the goal of enacting progressive change, a candidate who can take the fight to Donald Trump and rebuild our Party infrastructure, and a candidate whom I, as a voting member of the DNC, am proud to support: Tom Perez.”
Harrison’s endorsement is a significant pickup for Perez heading into Saturday’s vote in Atlanta. The former labor secretary is locked in a tight race with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Harrison was the third-most popular candidate behind Ellison and Perez, according to an Associated Press report, and his support will now likely go to Perez.
Neither Perez nor Ellison currently has a majority of the 442 party officials eligible to vote. If no candidate wins an outright majority in the first round of voting, there will be additional ballots until a candidate obtains one.
The close state of the contest has set the stage for a scurry of dealmaking in the race’s final days. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley exited the race and endorsed Ellison on Saturday. If Ellison wins, Buckley will lead the DNC’s efforts to revive state Democratic parties, according to the two campaigns.
Joshua Roberts / Reuters South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison speaks during a Democratic National Committee forum in Baltimore on Feb. 11, 2017.
In addition to Perez and Ellison, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton; media strategist Jehmu Greene; Milwaukee attorney Peter Peckarsky and U.S. Air Force veteran Sam Ronan are still in the running.
Harrison turned in one of his most forceful performances of the monthslong campaign at a CNN-sponsored debate on Wednesday night. But the former floor director for then-House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) has failed to gain traction in a race dominated by two figures with major national backing. Until entering the DNC chair race, Harrison worked as lobbyist for the Podesta Group, where he represented the coal, tobacco and financial industries.
Democratic activists and operatives are closely watching the DNC race, viewing it as a proxy battle between the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wing of the party and the Democratic establishment. Ellison endorsed Sanders in the 2016 primary and now has the blessing of Sanders and many of his most active backers. Perez backed Hillary Clinton in the primary, and has earned the endorsement of major figures from the Barack Obama administration, including former Vice President Joe Biden.
But Perez also has strong progressive credentials, winning liberal praise for his leadership of the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. One of his only major policy differences with Ellison is his backing for the now-defunct 12-nation trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.Blackberry (Shutterstock photo)
You would have to go back almost two and a half years to find the last time shares of BlackBerry (BBRY) traded at double digits.
Shares of the embattled Canadian company soared as much as 8% Tuesday, reaching a session high of $10.41 following a huge endorsement from Macquarie analyst Gus Papageorgiou. In a research note to investors on Tuesday, Papageorgiou laid out a scenario where he sees BBRY stock reaching $45 per share, which would translate to a gain of almost 400% from Monday’s close. Calling this prediction bullish would be a gross understatement.
Papageorgiou’s call is centered around the company’s RADAR solution, which he estimates will be the main driver of not only sustainable and predictable revenues, but also higher drive higher margins. Papageorgiou’s model calls for BlackBerry to reach 500,000 RADAR units in the next three years — a number he expects will eventually triple, while raking in $20 per month (on average). He also sees gross margins reaching 50% based on 1 million additional unit sales.
“It’s not hard to see BlackBerry earning $2 billion of software revenue and $1.82 per share of earnings by its fiscal year 2020,” Papageorgiou said, according to The Fly.
The analysts is banking quite a bit on the RADAR system, which according to BlackBerry, is a service designed to provide customers with information about their trailer, chassis, and container fleets that matches reality. “Radar provides more sensor readings more often than any other solution on the market today,” the company says.
Given that BlackBerry is projected to earn 2 cents per share this fiscal year and 8 cents per share next year, $1.82 per share by 2020 seems far away. Can BlackBerry get there? Papageorgiou believes it can. RADAR customers "are seeing a reduction in the amount of trailers needed to manage existing sales thanks to the more efficient use of the assets," says Papageorgiou according to The Fly.
To be sure, Papageorgiou's neck is not completely on the line. His $45 per share target by 2020 is is best-case scenario. Though he has an Outperform rating on BBRY stock, his 12-month price target is $11.80, which calls 15% premium from current levels.
Once the darling of Wall Street for pioneering the smartphone market, the Canadian-based tech giant has since ceded the hardware market to both Apple (AAPL) and Samsung (SSNLF). But all is not lost. Under CEO John Chen, BlackBerry has begun to carve out a niche in software and services. And now Wall Street has begun to take notice about other catalysts the market could be ignoring.The existing federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 provides for the negotiation and execution of tribal-state gaming compacts for the purpose of authorizing certain types of gaming on Indian lands within a state. The California Constitution authorizes the Governor to negotiate and conclude tribal-state gaming compacts, subject to ratification by the Legislature. Existing law expressly ratifies a number of tribal-state gaming compacts, and amendments of tribal-state gaming compacts, between the State of California and specified Indian tribes.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires a lead agency to prepare, or cause to be prepared, and certify the completion of, an environmental impact report on a project, as defined, that it proposes to carry out or approve that may have a significant effect on the environment, as defined, or to adopt a negative declaration if it finds that the project will not have that effect.
This bill would ratify the tribal-state gaming compact entered into between the State of California and the Quechan Tribe of the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, executed on August 31, 2017. The bill would provide that, in deference to tribal sovereignty, certain actions related to that amended compact are not projects for purposes of CEQA.
This bill would declare that it is to take effect immediately as an urgency statute.A black teen in New Jersey seeking to win election to a student government office at a mostly white school was busted for sending racist text messages to himself, ostensibly to garner attention, sympathy and votes, school officials said.
The 16-year-old boy, who was running for president of the student body at Peter’s Prep school in Jersey City, alerted the officials to the texts he received that pushed for him to drop out of the race, the Jersey Journal reported.
They said things like: “We have NEVER and will NEVER have an [N-word] to lead our school.”
Another read: “COMEONE your black!!! lol you’re a joke for even trying to run.”
Administrators subsequently called his father and the police, the Journal reported.
His father said at the time of the investigation that his son was “extremely nervous and feels threatened.”
“It is a predominantly white school and there may be a few sections of the school who are fearful of a new face trying to get in office,” the father said.
Police tracked the texts and ultimately determined that he actually sent them to himself using a phone app called TEXTME.
A source said the teen no longer attends the school. Meanwhile, administrators expressed relief in the finding.
“The entire Saint Peter’s Prep community is relieved that this extremely distressing incident has found closure, and we commend the various law enforcement officials for their diligent work on this case over the past months,” James Horan, a spokesman for the school, told the Journal.
Neither the boy nor his father could be reached for comment in the Journal report.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.If like any red-blooded American capitalist you measure success by growth, these are boom times for Major League Soccer. North America’s top soccer league has gone from just 10 teams in 2004 to a whopping 22, with two more clubs in Los Angeles and Miami set to come online in the couple of seasons. And it’s readying itself to announce two more expansion franchises this fall, then another two next year, with ownership groups in Charlotte, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, Phoenix, Raleigh-Durham, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg lining up to throw $150 million at the chance to own a piece of the soccer pie.
It’s a bit of a strange course for a sports league that isn’t exactly lighting it up in terms of attendance, viewership, or revenue. MLS may be allegedly growing in popularity—you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a claim of its popularity with urban millennials—but it’s still miles behind the England’s Premier League and Spain’s La Liga and Germany’s Bundesliga and probably another half-dozen leagues around the world in terms of both talent and viewership. And as far as North American sports leagues go, it’s a distant fifth behind the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL. When Forbes last looked at MLS finances, it had to perform mathematical contortions to explain why franchise values are rising even as annual losses continue to mount.
That business model and this financial trajectory suggests that MLS’s sea of red ink is either a loss leader or a Ponzi scheme, and it’s not always easy to tell the difference between the two until it’s too late. Several sports economists, though, aren’t optimistic.
“The best indicator of expansion franchise worth is success at the bottom of the league” in revenues, says Stanford economist Roger Noll. For MLS, “that still looks more like AAA baseball except for a few million per year more in TV revenue.”
The University of Michigan’s Stefan Szymanski, co-author of Soccernomics, is even more blunt about MLS’s shortcomings. “Any modern professional sports league, to be profitable, needs to generate a large revenue from broadcasting, and that means you have to have large TV audiences,” he says.
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MLS TV ratings, Szymanski notes, are typically smaller than those in the U.S. for Mexican Liga MX games; MLS games in primetime routinely get lower U.S. ratings than English Premier League games aired on Saturday mornings. “One estimate is that something like 80 percent of the revenue generated by the league is generated from selling tickets,” he says, “and MLS is one of the cheapest tickets in major-league sports.” That’s even when fans pay full price, which seems to be more the exception than the rule.
It all makes the long line of candidates eager to pay MLS’s ever-growing expansion fees—in 2005, you could land a franchise for a mere $10 million—a bit puzzling, says Szymanski: “Why would you buy something for $150 million which is basically giving you a share of losing $100 million a year?”
More importantly, if you’re an MLS fan or a city considering dropping big bucks on a soccer stadium to lure one of the umpteen new teams: What is the end game here? Can MLS continue to expand indefinitely, or is it a bubble destined to burst?
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One likely reason for the league’s furious expansion is the same dynamic that led to Steve Ballmer spending $2 billion to own the Los Angeles goddamn Clippers: There are suddenly a hell of a lot of people with ungodly amounts of money in the U.S., and only so many sports franchises: America now has 540 billionaires and only 123 Big Four teams. If you’re a rich dude with a jones to sit in an owner’s box and hire and fire GMs, MLS may be your best option.
And among the buyers, you’ll find that common sentiment that typifies both successful speculative investments and pyramid schemes alike: hope, shading to wish-fulfillment.
“It’s like buying into in a dot-com in the late ’90s,” says Szymanski. “Although most of the dot-coms went belly-up, if you bought Amazon shares when they were losing a ton of money, you’ve done extraordinarily well.” If soccer continues to grow in popularity, the reasoning goes, that $150 million could turn into a windfall when you suddenly find yourself owner of a franchise in a world-class league.
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And here’s where Szymanski—and, really, anyone who’s not an irredeemable MLS cheerleader—throws up their hands in disbelief. The only way to become a world-class league is to get more soccer fans watching, and the way to do that is to put a product on the pitch that will make Americans tune into their local club. But to do so, MLS owners would need to spend even more money, and incur even greater losses.
It’s the sort of thing that U.S. sports fans are used to having resolved with ungodly amounts of American cash. But MLS is in a uniquely weird position as American leagues go, with its teams competing for players against far better and richer leagues in an international market.
(Technically, it’s MLS as a whole competing for those players, since it’s a “single entity” construct where franchise owners hold shares in the league, which pays player salaries out of its New York office. This helps keep expenses down—no teams engaging in bidding wars for free agents—but also prevents a Guggenheim Management or a Qatar from showing up to spend big on international stars just because. There’s no rising tide to lift all boats.)
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The only way to lure better talent, then, is to find players willing to step down in competition and in fame. So far that’s mostly manifested as spending heavily by MLS standards, but not by international ones, for a handful of old guys with big names who might lure curiosity-seekers through the turnstiles.
As Szymanski and Simon Kuper note in Soccernomics, signing big-money players as loss leaders and punting profits is not uncommon in European soccer. But there, owners in those leagues have incentives that MLS moguls don’t. Many are controlled by fan shareholders who value wins over profits; the Champions and Europa Leagues offers revenue windfalls for teams that finish near the tops of their domestic tables; the fear of having your investment turn to dust—thanks to promotion-and-relegation that exists just about everywhere but here—are all enough to keep spending, even when it can eat up the profits.
MLS has none of this—it’s been especially resistant to promotion and relegation, despite clamor for it from advocates of traditional soccer, and even a recent offer of big media money if it adopted the format. (It doesn’t help that if MLS stuck to a traditional 20-team first division like European leagues, many of the new owners plunking down $150 million for franchises would find themselves suddenly stuck with minor-league teams.) And so we’re left with a league of owners trying to pull off a typical American sports racket—try to turn a profit by chintzing on salaries while still raking in TV money—in an international soccer market that is playing a very different game.
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“MLS would have to go out and throw an absolute fortune at players,” says Szymanski. He was guessing when he said that the average Premier League team spends more on player salaries than all 22 MLS clubs combined, but he’s right: £91.68 million per Premier League team last year, or about $121 million at the current exchange rate, vs. $99 million for all of MLS.) “MLS spending is somewhere between Belgium and Romania,” Szymanski notes, and neither of those leagues is anywhere near being a threat to break into the upper echelons of club soccer.
The potentially worrying part is, this is all no secret. “[MLS commissioner] Don Garber’s not an idiot,” Szymanski says, “and most of these owners are very successful businessmen in their own right.”
So what’s their end game, then?
“I do struggle as to how to explain this.”
If Garber’s long-term strategy for the league doesn’t exactly make sense, the endless cycle of expansion does: If you can’t make money either of the old-fashioned or sustainable ways, you might as well recruit a new batch of suckers to boost your bottom line in the short run. It’s a marginally more respectable version of the same business model that the owners of the American Basketball Association—not the original one, but the 1999 minor league that inherited the red-white-and-blue ball and little else—happened upon when it decided to start issuing franchises to anyone with a $10,000 check, with predictably chaotic results. Here’s a long, long list of franchises that have gone under.
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It also helps to explain MLS’s otherwise puzzling insistence on making a brand-new, soccer-only stadium a primary condition for anointing new franchises. This would be madness in Europe, where teams, especially newly promoted ones, often end up playing in grounds that look like they were pieced together out of spare parts. If you’re running a normal sports league, Cincinnati’s 20,000-a-game attendance for its USL team would be a tasty lure; if you’re running a pyramid scam, maybe it’s better to take El Paso if they’re willing to throw public money at a stadium deal and Cincinnati won’t.
(This demand is useful as leverage, but flexible if you’re bringing enough money into the league. After all, MLS backed down on its “soccer-only” requirement when the owners of the Atlanta Falcons and New York Yankees decided to apply for teams to play in their new football and baseball stadiums, respectively.)
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Crunch time for MLS, in Szymanski’s view, will come with the league’s next broadcast contract, when the league’s current $90 million-a-year deal expires in 2024. If what remains of the cable TV industry then doesn’t come up with a relatively staggering figure—something in the $300-400 million range would be required, he estimates, which doesn’t seem likely—“I think owners will start to think about an alternative.”
At that point, he says, promotion-and-relegation advocates may get their wish, albeit not the way they might prefer. Contracting a good chunk of the league, leaving only around 20 teams and entering into a pro/rel agreement with the NASL or USL, he says, could be “an honorable way for those who want to get out to get out”—similar to what Japan’s J-League did in the 1990s.
Whether current MLS honchos actually have this in mind now, or are still guzzling their own Kool-Aid, is tough to say. But for most big-market teams and early adopters, even if the expand-o-ganza goes south, it’s a fair bet they’ll be left with a chair when the music stops—franchises like New York and Los Angeles should be safe and potentially profitable, even if the likes of Raleigh or Nashville might be screwed.
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That might end up being good for soccer in the U.S. overall, and would at the very least provide American fans with a sports league where franchises can no longer levy relocation threats to get their way. (In a pro/rel system, if a team leaves town, you can just find a new owner to start a lower-level team to put in its place and then have them work their way back up via winning seasons.) But it would be a disaster for cities that are counting on at investing money in soccer stadiums in hopes of an economic windfall from getting into the “big leagues.” If that’s the game you’re playing, it might be better just for your city just to buy an ABA franchise instead. It’s far more certain to crash and burn, but at least you’d only be out 10 grand.
Neil deMause has covered sports economics for more publications than even he can shake a stick at. He’s co-author of the book Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit, and runs the website of the same name.Would you Adam and Eve it? Why creation story is at heart of a new spiritual divide
The biblical account of creation and the fate of Adam and Eve, progenitors of the human race, continues to inspire artists and writers. But according to a groundbreaking new survey, it is also at the heart of a deep misunderstanding between religious and non-religious Britons.
A YouGov poll, commissioned by Newman University in Birmingham, has found that 72% of atheists polled believe that someone who is religious would not accept evolutionary science. In fact, only 19% of religious respondents in the poll rejected Darwinian thinking in favour of a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.
According to the research, nearly two-thirds of Britons – as well as nearly three-quarters of atheists – think Christians have to accept the assertion in Genesis that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But just 16% of believers accept the creation myth – according to which, in the words of the questionnaire, “humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form”. Only 9% of all Britons reject evolutionary theory.
According to Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker, who led the research, the findings suggest a need to revise stereotypes when it comes to Christian belief in Britain. “In a society that is increasingly non-religious, this mismatch in perception could be seen as a form of prejudice towards religious or spiritual groups,” she said. “It may be one of the contributing factors in religious groups or individuals saying they see a conflict between science and religion.”
According to the British Attitudes Survey, religious belief is continuing to decline in Britain, but the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord (Rowan) Williams, says the YouGov survey confirms that a presumed incompatibility between science and religion is “a phoney war”.
Questioning evolution is neither science denial nor the preserve of creationists Read more
“The number of mainstream Christians – certainly in this country – who have qualms about evolutionary theory is very small indeed,” said Williams. “But perceptions are different, and the presence of US-style fundamentalism in the popular imagination means that a growing number who know nothing of the actual history of intellectual discussion of these questions assume that all religious believers must be committed to combating scientific accounts of the universe’s beginnings.”
The Newman University research also revealed an intriguing misconception about scientists who are also religious. One in three people polled said that they thought a scientist who is religious is much more likely than an atheist scientist to find it “very difficult, difficult or somewhat difficult to accept information about evolutionary science, in reference to their own personal beliefs or way of seeing the world”.
According to a separate survey by the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) – a group devoted to marrying evidence-based science and spiritual practice – 25% of professionals working in science, medicine and engineering describe themselves as atheists, and 45% as religious (practising or not) or “spiritual”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
Guy Hayward, research fellow at SMN, said: “It is clear from this survey by Newman University that non-believers have very little idea about what believers believe. They seem to be responding to a caricature based on American creationists, rather than reality. Even in America, creationist beliefs in the literal truth of Genesis are not shared by most mainstream Christians. In fact, many scientists have religious or spiritual beliefs and do not see these as conflicting with science.”
The story of God’s creation of Adam and Eve, and their eventual exile from the Garden of Eden, is a bedrock of cultural history. This month, Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt published an acclaimed new volume on the subject, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, which recounts the impact of the Bible narrative on Michelangelo, the poet John Milton, and German artist and printmaker Lucas Cranach the Elder, among others. Greenblatt also points out how the role of Eve, who breaks God’s law by eating an apple from the tree of knowledge, has been used to justify misogyny and was used by thinkers such as St Augustine to develop theories of man’s essential sinfulness.
According to Williams, Britain’s churches should be doing more to explain modern theological thinking on the origin of life. “Christians need to be clearer about what the doctrine of creation does and doesn’t mean,” he said. “To say that all things depend unilaterally on the eternal action of God is not the same as saying that specific steps in the universe’s history must be the direct result of divine intervention.
“Christians and scientists need to be more ready to discuss the history of scientific discovery, they need to recognise that their supposed ‘war’ is just fiction. Scientific education badly needs to develop an awareness of this intellectual history and to acknowledge that old-style mechanistic accounts of the material world are no longer adequate.”
A previous survey of Britons, in 2014, indicated that 19% of people held creationist views, suggesting a sizable (10 percentage points) drop in the past three years, although this could be due to variations in sampling methods.- 2018 USL expansion club Fresno FC announced on Tuesday the addition of three key front office staff, officially welcoming Assistant General Manager Jeremy Schultz, Vice President of Ticket Sales & Service Fred Matthes and Director of Marketing & Communications Jordan Wiebe to the club in their respective roles.
- Sixteen cities with independent USL clubs have been ranked in the top 40 nationally as one of the best for soccer fans in the United States, according to a ranking by WalletHub.com released on Wednesday. Cincinnati was the highest-ranked city with a USL team in the survey at No. 18, while Sacramento claimed the site's highest USL ranking in addition to being named 21st overall.
- Tulsa Roughnecks FC (12-10-4, 40pts) strengthened its hold on a place in the 2017 USL Cup Playoffs with a 3-1 victory against Vancouver Whitecaps FC 2 (5-14-7, 22pts) on Wednesday night at MacLeod Athletic Park. Joey Calistri had a goal and assist in a two-minute span after coming on as a substitute to see the Roughnecks home as the side took seven points from its three-game trip to Cascadia.
- The Tampa Bay Rowdies (11-7-8, 41pts) earned just their second road win of the season with a 3-2 victory against the Harrisburg City Islanders (6-14-6, 24pts) on Wednesday night at FNB Field. Georgi Hristov scored twice to reach 10 goals for the season, and Martin Paterson also found the net as Tampa Bay moved back into fourth place in the Eastern Conference ahead of this weekend’s action.
- The New York Red Bulls II (10-11-5, 35pts) are on a five-game undefeated streak as they visit Toronto FC II (5-15-7, 22 points) at BMO Field on Saturday night (8 p.m. ET | Match Center), which has moved the side into the top eight in the USL Eastern Conference. The Red Bulls II earned a 4-2 victory against the Tampa Bay Rowdies last Saturday to continue their recent run (3-0-2), with Andrew Tinari and Florian Valot both scoring their second goals in as many games in the win. Toronto was held to a 1-0 defeat by the Rochester Rhinos on Saturday night, and remains in last place in the Eastern Conference. The Reds might take inspiration from the chance to play at BMO Field, however, where earlier this season they played to a 2-2 draw with the second-place Charlotte Independence.
- Sacramento Republic FC (10-8-6, 36pts) is looking to break a four-game winless streak when it visits the Rio Grande Valley FC (7-12-7, 28 points) at H-E-B Park on Saturday night (8:30 p.m. ET | Match Center), with the Toros fast slipping out of playoff contention with a five-game winless streak of their own. Sacramento was on course for victory in its last outing until a late equalizer by Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC earned a 2-2 draw at Papa Murphy’s Park. Republic FC is now nine points back of the fourth-place Swope Park Rangers as their hopes of a home playoff game are fading. Rio Grande Valley’s hopes of being part of the postseason at all are in similar shape, with a six-point gap to the playoff positions. After a 1-0 loss to the LA Galaxy II on Sunday the Toros are now in must-win territory with six games to go.
- Saint Louis FC (8-11-7, 31pts) is in major need of a victory as it returns home from a three-game road trip to host the Harrisburg City Islanders at Toyota Stadium – Saint Louis (8:30 p.m. ET | Match Center). Saint Louis took two points from its trip to face Rochester, Toronto and Ottawa, including a 2-2 draw last Sunday against Fury FC that had seen the visitors rally to take a second-half lead at TD Place only to concede late to their hosts. Sitting four points out of a playoff position with six games to play, STLFC will hope to take all three points against a Harrisburg side that fell in midweek to the Tampa Bay Rowdies for its sixth consecutive defeat.
- Real Monarchs SLC (17-4-4, 55pts) will look to rebound from its first home defeat of the season when it visits the Portland Timbers 2 (2-18-5, 11pts) on Saturday night at Providence Park (10 p.m. ET | Match Center). Real clinched a place in the 2017 USL Cup Playoffs despite falling 2-1 against San Antonio FC last Saturday night, with a pair of late goals by the visitors earning victory at Rio Tinto Stadium. The Monarchs still hold a seven-point lead at the top of the Western Conference but will be looking to rebound quickly to keep their cushion intact. T2 has earned back-to-back draws coming into Saturday’s game after holding Tulsa Roughnecks FC to a 1-1 tie last Sunday.
- Seattle Sounders FC 2 (9-15-2, 29pts) is in must-win territory when it faces the challenge of second-place Reno 1868 FC (14-5-6, 48pts) on Saturday night at Starfire Stadium (10:30 p.m. ET | Match Center). 1868 FC took a 2-1 victory against the LA Galaxy II on Wednesday night to extend its winning streak to six games and is now level on points with San Antonio FC in the race for playoff position at the top of the Western Conference. Seattle suffered a 2-0 defeat against Phoenix Rising FC last Saturday to further diminish the club’s playoff hopes as it suffered its second consecutive loss. S2 is now five points out of the playoff positions with six games to go, putting the pressure on if the side is to reach the postseason for a second time in three seasons.
- San Antonio FC (13-2-9, 48pts) will look to build on a big road victory when it visits the LA Galaxy II (7-14-4, 25pts) at the StubHub Center Track and Field Stadium on Saturday night (10:30 p.m. ET | Match Center). San Antonio moved within seven points of Real Monarchs SLC at the top of the Western Conference with a 2-1 win last Saturday against Real and also has a game in hand to try and close the gap further. SAFC’s win against the Monarchs also gave the side its first back-to-back wins in league action since May 20-26, with the side having gone 4-2-7 since that point. Los Dos are coming off a 2-1 defeat against Reno 1868 FC on Wednesday night that put the side close to elimination from playoff contention, sitting nine points out of a playoff spot with seven games to go.
- OKC Energy FC (9-10-6, 33pts) is looking for a bounce-back performance when it hosts Vancouver Whitecaps FC 2 on Sunday evening at Taft Stadium (6 p.m. ET | Match Center). Energy FC slipped out of the playoff positions last Saturday as it fell 2-0 to the Swope Park Rangers. OKC is still in fair shape to make the postseason despite the loss but will need to pick up wins in games like this against sides below it in the standings to do so. Fourteenth-place Vancouver is coming off a 3-1 loss on Wednesday night to Energy FC’s Oklahoma rival Tulsa Roughnecks FC, its second defeat in the past three games.Title: Dreaming of Sunshine
Summary: Life as a ninja. It starts with confusion and terror and doesn't get any better from there. OC Self-insert.
AN: Okay, so, some of you have been around since the start of the fic, and some of you might have scrolled up to see, but it should be pretty obvious that DOS is old as balls by now. It was started long before canon was finished – as such, there are |
usually comes up with something pretty good, so I just let him get on with it.” It’s very good, I say. Johnson laughs. “No spoilers, but does he get better in the end?”
But most of all, he’s clearly bemused by the fact that he’s alive. “I’ve found myself back in the land of the living, and it’s kind of difficult to adjust my consciousness back from the idea that death is a terrible thing in the imminent future.” Long pause. “The idea of death, now, to me, is just as dreadful as it was before. Really! Obviously, I have to go for regular check-ups and things. Everything’s all clear so far, but it sometimes crosses my mind: ‘What if they said it’s back and there’s nothing we can do?’ I mean, it gives me the horrors. I can’t think: ‘Oh, that’s all right, I’ve done that before, I can handle it.’”
When he received his initial diagnosis, he says, he felt a kind of transcendence: “Such insights and feelings, a kind of intensity of just being that I’ve never felt since youth. Sometimes the insights and ecstasies and whatever were so intense, I’d think, ‘Man, this is almost worth it!’ Not quite, but almost.”
Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson on Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto Read more
But nothing similar happened when he was given the all-clear. He remembers applauding the doctor when he was told they’d got all the cancer, but nothing approaching the Blakean revelations about seeing the world in a grain of sand that he’d felt when he was told he was dying. “The thing is, getting the diagnosis, you’re sitting there and the doctor says: ‘You’ve got cancer.’ What does that take? One second to say something like that? And bang, the universe changes, nothing will ever be the same. You’re so far from everything. But there’s no corresponding thing on the other end, because on the other end, it’s a long, long road to recovery, and you’re not feeling on top of the world. The reason for all those ideas I had was that I was faced with my imminent dissolution, and you can’t fake that. You’re either really, really faced with death or you’re not. And now I’m not, I’m looking on all that like a dream, and thinking, ‘Yes, I remember that intensity.’ I hoped I’d brought something with me, but … ” Another long pause. “I feel like I’m parachuting back into the land of the living and looking around thinking, ‘Oh well.’”
He laughs again. “When I was making the album with Roger, I really thought I was at the end. I’d think, ‘Man, I can’t complain, I’ve lived to be fairly old, I’ve had a really good life and I’m making an album with Roger Daltrey! What a fantastic ending!’ It built up to this fantastic climax, and then suddenly the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet by a brilliant surgeon! It is a bit of an anticlimax in a way.”
He keeps chuckling while he says things like that, but the more he talks, the more clear it becomes how complicated his response to being cured is: he’s obviously incredibly grateful, but it isn’t as straightforward as “waving my arms in the air, going ‘I’m alive!’” After a lifelong struggle with depression, he found the illness evaporated when he thought he had 10 months to live. Now it’s back. “For instance, since coming out and recovering, oh man, I’ve started grieving for my wife, Irene, again. It’s 10 years, nearly 11 since she died, and I never, ever got over her. I just … ” He lets out a huge sigh. “I’m still in love with her. And it hurts now, to think of her. During all that year, I dunno, if you’ve got no future, you do think, ‘Well, I don’t have to sit here and think about how I’ve got to go on for years without her.’ So perhaps it receded a bit, just thinking about her every quarter of an hour instead of every minute. Now I’m recovered, I do find myself sometimes … ” His voice tails off, and there’s another mammoth sigh. “Oh man, it hurts.”
Wilko Johnson and Roger Daltrey: Going Back Home review – blistering R&B that's full of joie de vivre Read more
He’s wary, too, of his illness overshadowing the rest of his life, of being more famous as “the Cancer Bloke rather than a guitar player or whatever”: after a while, during his illness, he started to turn down interviews for precisely that reason. Still, he deadpans, “the cancer business was a pretty cool career move”. By Johnson’s own admission, his solo career since leaving Dr Feelgood had always been “chaotic”: he never had a manager, “stumbled from one wrong decision to another” and recorded a scant handful of albums in 30 years, due to “a fairly lackadaisical attitude”. But his album with Daltrey went to No 2, and on his comeback tour, earlier this year, he headlined the Royal Albert Hall. “Now we’re out on the road again, we’re playing twice-as-big gigs as we ever did before. Oh yeah, it was a fabulous career move. I mean, in your old age, to suddenly regenerate your audience like that, it was great.”
In truth, Johnson’s star was already on the rise before his diagnosis, thanks to Oil City Confidential. Prior to the film’s release, Dr Feelgood had been one of the great you–had-to-be-there bands. Listening to their records, you could just about work out how striking their stark, belligerent take on rhythm and blues must have seemed in 1974 or 75 – as if some of the desperation and nihilism of the era of pub bombings and stagflation had seeped into the bones of old songs like Rollin’ and Tumblin’ or Riot in Cell Block No 9. But it was hard to really grasp the apparently life-changing effect of seeing the band on stage, to which everyone from Weller and Strummer to Bob Geldof and the KLF’s Bill Drummond has attested, until you saw the old live footage that Temple assembled.
They looked like three villains from The Sweeney who’d been forced to keep an eye on someone’s awkward nephew – Johnson, who, while the other members glowered, would fling himself around the stage, occasionally colliding with his bandmates, raising his guitar to his shoulder like a gun, his mouth perpetually open, his eyes bulging with the effects of amphetamines beneath a pudding-basin haircut: “Me and Lemmy always used to have this saying that the third day you’re up on speed is the best, because it feels like your skull is full of Rice Krispies and someone’s just poured milk into your thought processes – it’s great.”
Moreover, the latterday Johnson emerged as the film’s star turn. Far from the borderline psychopath he appeared to be on stage, or the petulant nightmare he was reputed to be off it (“at times Mr Johnson could a bit of a ballerina,” noted the late Ian Dury, after Wilko’s brief post-Feelgood tenure in the Blockheads), Johnson was revealed as a hugely engaging, entirely unaffected English eccentric: an astronomy fanatic who’d built an observatory on the roof of his otherwise unassuming terraced house, a Shakespeare- and Milton-quoting medieval scholar, fluent in, of all things, Old Icelandic, who referred to his on-stage movements as “skittering”, a word he noted also appeared in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wilko Johnson and Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood on stage in 1975. Photograph: Mick Gold/Redferns
It was in Oil City Confidental that the makers of Game of Thrones spotted him. He says he might return to the series now he’s better, but he doesn’t have any plans, musical or otherwise. “I can’t get my head around the idea that I’ve got a future. All of that was turned off back at the beginning, whenever it was. People talk about what we’re doing later this year – we’re touring supporting Status Quo, actually. But that’s all too far in the future for me to look on as something that’s really going to come. I’ve come through this adventure, I’m nearly 68. I can’t learn a new job. Just keep on playing, that’s as far as my planning goes.”
In the meantime, he is focused on trying to maintain a resolution he made while recovering from his operation. He was in pain and protesting that he wanted to go home, when he had a revelation: “I suddenly realised there were all these people, that I never even saw, looking down microscopes and all that, doing all this for me. And I kind of gave myself a good talking to.” He resolved never to complain about anything ever again: to be, as he puts it, “less of a twat”.
The thing is, he says, it’s not that easy: if there’s one thing he’s learned since he recovered, it’s that human nature isn’t as straightforward as you might hope. “I got in an awful ruck at Glastonbury,” he nods sadly. “We got there to play the gig, and the fucking security, some muppet in a yellow jacket, started searching all our bags. Like he had powers beyond the law! A policeman can’t do that!” He’s shouting now. “That made me very fucking angry, actually. I mean, Jesus Christ! I’m suddenly surrendering my civil liberties to a fucking idiot! Can you imagine what that feels like? Bleedin’ nerve! Yeah, that really, really pissed me off.” And then, as if catching sight of himself, he lowers his voice. “But I do think, actually, since my illness, I have become a lot more tolerant and easygoing,” he says. “I mean, I suffer most fools gladly.”
The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson is in cinemas from 17 JulyDan O'Bannon, the man who gave the world Alien and Total Recall, has died aged 63, the New York Times reports.
O'Bannon passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, last Thursday, as a result of the gastrointestinal disorder Crohn’s disease, which he'd suffered for 30 years.
O'Bannon's sci-fi screenwriting career began when he and fellow University of Southern California film school student John Carpenter hooked up to write the low-budget Dark Star, which made its way to the big screen in 1974.
After a stint working as a computer animator on Star Wars, O'Bannon penned Alien, of which he said: “I love gore films and I grew up with ’50s monster movies. The idea for the monster in Alien originally came from a stomach ache I had.”
His other contributions to cinema include screenplays for The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which he directed, Total Recall (1990), Screamers (1995) and Bleeders (1997).
O'Bannon also helmed 1992's The Resurrected, based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft, who he applauded as “the greatest horror writer who ever lived". ®If you’re a regular reader of this website, then you already know how I feel about drugs. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking things that improve the quality of your life. As long as they are taken intelligently and responsibly.
And apparently neither does the American population. About 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug. And a large percentage of them are on psychotropic drugs, like anti-depressants, anxiolytics (anti-anxiety drugs), mood stabilizers, and sleeping pills.
Many prescription drugs come with tons of side effects. And you’re not free to use what you want: you need to get them prescribed by your physician.
But what some people may not realize, is that there are tons and tons of perfectly legal drugs, herbs, plants, and supplements out there that can be used to treat a variety of things. A 2007 study found that almost 40% of American were using some kind of alternative medicine.
There’s things like valerian, l-theanine, and kava that reduce anxiety. There’s mood-boosting supplements like St. John’s Wort and Sam-E. And then there’s kratom.
What is kratom?
Kratom (aka Mitragyna speciosa) is a plant that is native to southeast Asia. It is in the same family as the coffee plant.
It has been used for centuries as a pain reliever, a mild stimulant, to treat diarrhea, to treat premature ejaculation, reduce anxiety, and to treat opiate addiction. There are countless reports all over the internet of people using kratom to treat their addiction to prescription and illegal opiates.
The way that kratom works, at least in part, is by activating the same receptors in the brain that opiates, like morphine or oxycodone do. Specifically, it has been shown to bind to the mu and kappa opioid receptors.
But it is not nearly as powerful as these prescription pain killers. And it doesn’t cause the dangerous respiratory depression that most prescription opiates do.
In fact, kratom has stimulating effects, as well. More and more chronic pain sufferers are turning to kratom because it helps them manage their pain without making them drowsy, like prescription pain killers.
Is kratom safe?
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of research done on long-term kratom use. Kratom, when used responsibly, seems to be safe long term. People have been using kratom for centuries, and it doesn’t seem to cause any long-term health problems.
Like anything with psychoactive properties, it can be addictive for some people. And long-term, high dosage use will result in some mild withdrawal symptoms.
But these withdrawal symptoms are very, very mild compared to prescription painkillers, like morphine and oxycodone. And they can be avoided all together by tapering your dosage over the course of a couple of weeks.
By using kratom responsibly, you can avoid dependence and withdrawal. If you keep your dosages reasonable and you only use kratom a few times a week, you won’t run into any of these problems.
Are there side effects?
Everything you put in your body has desirable effects and side effects. Your perspective determines which are which.
Take caffeine, for example. If you are drinking coffee because you want to pull an all-nighter, then coffee’s wakefulness-promoting effects are desirable. But if you drink coffee in the afternoon to give you energy but then have trouble falling asleep at night, then that same effect is now a side effect.
Kratom is no different. It has a number of effects, some of which you may find desirable, some you may not.
Some of the generally desirable effects of kratom can include an increase in motivation, focus, and energy, improved mood, decreased anxiety, reduced pain, delayed ejaculation, and increased creativity.
Some of the generally undesirable effects can include constipation, increased anxiety, reduced libido, dry mouth, nausea, gastrointestinal distress, and vomiting.
A lot of these effects are dose-dependent. The gastrointestinal problems are generally only seen with higher doses.
My experience with kratom
I first discovered kratom a couple of years ago. They were selling it at a gas station near my work.
As I always do, I did a ton of research before deciding to try it. I always learn everything I can about anything I put in my body. I’m willing to take risks, but they are always calculated risks.
Anyway, after reading through medical journals, websites, and a number of forums, I decided to buy some kratom and try it.
I have a lot of experience with prescription pain killers. If you are familiar with me and my story, you know that I’ve been living with an autoimmune disease for over 20 years. Many of those years were filled with pain, and I’ve been on just about every prescription pain killer at one time or another.
The first time I tried kratom, I was amazed at how opiod-like it was. I could feel the pain relieving effects within ½ hour. And I also experienced the pleasant but mild euphoria that goes along with low-dose opiate use.
But I also found it to be mildly stimulating. Almost like a low dose of amphetamines. If I had to compare my first kratom experience to any prescription drugs, I would say it felt like I had taken maybe 5-10 milligrams of amphetamines (Adderall) and 5-10 milligrams of oxy- or hydrocodone (Percocet or Vicodin).
Since my first experience with kratom was overwhelmingly positive, I decided to experiment a little more.
I found some online vendors and ordered some different strains. Kratom usually comes in one of three colored strains: red, green, and white.
White strains are the most stimulating. Red strains are the most sedating, and generally are the best for treating pain. And green strains are the best of both worlds. They are mildly stimulating while relieving pain and being mildly sedating.
Over time I tried a variety of different strains from different vendors. Each type that I tried had slightly different effects.
Now I use kratom regularly. Not everyday, but at least several times a week. It helps me to manage pain, improve my mood, and to reduce my anxiety.
At one point I was taking it every day, several times a day, and at pretty high doses. My pain was bad at the time, and the kratom worked better than the prescription painkillers that I had.
But I wanted to see how bad the withdrawal would be if I stopped, so I tried it. I knew that if it was too bad I could just take some kratom to reverse it.
I was amazed at how mild the withdrawal was. Runny nose and some mild chills. That’s it. And it only lasted for a day, then I felt completely normal.
The kratom withdrawal wasn’t even as bad as caffeine withdrawal.
I have been through full-blown opiate withdrawal, and that is terrible. Stomach pain, diarrhea, depressed mood, insomnia, and extreme anxiety. Kratom withdrawal was nothing like that.
Opiate withdrawal is like having a really bad case of the flu. Kratom withdrawal is like having a mild cold.
All things considered, I think kratom is great. It provides a modest mood-boost, reduces my anxiety, and helps to control mild to moderate pain.
Conclusion
More and more people are turning to kratom as an alternative to dangerous and highly addictive prescription painkillers.
Although more research needs to be done to conclusively determine that it’s safe for long-term use, it seems to be safe when used responsibly.
Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies and politicians that are more concerned with money and their careers than the welfare of the public have been attempting to ban kratom.
Drug companies don’t like kratom because people are using it instead of their dangerous and addictive drugs. And since a “tough on drugs” approach is usually good for a a political career, some politicians are trying to ban kratom in their states. Even though most of them have no idea what it actually is.
And then there’s the media. News stations love to run fear-driven stories about unknown drugs. I’ve seen and read stories from news channels comparing kratom to heroin, crack, and methamphetamine. How absurd! It’s closer to a strong cup of coffee than any of those things. And, if you recall, the kratom plant is in the same family as the coffee plant.
But the people are speaking up. In several states, uninformed politicians have proposed legislation to ban kratom. And through letter writing campaigns, phone calls, education, and the raising of awareness, the people have helped to swat down such ridiculous legislation.
Kratom has been a miracle plant for chronic pain sufferers and for people struggling with opiate addiction. It’s certainly helped me.
If you suffer from pain, drug addiction, or are just looking for something to give you a modest mood boost, check it out. And if you’ve used kratom or have an opinion about it, I’d love to hear all about it in the comments section below.Disclaimer: RWBY and all affiliated characters/titles belong to Rooster Teeth, those wonderful geniuses.
Yang stooped low and retrieved her dropped fork from the floor, she turned it over in her hand, inspecting it for any obvious signs of dirt or grime and saw none so she returned it to her tray. She looked about the cafeteria, scanning for anyone she knew, anyone to sit with. She and Nora were well into their third week as a couple and hadn't spent a lunch period apart that entire time. Today Nora had some things she had to do with her team so Yang was on her own for lunch. It wasn't that she felt lost without her, or even uncomfortable in the absence of the energetic redheaded girl. It was just that she had slipped so easily into their routine that now being out of it felt slightly alien to her.
Usually they would grab their food and rush to the nearest spot of table they could find to wolf it down before any of their other friends arrived. That would leave the rest of the period open for discussion and chatter amongst themselves and any friends who had the period free to come spend with them. Lately, it meant that they could sometimes sneak away to a secluded corner or a luckily empty dorm room to have some personal time with each other, to ease the tension that built between them all day long. They didn't do it often Yang thought, only twice this week. Then she checked herself and realized that it was only Wednesday, they had snuck off together every day this week. Yang shook her head with a gentle laugh and looked for her little sister and team leader, she needed to spend more time with her.
A quick scan of the room revealed Ruby seated with Weiss off to one side of the hall, they were sitting with one another and chatting amicably. She hadn't so much seen her diminutive little sister, as much as she had seen the platinum ponytail of her partner bouncing back and forth while she talked. That girl's hair was visible from a mile away, not great for sneaking up on opponents. Watching the two talk Yang thought they looked happy. Ruby had said she was still having trouble bonding with Weiss, but if the two of them were sitting and talking like that, it had to be a good sign. For a moment she considered not interrupting the two, not wanting to intrude on their bonding, but then decided that it couldn't hurt. They were one big team after all and she needed to make nice with Weiss almost as much as Ruby did, so she headed over.
"What's up shorties?" Yang tossed her over loaded tray down, sending her fork clattering back to the floor and flashed them both a smile.
"Honestly Yang, do you ever behave with dignity." Weiss turned her icy stare on the blonde.
"You dropped your fork." Ruby reached down and scooped the utensil up from where it had fallen beneath the table and handed it to her sister.
"Oh thanks Rubes." Yang took the fork happily and speared a piece of meat, shoving it into her mouth. Weiss's mouth practically hit the table in shock.
"That was just on the floor. The dirty floor where all of our shoes go." Weiss shuddered slightly in disgust, "And you're eating with it?" Yang's eyes opened a little wider and she regarded Weiss with surprise. She swallowed the bite in her mouth.
"What? It's just the floor." Yang chuckled and looked at the fork, "It's not even dirty see?" she held it out and rotated it around for Weiss to see.
"This floor is absolutely disgusting, I even have trouble eating in here because of it. Just look." Weiss indicated the rather shiny laminate floor beneath them, "Think about how many dirty shoes and combat boots trod on this, and I have never seen the custodial staff properly clean it."
"Relax Princess. It's just a little dirt." Yang tried to give Weiss a smile but the girl shot her a disdainful glare.
"I will never understand how you two made it this far without me." Weiss raised herself from her seat and strode away.
"Where do you think she's going?" Ruby watched her partner leave and then turned back to her the table.
"I dunno." Yang looked after the heiress and then returned her attention to her sister with a chuckle, "How have you been Rubes? You two look like you're getting along better." Yang smiled and began eating again, adopting a pace that would let her respond without spitting food all over the place or mumbling unintelligibly through a mass of unchewed goodness.
"Oh yeah, we've been training together a lot lately and I think she's starting to see all the work I've been putting in." Ruby smiled hard, "Plus she had an issue with the actuator on her rapier the other day and I took it apart for her and fixed it and she said the revolver's rotation is even smoother now." Ruby's pride in her work was evident in her grin, she was nothing if not good with weapons.
"That's awesome sis', I'm glad the Ice Queen's warming up to you." Yang chuckled and Ruby let out a little giggle, there was the smile Yang knew so well.
"I am not an Ice Queen." Weiss stomped her foot from where she stood off to Ruby's side.
"Oh I'm sorry Snow Flake," Yang said sarcastically, "I didn't mean to offend the royalty." Weiss jerked her hand forward, holding a fork out to Yang.
"Here, I got you a clean fork so you don't have to eat like an animal." Yang reached forward and accepted the fork gratefully from Weiss.
"Aww shucks, thanks. I could almost kiss you." Yang laughed and Weiss turned away in indignation.
"Oooh Yang. I'm gonna tell Nora," Ruby stuck her tongue out at her older sister with a giggle.
"Nora knows she's got me by the hair, don't worry." Yang laughed and switched the new fork to her right hand, leaving the old one discarded to the side. Ruby gasped at her expression.
"That bad huh?" Ruby asked as Weiss retook her seat.
"Yeah," Yang chuckled a little nervously, "She got me hard." Yang smiled and looked down at her food happily, "I don't even know how it happened, I just sorta fell for her." Yang looked back up at the pair across from her.
"Are you hiding a secret romantic in there?" Weiss craned her head back and forth, as if trying to see something Yang was hiding, "Because if so, you're doing a pretty good job of it." Ruby laughed more openly and playfully pushed at Weiss's shoulder.
"My sister is plenty romantic, didn't you hear she and Nora are trying to help Blake out with her man problems?" Ruby looked back to Yang, hoping for some sort of confirmation.
"Where did you hear that?" Yang gave her little sister an inquisitive eye under which Ruby withered.
"Umm… uhhh… no where." Ruby's eyes darted up to meet Yang's which were still boring into her and then back down to her lap, "From Jaune." Yang sighed in realization.
"Nora can not keep a secret at all." Yang laughed in resignation, "Oh well, I guess the cat's outta the bag," Yang shot them both with little finger guns and wiggled her eyebrows, Ruby sighed and shook her head and Weiss failed to suppress a groan.
"Yang, are you ever serious?" Weiss looked up from pinching her nose to meet Yang's jovial grin.
"I am very, extremely serious about two things." Yang leveled a grimace at Weiss and held up two fingers, "My hair," she pulled back on one finger with her opposite hand, "and eventually finishing this lunch," she pulled back the other finger and Weiss groaned again. Yang fell to devouring her food and Weiss turned to Ruby with a resigned shake of her head.
"So what's going on with Blake?" Ruby had returned to her usually over energetic self watching Yang and her partner joke with each other.
"Oh, just that she has a crush on Sun, that Faunus boy that helped us fight the Atlas mech. She was having trouble asking him out or whatever and so she asked Yang and Nora for help. They tried taking them out for a like double date to hint to Sun that Blake liked him but they had to leave really early so I don't know if it worked." Ruby plowed through the entire explanation in a single breath and then sat there with a little smile on her face, happy to divulge a secret.
"Ruby, thasch shoo not cool." Yang muffled out of her full mouth. Ruby's little smile faded again to worry and then back to a smile when Weiss rested a comforting hand on her shoulder.
"I wouldn't tell a soul Ruby. We are all one team so we should all know, but I promise this secret will stay with me." Weiss gave Ruby a rare warm smile that made Ruby brighten up even more. Ruby pulled out her scroll.
"Weiss can I take a picture with you?" Ruby slid in beside her without waiting for an answer and lifted the scroll. She hadn't unlocked it yet and Weiss's eyes fell directly on the time displayed on the screen.
"Ruby. We are gonna be late." Weiss practically screamed in shock. Ruby's eyes flew open even wider than usual as she saw the time as well.
"Ahh I totally forgot we have to be in Oobleck's class early today." Ruby pocketed the scroll and looked down at her and Weiss's mess from lunch, "I got this, don't worry, we won't be late." Ruby started babbling, doing more to psyche herself up than to reassure Weiss. There was a flash of rose petals and the trash vanished, seconds later Ruby reappeared next to Weiss, "Okay, okay let's go. Bye Yang." Ruby grasped Weiss by the wrist and there was another flash of petals that trailed away down the hall. Yang watched the two depart and listened to Weiss's frantic screams as Ruby towed her along at inhumanly high speed, Yang laughed.
With the goal of bonding a little more with her sister and the continual effort of melting the Ice Queen's heart a little out of the way Yang breathed a sigh of relief and continued to enjoy her food. She couldn't believe that Nora had blabbed to her team about Blake's deal with Sun but figured that in the end it was probably just fine. Yang was sure that everything had gone great between her partner and the boy after they had left, but assuming it had been a secret, she had not had a chance to discuss it with the quiet girl yet. Yang glanced around the cafeteria, she didn't expect to see anyone, Blake was undoubtedly in the library or hopefully with Sun, and Nora was definitely still busy with her team but it couldn't hurt to check. She did see the Headmaster, Professor Ozpin roaming between the tables, giving polite nods to students who realized he was there and just quietly making his way around. That was weird, he didn't usually come around but it could be to check in on the transfer students, or maybe something had drawn his attention down here. Who knew what that man was thinking. Yang kept looking around and found one of the last things she was in the mood for, Cardin Winchester approaching her table. Yang slid her tray forward slightly and went to stand.
"Well, well, and where's your 'girlfriend'?" the emphasis he put on girlfriend put Yang on edge. She knew the boy was rude and an imbecile, but what was he thinking coming up to her like this? He knew she would floor him with a single blow if she felt like it, and insulting Nora was the fastest way to get her in a dangerous mood. "Is she off in detention for not shutting up in class again?"
"Don't even start with me Cardin." Yang leveled an angry gaze at the boy, she had been having such a nice lunch and she was not in the mood to deal with him right now.
"Oh come on, I just wanna watch you two make out a little." he made kissy faces at her, "Or do you wanna put on a show for me in the gym again?" Yang's blood boiled and she clenched her fists.
"You disgusting, little, pervert." Yang could feel the heat rising in her limbs and she knew her eyes must be hazing over with red. She felt her aura building up in her fists subconsciously, preparing to knock the foolish boy's head clear across the cafeteria.
"What's wrong? Are you getting mad?" Cardin jutted his face out towards her, mockingly, "Not gonna hit me are you?" He recoiled in mock fear, putting his hands in front of his face and then laughing at her, "Go for it." Yang squeezed her right hand and felt the knuckles pop under the pressure, that was it. Her eyes widened as she prepared to leap over the table and destroy the fool but then she saw Professor Ozpin, watching the two of them curiously. She couldn't beat him down right in front of the headmaster. Yang took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She closed her eyes and forced her aura down, trying to channel as much Ren as she could. She inhaled again and slowly let it out, opening her eyes and easing her fists loose.
"Just screw off Cardin, you're not worth my time." Yang slowly returned to her seat, keeping her eyes down. She knew that if she looked up and saw that smug face of his again she wouldn't be able to stop herself, she wasn't sure how she had managed it the first time.
"Aww it's okay. You're just all soft now 'cause you're not with a man." Cardin pounded his chest in what Yang assumed was supposed to be pride, "C'mon, I can show what it feels like if you forgot." Cardin leaned forward and planted both hands on the table, tilting his broad shoulders across the surface, towards Yang. That was all she could take, Yang jumped to her feet and felt her aura return with a fury. The feel of it rushing to fill her limbs as familiar as waking up and much more exhilarating. Whatever Ozpin thought of her, she didn't care, she was gonna put Cardin down, now. She heard the familiar crunching noise of knuckles connecting with cheekbone and looked up to see Cardin laid out on the floor opposite her. The shock and surprise cooled her anger instantly and she turned her head to see who had punched him out. Standing there was a beautiful, grinning redhead, smile stretched from ear to ear and chuckling happily to herself.
"Oh he deserved that," Nora clenched both fists and flexed her arms in front of her in excitement. She looked over to Yang and her smile grew, "Sorry, I know you probably wanted to do that but I just had to." Yang laughed but then caught sight of Ozpin over Nora's shoulder. He was approaching their group, no hurry in his step, but moving with definite purpose. He had his cane clenched in both hands behind him, held horizontally out to both sides. Yang's laughter turned to a frown and Nora cocked her head to one side, "Oh I'm sorry. You can punch him next time, or uhh I'll still take you on an adventure but you don't have to make me pancakes, or I'll make you pancakes except I don't know how really, Ren always makes them." Nora started trying to rattle off as many ways to appease Yang as she could until Yang pointed solemnly behind her and she turned, "Oh," Professor Ozpin reached the pair of girls, and the unconscious boy, and looked slowly at each member of the group.
"Miss Xiao Long, you did very well controlling your anger. I saw what was happening and frankly, I was worried for Mr. Winchester." he turned to Nora, "Ms. Valkyrie, you stood up for someone you care about and acted without hesitation, that is very commendable." he inclined his head and gave her a slight smile. Then the Professor twirled his cane in an easy circle and poked at Cardin's midsection with the end. Cardin groaned and sat up slowly, shaking his head and rubbing a hand on his face where a bruise was already starting to form. "Mr. Winchester, you acted quite deplorably and were then unable to defend your actions. You require much more discipline and training if you ever hope to become a true Huntsman." Cardin raised his other hand and began to retort but Professor Ozpin turned deftly back to the girls and he fell silent, "Ladies, enjoy the rest of your day and do remember to enjoy every moment together. You're headed for a dangerous life and need to cherish those close to you." He gave them both a polite nod and, twirled his cane back against his back and strode away peacefully. Yang and Nora were both grinning and watching him leave.
"Wow, that was soo cool." Nora raised her fists to her chin and trembled with excitement, "Can you believe that?" she spun to face Yang.
"Yeah, I guess he's a pretty cool guy. I mean he did let Ruby in two years ahead and all but that was awesome." Yang smiled and looked away from the departing Headmaster just in time to see Nora flying towards her. She threw her arms out and caught the airborne redhead as she came vaulting over the table with a giggle.
"I mean it, you can punch him next time." she gave Yang a quick kiss on the cheek.
"Oh you can try." Cardin had staggered to his feet again and apparently failed to lose any of his bravado. Yang and Nora both swiveled their heads and furrowed their eyebrows at him. He shrank a little under the combined gaze.
"Leave right now before I come over there and make you." Yang let her aura loose again, still bottled up from her earlier anger. The visible effect was immediate, her signature glowing hair and a sudden distinct red tint to her eyes flashing into existence. Cardin backed down and turned with a flick of his head.
"Whatever, you got a lucky punch." he walked away from the pair, shoving his hands in his pockets. They watched him leave and Yang slowly let her anger fade.
"Hey Yang, you're uhh, you're kinda squishing me." Nora squeaked out from where Yang was holding her. Yang looked down and saw that she had indeed crushed the girl against her in her anger, flexing her arms and pulling Nora tight against her in her fit of rage.
"Oh," she chuckled slightly and loosened her grip but didn't let her go, "Sorry." she laughed again kissed Nora on |
(his hands were full of gyros).
Later, back at the hotel, one drunk member of the group jumped on the hotel lobby desk and imitated Greenbay Packers player Aaron Rodgers after he scores a touchdown.
"It completely freaked out the receptionist," Kennedy said.
When the hotel threatened to call security, the group decided it was time to depart for their rooms.
"I actually couldn't believe his wife was letting him go," said Nate Berghoff, 28, who works in also sales and was on the trip. "When I told my girlfriend she was like 'Yea, you won’t be doing that.'"
When asked about any exchanges of fatherly advice at these parties, Berghoff replied, "None at all!"
So what's behind the rise of the dadchelor party?
Carley Roney, editor in chief of TheBump.com, a website for expectant mothers and new moms, said she suspects they are a response to changes in parenting norms. Based on what she knows from the site's community forum and from those in the baby industry, such dad-centered celebrations seem to have taken off in the last year or two.
"In the (19)50s it all fell on the girls," Roney said. "Now, it's a shared responsibility. Guys are just as overwhelmed by the thought of how much their lives are going to change. This is the antidote to that, the hedge against it."
According to Roney, also at play is the fact that both men and women are having their first children later. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the average age for first time motherhood in 1970 was 21.4. By the year 2000 it was 24.9 and it crept up further to 25.1 in 2008 (statistics for first time fathers are not available).
Because couples have had more time to enjoy the luxuries of uninterrupted sleep or a last minute trip to the beach, Roney theorized that panic is more likely to accompany impending parenthood. In addition, she argued that the challenges of parenting weren't spoken of amongst previous generations. Now?
"People are like, 'You wouldn’t believe it: you're not going to get any sleep and you're never going to have sex again,'" Roney said. "The picture of parenthood that's been painted is so dire, it seems like you do need a last night of freedom."
Roney suggested that the phenomenon of the babymoon—a final vacation a couple takes before having a child—can be explained in much the same way.
Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, suspects dadelor parties could in part be explained by the fathers' fears about how the baby's arrival will affect his relationship to his spouse.
"When babies come along, it tends to make a much more dramatic shift in the wife's focus," Wilcox said. "It's to some degree traumatic for your average husband."
Though he didn't advocate dadelor parties specifically, Wilcox said research suggests that bringing friends together in similar phases of life is something positive.
"They're more likely to succeed in marriages if they have friends going through parenthood at the same time," Wilcox said. "It's a lot easier if you can commiserate amongst friends."
Brian Podvia, 28, who owns the Philadelphia travel agency JetSetPilot, says he's seen an increase over the last couple of years in bookings for what his friends call "daddymoons," several of which he has been on himself.
"At the end of the day, it's the last time to see your friends before you have responsibilities with the baby," Podvia said. "You know, as a parent you can't do these kinds of things anymore."
Though previous destinations included Atlantic City, last March, Podvia's group of friends upped the ante and spent six days at an all-inclusive resort in Riviera Maya, Mexico. The men are in their late 20s, but still took advantage of the dawning of Spring Break season in nearby Cancun and hit up some clubs. Back at their hotel, they stormed the stage at a Michael Jackson look-alike contest.
"At this point, we need any excuse to get out as a group, just guys, so we can have fun like the old days," Podvia said.
According to Podvia, the trips he takes with his friends have been innocent enough, barring the occasional hiccup, like someone falling asleep in a hotel lobby, getting kicked out of the same bar twice in one day, or the whole group getting kicked out of a baseball game (all of which happened during a trip to Pittsburgh in May of last year).
No one has ever been arrested, and the worst it ever got was someone temporarily going missing, also in Pittsburgh.Clemson DT moving to offensive line
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney spoke to the media on Monday afternoon and had an update about redshirt freshman defensive tackle Gage Cervenka.
"Cervenka moved over to OL and he is excited about that and so am I," Swinney said. "His decision to make the move and he came to me yesterday afternoon and wanted to meet with me. We talked through it and that is what he decided to do. I think that is the right move for him long-term. We will try to work with him and teach him how to play center and guard. We will start that process today."
The former high school wrestler knows a thing or two about leverage because he won the S.C. Wrestling Championship for the heavyweight division four straight years.
Swinney also said on Monday afternoon that center Jay Guillermo has had a concussion but will be fine for the Auburn game.MILLTOWN, N.J.
“Don’t know much about history,” goes the song first recorded by Sam Cooke, and, no, we don’t. But it can get complicated very fast when we have to learn.
Just ask local officials, aggrieved residents of a neighboring town and the folks on Petain Avenue, a tiny, two-house side street in this placid central New Jersey borough. All have suddenly had to confront the legacy of the French World War I war hero and World War II Nazi collaborator, for whom the street is named, and the balance between the burdens of the past and the demands of living in the present.
Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was just one of the military leaders of the Great War (others were Foch, Pershing, Joffre and Haig) so honored in that part of town. From 1920 onward, Petain Avenue existed quietly, populated by 17 people in four families over the last half century. No doubt that quiet existence would have continued had not Eli Mintz, from nearby East Brunswick, dashed off a letter to Mayor Gloria M. Bradford in 2006.
“While driving through Milltown, I noticed that you have a street named after Marshal Pétain,” it began. “I find this very disturbing, as he was head of the Vichy government in France during World War II and was responsible for deporting thousands of Jews to Auschwitz.” He urged her to change the name as soon as possible.
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The letter was read and forgotten until Evan Gottesman, the 15-year-old son of one of Mr. Mintz’s friends, heard about the avenue’s namesake from his father. He sent letters to the mayor and members of the Borough Council and started a Facebook group, inaccurately called “Change Pétain Street!” featuring a picture of the marshal shaking hands with Adolf Hitler. Citing Pétain’s role in the Holocaust and as a collaborator, his letter concluded: “To not change the name of Petain Avenue would be to not do the right thing.”
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But one person’s idea of doing the right thing can be another’s headache and intrusion. So, the Council soon heard from Marion Servon, who has lived on Petain Avenue for almost 50 years, ever since her widowed mother bought a house there. She said her memories and family history on the seldom-visited avenue, its namesake’s history largely forgotten, should not be pushed aside to satisfy someone else.When Andrew MacDonald was acquired from the New York Islanders for two draft picks, there was a large outcry from the advanced stat community. MacD's possession metrics were horrible on the Island. Many wondered if this was yet another medicore possession d-man being added to a mediocre defense in Philly. The counter argument goes something like this.
MacDonald was over-exposed on a bad team. He'll be much better in a reduced role against easier match-ups on the Flyers.
Its been 10 games since MacD's acquisition, which is a reasonable amount of time to start judging his performance. Charlie O'Conner of Broad Street Hockey has confirmed that Berube has given MacDonald much softer minutes. But how do his numbers look in those minutes? To put it bluntly, his numbers have been atrocious.
MacDonald's shot metrics haven't improved. In fact, they've gotten worse.
Andrew MacDonald was -9% CF% rel with NYI. He's -11% in 8 games with Flyers. http://t.co/LdYjdpxsda — Extra Skater (@ExtraSkater) March 23, 2014
Lets take closer look and see how MacD is affecting his teammates.
Obligatory small sample size warning!!!!
WOWY CF% Forwards
Looking at forwards who've spent +25 minutes TOI with MacD show's that he negatively impacts almost everyone, with the notable exception of Sean Couturier.
WOWY CF% Defense
Looking at his most common defense partners, we see a similar pattern. He has a dramatically negative impact on Coburn. He hasn't improved Luke Schenn. In fact, he's made him slightly worse. So far the best partner for MacDonald has been Mark Streit.
In his first 10 games as a Flyer, MacD's softer usage has been demonstrably ineffective. He's still giving up more shots against relative to his team. And he's still making many of his teammates worse. Now lets look at scoring chances.
Is he giving up quality shots?
Many might argue that its possible MacDonald is giving up shots, but they aren't good quality scoring chances. As it happens, I've been tracking scoring chances for the Flyers this season. To answer this criticism, we can look at how the defense has performed in the last 10 games with my chance data.
The Flyers third pair has been bleeding quality chances against. Opposition teams have controlled a staggering 65% of the scoring chances with MacDonald and Luke Schenn on the ice. As you can see, Timonen and Coburn have done far better while getting substantially tougher assignments.
Video Scouting
A familiar refrain of the anti-stat crowd is that proponents need to "watch the games". Setting aside the insulting implication that analysts don't watch games, lets watch some film and hone in on what makes MacDonald a mediocre third pairing defender.
Checked off by Patrick Kane
Blown Coverage against Bickell
Beaten Wide by Bodie
Turnstiled by JvR
Beaten by Berglund
Deked by Schwartz
Egregious PP turn over leads to shorty against.
Beaten to the net by Moore
Disrobed by Nash
Crushed in the Corner
MacDonald is easily pushed off the puck by strong forechecking and physical forwards. He turns the puck over when pressured and can make clumsy decisions even when he isn't being directly pressured. Both Luke and MacD are very vulnerable on the rush. I've shown you multiple examples of MacD getting beaten wide with speed. And to top it off he's prone to losing his assignments from time to time.
With all of this said, he's not the worst defender I've ever seen play at an NHL level. His first pass is as good as advertised, and he is certainly a plus skater. Unfortunately, these positives are often outweighed by his negative attributes.
But couldn't you do that with any defender???
Sure. If you go back and scout the last 10 games you can probably find similar mistakes being made by every Flyers d-man. This is why eye test scouting is often biased and subjective. People see what they want to see with a player, no matter how effective he might be otherwise. Case in point, Flyers fans would often lament about Jeff "High and Wide" Carter and Matt "POS" Carle. Its easy to develop tunnel vision after you've seen someone make a few glaring mistakes or conversely a great scoring play. This is why looking at aggregate statistical scouting has proven valuable time and time again. Every defender has made mistakes over the past 10 games. But MacDonald and Luke Schenn have made significantly more.
Ten games is still a relatively small sample and its possible that MacDonald improves a bit with time as a Flyer. However, its clear that his poor metrics are not because of his extremely difficult usage in New York. There is some substance behind the numbers.
The Real Problem
My biggest issues with the MacDonald acquisition remain the benching of Erik Gustafsson, the loss of draft assets, and the issue of money. Expending assets to acquire yet another passable 5,6,7 d-man while benching the best performing 3rd pairing guy on the roster is inexcusable. And if reports are correct that MacDonald turned down a multi-year contract worth 4 million AAV, its probable that MacDonald is looking for an even better deal from the Flyers. Signing MacDonald to a long term contract with Top-4 money is invariably a mistake. His on-ice results simply do not justify a contract extension worth 4+ AAV.
MacDonald hasn't improved the third pairing since his acquisition. In terms of on-ice results he is a clear downgrade from Erik Gustafsson. In the 59 games before he was scratched, Gustafsson was a +16 in scoring chances, putting up substantially better possession numbers, and was far more effective at preventing chances against. Even more impressive, Gus's scoring chance numbers were good enough for 2nd on the Flyers defense, behind only Kimmo Timonen. Why are the Flyers sitting their most effective third pairing defender in favor of Andy MacDonald?
Thanks for reading, and #FREEGUS!
EDIT: I've made a few changes. The WOWY graphs are now using 5v5 zone start adjusted Corsi instead of straight up 5v5 Corsi. Thanks to OrangeNBlack for pointing out the error.
I've also made the small sample size warning more noticeable. Seriously....I warned you.A friend of mine told me that for every $100 he spends on buying an item, he devotes an hour of research to the purchase before making a move.
That seems like a good rule of thumb. In fact, I’d go even further: for every $100 I spend on an item over the item’s lifetime, I try to devote an hour to researching the purchase before making a move.
What do I mean by that? Take a car, for example. Yes, we have the initial sticker price of the car, but how long do you intend to drive that car? How much gas will that take? How much maintenance will be needed to keep it on the road? Those are additional costs, and they should be an important part of the research you do.
If I buy a new computer, I might spend $500 on it (hypothetically). However, it’s going to suck energy right out of the wall and inflate my electric bill, so my total cost of owning that computer is significantly higher than $500 over the lifetime of that computer.
Research pays off. Almost always, research will lead you to the option that will provide you with the most bang for your buck. Whether it’s the most fuel-efficient and reliable car or the computer with the most horsepower for your dollar, time spent learning exactly what you’re buying and how to milk all the value you can out of that purchase pays for itself over the lifetime of the item.
What exactly do I mean by “do the research”? Here’s the process I go through for almost every significant item I buy.
What exactly am I buying? For starters, I don’t buy something unless I can clearly state what exactly I want it to do. What tasks must that item be able to take on to make it worth one’s money and time?
Let’s say I’m looking for a new kitchen knife. What do I care about with that knife? I want it to be able to chop vegetables easily. I want it to hold an edge for a while after I hone it. I want it to be able to maintain a sharp edge (with regular maintenance, of course) for a very long time, because I don’t want to have to go through the process of buying another one because the first one was junk.
This, in itself, involves research. To understand what features you want in a knife, you need to have a basic understanding of how a knife works, what knives are made of, and so forth. Reading and personal experience are both part of this. This is deeply connected to the idea that one should buy a low-end item first, become familiar with its use, and then replace it with an item appropriate to their needs. In other words, start with a cheap knife, learn how to use it, learn what you actually don’t like about it and could be improved, then use that as a basis to buy the right knife for you (assuming you use it enough, of course).
What items out there match the features I’m looking for? Once you know clearly what you’re looking for, you can start looking for items that match it.
I usually rely on several different sources for these types of answers. A few key magazines, such as Consumer Reports and Cook’s Illustrated, provide solid and unbiased reviews of products that I often use as a baseline for what I want to buy. Another key element of this type of research is my own social network, as I’ll send out emails or Facebook requests asking for their recommendations or suggestions. There are a small handful of bloggers that I trust as well. I also use the raw data provided by the manufacturer to figure out things like energy use.
Usually, this means a trip to the library and, often, a trip to a few stores, simply to understand the products I’m comparing and the features that they offer.
Where can I find the item(s) I want at the right price? I generally prefer to buy things when my back isn’t against the wall so that I have time to evaluate lots of different buying options. For example, after shopping for months for the right price on the right vehicle, I actually bought my car off of Craigslist.
The moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to hunt far and wide for the right price on the item that you want. Don’t wait until you have to make a purchase. Instead, start the process now on items that you know you’ll have to purchase down the road.
Research pays off, every single time. You’ll know it when you find the perfect price on an item that you know has the right balance of features for your needs.
This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.The Occupy Wall Street movement is a populist sit-in demonstration against what protestors charge are the corrupt practices of the financial industry, and the bought government complicity, that are helping drive the majority of the nation's citizens into ruin.A collective that amplifies its voice with a passed-around Peoples' Microphone, they have gained more attention over the past few weeks, culminating Saturday with a mass arrest of protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge.
While the movement claims representation over the "other" 99% of the nation -- those not making millions of dollars a year -- they have received support from a number of left-leaning actors and entertainers, who, despite their high incomes, believe that government policy is skewed toward big business and the wealthy.
Mark Ruffalo showed up over the weekend and tweeted non-stop his support, while last week, Roseanne Barr gave a speech that called for a combination of capitalism and socialism and a system based not on "bloated talk radio hosts" and "that goddamn Aynn Rand book."
Here's a look at some of the celebs who have lent their voice -- or at least investigated -- the case.
PHOTOS/VIDEOS:NEW DELHI: The government on Tuesday has disclosed the names of all 26 account holders in Liechtenstein Bank to the Supreme Court It has also made public the names of 18 account holders against who proceedings have been launched and the names of the remaining 8 account holders have been given in a sealed cover.The names were given to India by Germany in 2009.Out of the 18 names made public, 5 are from Dhupelia family who are trustees of Ambrunova trust, 4 from Manichi trust, 4 from Ruvisha trust, KM Mammen of Webster Foundation and two others.The government told the Supreme Court that income tax probe against all the 18 people is complete while prosecution procedures have been launched against 17. One person has died.The court has said it will discuss the content of documents and hear the matter on Thursday.(With inputs from PTI)Here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s article on the subject.
Here’s some reporting by Glenn Greenwald, who’s done a good job of aggressively covering and commenting on the Obama Administration’s most egregious missteps concerning civil liberties, privacy, et cetera.
Basically, the shorthand version of the story is: The EFF took the NSA to court over the latter’s illegal surveillance activities, and the Obama Justice Department has filed a motion calling for this court challenge to be thrown out, citing “state secrets.” Combining this with Obama voting in the Senate to grant the telecoms legal immunity for cooperating with the wiretapping program, and Obama’s refusal to discard Bush’s expansion of executive privilege, we get a very depressing picture, indeed.
What the HELL, Mr. Obama!? This is exactly the kind of thing you were elected to STOP, and you should have stopped it on day ONE of your Presidency!The Acid Tests were a series of parties held by author Ken Kesey primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s, centered entirely on the use of, and advocacy of, the psychedelic drug LSD, also known as "acid". LSD-25 was not made illegal in California until October 6, 1966.
Ramon Sender co-produced the Trips Festival with Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. It was a three-day event that, in conjunction with The Merry Pranksters, brought together the nascent hippie movement for the first time.[citation needed] The Trips Festival was held at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco in January 1966.[11] Counterculture sound engineer Ken Babbs is mostly credited for the sound systems he created for the Trips Festival. Prior to Babbs' creation, it was discovered that particular music usually sounded distorted when cranked to high levels because of the cement floor on the San Francisco Longshoreman's Union Hall (where the Trips Festival was taking place). Babbs being a sound engineer resolved the problem. He made sound amplifiers that would not create distorted sounds when turned up to high sound levels.[citation needed]
Organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley, Zach Stewart and others, ten thousand people attended this sold-out event, with a thousand more turned away each night.[12] On Saturday January 22, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company came on stage, and 6,000 people arrived to imbibe punch spiked with LSD and to witness one of the first fully developed light shows of the era.[13]
Big Brother and the Holding Company was formed at the Trips Festival. In the audience was painter and jazz drummer David Getz, who soon joined the band.[14][15][16]Get the biggest daily 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
A man from Greater Manchester has been arrested after a Muslim woman was racially abused on a train carriage full of football fans.
The victim was sitting on a Virgin service between London and Manchester Piccadilly on Saturday evening, September 19, when someone made a vile comment about her traditional clothing.
The carriage contained a group of travelling Leeds United supporters whose team won at Milton Keynes Dons earlier that day.
British Transport Police confirmed that a 47-year-old man from Bolton was removed from the train at Stoke station and arrested on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence.
He was interviewed and has now been bailed until October 28, pending further enquiries.
British Transport Police say they are cracking down on ‘travelling troublemakers’ this season to improve journeys for other football supporters and passengers.
Insp Michelle Wedderburn said: “Anyone who finds themselves in an intimidating or frightening situation because of the behaviour of football fans should not ignore it – if you tell us, we can do something about it.
"Anyone who sees football-related crime or disorder on the rail network can text their concerns to BTP on 61016. Reports can also be made by calling BTP on 0800 40 50 40.”TEAM USA vs. TEAM FINLAND
Verizon Center, Washington
7 p.m. ET (ESPN, SN1, TVA Sports)
WASHINGTON -- Goalie Jonathan Quick will start for Team USA against Team Finland in a pretournament game for the World Cup of Hockey 2016 at Verizon Center on Tuesday.
This will be Quick's second start; he made 32 saves in Team USA's 4-2 win against Team Canada at Nationwide Arena in Columbus on Sept. 9.
"[We need to] find out who we feel is going to be starting, and I think [Quick] has an inside track on that," Team USA coach John Tortorella said. "That's why I'm going to play him again tonight. But in the tournament, I've thought about it all summer … with the three goalies that we have, it's a very tough decision. But I think within the play so far within the tournament, I think Quick deserves another start here and has the inside track on being the No. 1 guy."
Goalie Pekka Rinne will start for Team Finland. He made 18 saves in a 3-2 overtime win against Team Sweden in Helsinki, Finland on Thursday.
Team Finland goalie Tuukka Rask allowed five goals on 28 shots in a 6-3 loss to Team Sweden on Saturday.
"We have two good goalies," Team Finland coach Lauri Marjamaki said. "It doesn't matter who you put in I feel confident. It doesn't matter who is in."
Here are the projected lineups:
TEAM FINLAND
Jussi Jokinen - Aleksander Barkov - Patrik Laine
Leo Komarov - Mikko Koivu - Mikael Granlund
Joonas Donskoi - Jori Lehtera - Teuvo Teravainen
Erik Haula - Valtteri Filppula - Lauri Korpikoski
Olli Maatta - Rasmus Ristolainen
Sami Vatanen - Jyrki Jokipakka
Esa Lindell - Ville Pokka
Pekka Rinne
Mikko Koskinen
Scratched: Tuukka Rask, Sebastian Aho
TEAM USA
Zach Parise - Joe Pavelski - Blake Wheeler
James van Riemsdyk - Derek Stepan - Patrick Kane
Max Pacioretty - Ryan Kesler - T.J. Oshie
Justin Abdelkader - David Backes - Dustin Byfuglien
Ryan McDonagh - John Carlson
Ryan Suter - Erik Johnson
Jack Johnson - Matt Niskanen
Jonathan Quick
Ben Bishop
Scratched: Cory Schneider, Kyle Palmieri, Brandon DubinskyThere’s always been a minor niggle at the back of my mind when I played the Nintendo DS. “They’ve got it backwards,” I thought, “The A button should be on the left and B on the right. That’s how it’s always been… I think.” A speedy investigation showed that my memory was a little foggy, and that the answer was significantly more interesting than that. Therefore, I present to you a brief history of gamepad button mapping.
Nintendo: BA for Life
The NES was the first console to move away from the joysticks of the Atari generation, opting instead for what would become an iconic design in gamepads. Despite my previous complaint, note that A is indeed mapped to the right of B. D’oh!
Following their ancestor’s example, nearly every Nintendo console is mapped this way. This includes the SNES, Virtual Boy, Gamecube, every iteration of the Game Boy, DS and Wii Classic Controller. The only dissenters are the Nintendo 64 (bottom right picture), which maps B in a location traditionally reserved for Y, and the Wiimote, which maps A and B on different surfaces entirely.
Sega & Microsoft Love AB
In the early days, Sega was hot on Nintendo’s heels. The NES had A and B buttons, so the Genesis added a C *. When the SNES added the X and Y buttons, Sega one-upped them by adding a Z to the Saturn. The Dreamcast controller was more minimal, perhaps inspired by Sony’s popular newcomer, the Playstation. The one element that all Sega controllers share is the AB orientation (the Game Gear labelled them 1 and 2, but arranged them in the same way.)
* It’s worth noting that the short-lived Atari Jaguar had A, B and C buttons oriented the opposite way. It also featured a full numeric pad, for a grand total of 17 individual buttons!
The first iteration of the Xbox controller, nicknamed “Duke”, was bulky and unpleasant to hold. The four main buttons were on a strange slant, putting the B almost directly above A. Fortunately, Microsoft quickly responded to public criticism and began packaging the Japan-exclusive “S” controller with their system. The new gamepad was smaller and straightened out the button layout, a mapping they largely reused for the Xbox 360.
Sony Goes Both Ways
The main buttons on the Playstation gamepad don’t use letters, but are instead labelled,, and. The original Playstation saw three types of controllers over its lifetime, adding dual analog sticks in 1997 and rumble in 1999. In recent years the DualShock line has seen slow incremental improvements, but they haven’t strayed far from the original design (mercifully they abandoned the boomerang concept.)
In North America and Europe, games commonly use to confirm (the role of A) and to cancel (the role of B.) In Japan, however, the symbol is commonly associated with maru (right) while is identified with batsu (wrong.) Therefore the roles are reversed, confirms and cancels. While the controls of most games are localized with this in mind, games such as Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid were left with their original mapping (to the general confusion of Western players.)
I hope this has been an enlightening trip down memory lane. With all the variety in gamepad mapping, it should come as no surprise that even veteran gamers can be betrayed by their muscle memory sometimes.Originally Posted by DiogoVP Originally Posted by
That is particularly sad news for me, because I worked a whole month to get the Essence of Physicality on my warden as well as the Pelargir ring with the essence slot and I am a yellow warden, so 95% of the skills and gambits that I use are ranged. And it has come from a pretty good essence that would take -20% physical mitigation from an enemy to increase +5% incoming damage. Could you change that essence to increase incoming melee *AND* ranged damage by 20 - 50% as the essence was supposed to do by removing an enemy's 20% physical mitigation? Though I would very much rather see the essence working and removing 20% of the enemy's mitigation as it was intended to do in the first place.Updated 2:30 p.m. ET
FEDERAL WAY, Wash. Gunfire erupted at an apartment complex in a city south of Seattle and five people were shot to death, including a suspect who was shot by arriving officers, police said early Monday.
Officers responding to an emergency call at 9:30 p.m. PDT Sunday at the apartments in Federal Way encountered a chaotic scene, with bullets flying.
"When officers arrived there were still shots being fired," said Federal Way police spokeswoman Cathy Schrock.
They found two wounded men on the ground in a parking lot. One of the men reached for a gun as police moved in to assist the two, she said.
At that point, officers opened fire. The suspect died but police said it wasn't immediately clear if it was from their gunfire.
The other man on the ground and a third man in the parking lot were found dead.
In a search of the complex, police found a fourth man dead in one apartment and a slain woman in another unit. Schrock said police were trying to determine if the woman was hit by a stray bullet.
A total of eight officers fired their weapons, Schrock said. All have been placed on administrative leave, per standard policy, as the investigation continues.
There was no immediate word what set off the shooting. Police scheduled a briefing for late Monday morning.
"We still don't have any idea what started this disturbance tonight," Schrock said.
A witness who declined to be identified told CBS affiliate KIRO-TV that she was caught in the middle of the gun battle.
"I got out of my car and shut the door, and before I got out of my car, I heard voices... and then the guy started toward me, and then the shots started," she said.
After police flooded the area and carried out searches, authorities said they were confident there were no more casualties from the shooting.
They said they did not think another shooter was on the loose or that there was an immediate threat to the public.
By dawn, a King County medical examiner's office truck arrived at the scene to pick up bodies. Crime scene investigators continued working. One officer was seen carrying books and a gun to what appeared to be an evidence van.
There were no reports of any officers being injured. The names of the five people killed were not immediately available.
Federal Way is about 20 miles south of Seattle.Out Now! The First Star Wars: The Last Jedi Inserts and the Latest Additions to the Premiere Series! By SWCT Team on 2017-09-01 04:01:00 Get your first look at the newest film in the Star Wars saga…
Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Premiere has arrived in Card Trader!
Collect them all today!
Set Information
15 cards + 3 award cards
Packs and inserts available until 12:01 AM ET on September 8th!
NOTE: Packs are available to registered fans who have made at least 1 purchase in the "Credits Store" since signing up.
Inserts available in 3 Crystal packs and 1 Credit pack!
1) Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Premiere Pack #1
These 5 Premiere inserts can be found in this pack!
1) R2-D2 & Porgs
2) Luke, Rey, Poe, Chewbacca, Finn, Rose, and BB-8
3) Poe Dameron
4) Chewbacca
5) Praetorian Guard
1 of the above Premiere inserts guaranteed per pack!
2) Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Premiere Pack #2
These 5 Premiere inserts can be found in this pack!
1) Praetorian Guard 2
2) Stormtrooper
3) Stormtrooper Executioner
4) BB-8
5) R2-D2
1 of the above Premiere inserts guaranteed per pack!
3) Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Premiere Pack #3
These 5 Premiere inserts can be found in this pack!
1) Rose
2) Finn
3) Kylo Ren
4) Rey
5) The First Order
1 of the above Premiere inserts guaranteed per pack!
4) Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Premiere Credit Pack
Includes all 15 Premiere inserts!
Chances per pack at Premiere inserts
1 Premiere insert guaranteed per pack!
Award Information
Super Premiere Award Card (pictured above) - Collect all 15 Premiere inserts PLUS the Villain Award Card within 24 hours for the Super Award Card. This card will be given out at 12:01 AM ET on September 2nd!
Villain Premiere Award Card - Head to the Smuggler's Den (found in the dropdown menu in the Card Sheet) and exchange (meld) ALL 15 Premiere inserts! This award card will only be available from NOW until 12:01 AM ET on September 4th.
Hero Premiere Award Card - Collect all 15 Premiere inserts by 12:01 AM ET on September 8th for this award card!
May the Force be with you! Head to the Star Wars: The Last Jedi Store!You, unsuspecting citizen, probably take the view that the Republican Party is too white. It’s the conventional wisdom, after all, and last year’s election results would seem to have proven the point resoundingly. But you’re obviously not up with the newest thinking in some conservative quarters, which is that the party isn’t white enough, and that the true and only path to victory in the future is to get whiter still. Some disagree, which gives us the makings of a highly entertaining intra-GOP race war playing out as we head into 2016. But given this mad party’s recent history, which side would you bet on winning?
The situation is this. The immigration reform bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go to the House. A few weeks ago, as I read things, there were occasional and tepid signals that the House would not take up the Senate bill. Now, by contrast, those signals are frequent and full-throated. For example, yesterday Peter Roskam, a deputy GOP whip in the House, said this: “It is a pipe dream to think that [the Senate] bill is going to go to the floor and be voted on. The House is going to move through in a more deliberative process.”
“Deliberative process” probably means, in this case, killing the legislation. House conservatives, National Journal reports, are increasingly bullish on the idea that they may be able to persuade John Boehner to drop the whole thing.
Last December, such an outcome was supposed to mean disaster for the Republicans. But now, some say the opposite. Phyllis Schlafly and talk-radio opponents of the bill like Laura Ingraham have been saying for a while now that the party doesn’t need Latino votes, it just needs to build up the white vote. And now, they have the social science to prove it, or the “social science” to “prove” it.
Sean Trende, the conservative movement’s heavily asterisked answer to Nate Silver (that is |
hats and jerseys.Donald Trump responded Tuesday to a fierce scolding by President Obama by questioning why the president was more outraged with him than with the terrorist gunman responsible for the Orlando massacre.
“I watched President Obama today and he was more angry at me than he was at the shooter,” the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee said in a speech in Greensboro, North Carolina. “That’s the kind of anger he should have for the shooter and these killers that shouldn’t be here.”
Mr. Trump previously criticized Mr. Obama for what he described as a weak response to the attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Obama blasted the real estate tycoon for proposing to combat terrorism in part by imposing a temporary ban on immigration from Muslim countries.
Mr. Obama said the plan “betrays the very values America stands for.”
“That’s not the America we want. It doesn’t reflect our democratic ideals,” said the president. “It won’t make us more safe, it will make us less safe, fueling ISIL’s notion that the West hates Muslims.”
SEE ALSO: Republicans distance themselves from Donald Trump after response to Orlando massacre
In North Carolina, Mr. Trump doubled down on his proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims visiting or immigrating to the U.S.
He also slammed likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for supporting more open immigration policies, saying she would bring thousands of poorly vetted immigrants from terrorist strongholds.
“A number of these immigrants have hostile attitudes toward women, toward gays and toward people of different faiths,” said Mr. Trump. “Look at what this one whack job, this horrible savage did.”
He noted that Mrs. Clinton’s family charity, the Clinton Foundation, collected more than $25 million in donations from Muslim countries that “treat women horrendously, that kill gays.”
“Let’s call for Hillary and Bill Clinton to give back the $25 million-plus to the countries we are talking about,” said Mr. Trump.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.The ghoul, from H.P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model"
"These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations—well, don’t ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding—I won’t say on what. They were sometimes shewn in groups in cemeteries or underground passages,"
"It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn’t even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-head of all panic—not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn’t the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet—none of these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness."
"It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered..."
-H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model"Neighbor watches as Detroit police brawl (WJBK)
Police officers from two different Detroit precincts fought in an apparent turf war in an area known for drug activity.
Two officers from the 12th Precinct were posing as drug dealers Thursday when they attempted to arrest two undercover officers from the 11th Precinct after mistaking them for buyers, reported WJBK-TV.
Other officers from the 12th Precinct’s special operations team showed up to raid a nearby house, but police from the two precincts instead started fighting each other.
Witnesses said guns were drawn and punches thrown in front of startled neighbors.
“You’ve got to have to have more communication, I guess,” said one neighbor who watched the brawl. “I don’t understand what happened about that — communicate.”
The fight was recorded on one officer’s body camera, and the department’s internal affairs division is investigating the incident.Improving central midfield was a priority for the Chicago Fire this offseason. General manager Nelson Rodriguez said as much shortly after the 2016 season ended and then delivered with the additions of former MLS All-Stars Juninho and Dax McCarty.
Both are proven, experienced MLS midfielders who will be expected to start. The question then becomes what happens to Matt Polster?
Polster was a finalist for Rookie of the Year in 2015 after emerging as a defensive midfielder who was capable of breaking up plays and making the numerous chasing runs asked of that position. He logged more than 2,000 minutes in each of his first two MLS seasons and was a part of the American Olympic qualifying team last year.
Suddenly a 23-year-old who was building up a nice resume for a somewhat young MLS player is looking at potentially being used off the bench or as a rotation player in 2017 with two well-paid central midfielders now ahead of him on the depth chart.
"I think I just have to go into the preseason and do my best to show that I should be on the field just like any other player should," Polster said on Monday. "I think there's a lot of competition at every position so it's going to raise my game and I think in everybody else's aspect it's going to raise their game as well."
[RELATED: Fire showing patience with Dax McCarty]
Coach Veljko Paunovic always preaches the value of versatility in players and Polster does have some of that. He played at right back on occasion during his rookie year. That was also the position he played with the Olympic qualifying team due to a glut of central midfielders and a lack of options at outside back on that roster.
Right back appears to be a position of need for the Fire since Rodrigo Ramos was not retained and no replacement have been signed yet. However, during the first week of training there has been no indication that Polster will be used at right back. He has trained with the midfielders when the defenders have been separated in certain drills.
"I think in general the adaptable nature of how Pauno views the game favors anyone who can adjust and either play multiple positions or interpret roles in different ways," Rodriguez said when asked about Polster. "I think Matt we have to remember is still a young player, only two years as a pro, but he continues to have a very bright future and I would say he has a very bright present. When and where he plays will be entirely up to how his performance is adjudged."
This will be the first time since Polster initially won his starting job early in his rookie season that he will be pushed for playing time. He quickly asserted himself as a starter in 2015, coming off the bench in the season opener and then starting the next 13 matches.
Paunovic and Rodriguez could be watching to see how Polster responds to this test or they may have a way to get all three central midfielders on the field at the same time. This early in the preseason there has been no indication from Paunovic about how the team will line up, but that will be something to follow as the preseason unfolds.
On Monday, when the players had entrance physicals a day before the first training session Polster said he hadn't talked with the Fire staff about what they have planned for him. For now, Polster is saying the right things.
"I think the biggest thing is I think there's a lot of competition now at just about every position so I think it's going to make the sessions a lot tougher, a lot more competitive and I think it's going to raise the level of the team," Polster said. "I think you'll see that once the season begins."UK citizens who have made a home in the EU face an uncertain future – and the government isn’t listening to them
Brexit negotiations will leave UK citizens in Europe in a far worse position than EU citizens in the UK, a group of British professionals living in Germany has warned.
There are about 100,000 Britons living in Germany. On Monday, discussions held by a group of about 50 of them in Munich focused on concerns that neither European nor British governments have fully understood the severity of the consequences of Brexit for people in their position.
Briton David Hole, who has lived and practised law in Germany since 1993, pointed out that the fact that EU citizens in the UK will still be part of the union will put them in a significantly stronger position than their British counterparts in Europe.
“You regularly see the 3 million EU citizens in the UK and 1.2 million UK citizens in the EU in the same sentence as if they are in mirror positions,” he said. “They are not. UK citizens will lose all their rights, EU citizens do not. We are in a far worse position.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The agenda and menu for the meeting about Brexit in Munich. Photograph: Dominik Gigler for the Guardian
UK citizens living in Europe will end up with fewer rights than EU citizens living in the UK after Brexit and fear they could be “locked in” to the country where they have moved to, it has emerged.
The rights UK nationals acquired under EU law to live, work, set up a business or provide services will all fall away on Brexit day, Hole told a group of about 50 British nationals at a meeting in Munich on Monday. This was the second meeting of the impromptu group, which represents just a sliver of the estimated 18,000 Britons settled in Bavaria, 6,000 of whom are in Munich.
The group is anxious that the voice of British working professionals who live in Europe is not drowned out by the better known challenges facing the likes of pensioners on the Costa del Sol.
Some have chosen to live abroad to broaden their horizons, others because their companies moved there. But their concerns are the same – they worry that their professional qualifications may not be recognised post Brexit, that their right to work and advance their careers will be blighted and that in retirement they will not be able to draw on a pension they may have aggregated in two or three countries in their careers.
“EU citizens won’t lose their rights, they simply won’t be able to use them while they live in the UK,” Hole said. “They will still have the right to live in another EU country, the right to work there, the right to freedom of movement, the right to have their qualifications recognised.
“Our position is we will have none of these,” he went on. “The 1.2 million UK citizens living in Europe will lose all their acquired EU rights after Brexit. How we address that remains a question here.”
Hole said the plight of EU citizens in the UK has “hideous” personal consequences. However, he said his point is that their situation can be resolved by one government, the British government, whereas the plight of the British in Germany for instance involves agreement of 27 member states.
“I, as a UK citizen, lose my European citizen rights in 27 countries, other EU nationals lose their rights in one country the UK. Hardly a good deal for the UK and certainly not democratic or fair to those UK nationals who live in other parts of the EU,” said Bernadette Faulkner, who has lived in Munich with her British husband, Alan, since 1977.
They are now retired but are concerned about their own future right to move. “Even assuming that the Brexit negotiations guarantee our acquired EU right of abode in Germany, we are essentially locked into living in Germany for the rest of our lives because our right to live in other EU states will be lost,” Alan said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest People discuss their concerns about the rights of British people living in Germany at the meeting. Photograph: Dominik Gigler for the Guardian
“The EU citizens in the UK will be able to travel freely if they want they go to another country. I can’t. I have two opportunities – one is to remain here for the rest of my life or the second is to go back to the UK. We are landlocked,” he added.
Others at the meeting expressed concern that professional rights may not be recognised post Brexit. Actuary Zawar Saleemi, who has worked in financial services in Munich for 18 months, said: “In the post-Brexit world, I won’t have the ability to move around. I may even have to stay with one employer if I want to stay in Munich,” he said.
Ken Gray, 53, a Scot who came to Germany 15 years ago, runs the German arm of engineering company Verilab. He said he is concerned that his British staff may not be able to move around Europe easily any more. “What will their status be in Germany? Will they be able to move around Europe to visit clients?”
Brexit: EU leaders to demand May respect citizens' residency rights Read more
Many of those at the meeting spoke of their anger and frustration at not being able to vote following the government’s failure to deliver its 2015 manifesto promise that those who have lived overseas for longer than 15 years would be allowed to vote in general elections.
British in Europe, a coalition representing 11 different groups across Europe lobbying for UK citizens’ rights post Brexit, has urged Theresa May to renew the Conservative’s pledge to give all those overseas the vote.
In a letter to the prime minister, lawyer Jane Golding told her: “There is consternation, and anger, at the failure by the government to honour its 2015 general election manifesto pledge to introduce votes for life.”Rev. Billy, Greg Palast and Santas. (Photo: Zach D. Roberts)
Even for New York, this was WEIRD. There were a half-dozen Santa Clauses on Second Avenue getting a sermon from a Midwestern preacher who looked like a cross between televangelist Jerry Falwell and a white-haired Elvis.
The Santa crew and their mini-skirted elves were on their way to get drunk (drunker?) with another thousand Santa impersonators at “SantaCon,” an annual gathering of St. Nicks. But they were willing to let the Reverend Billy attempt to save their souls.
Reverend Billy did not object to their plans for lubrication, but to their original Sin: collaborating with the Devil’s work known as “Christmas Shopping.”
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Was this some kind of joke? Yes, and a brilliant one.
(Photo: Zach D. Roberts)
Reverend Billy, pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping, is the Stephen Colbert of American hyper-commercialism. For more than a decade, the Reverend has been bringing Americans the Good News that there is life after Wal-Mart.
“Repent and give up your iPod to the Lord! Steve Jobs is not the iSaviour!” The Santas, cracked up as, one by one, they got the joke.
Like Colbert, the Reverend is never seen out of costume nor out of character. In his reversed collar, bouffant hair-do, white pointy shoes and Elmer Gantry suit, he has, in fact, performed 200 for-real baptisms, as many marriages – and been arrested 70 times.
In May of this year, while preaching at the opening of the David Koch Theater in New York, the Reverend was seized by four unknown assailants and hustled into a black, unmarked car. (He soon found out these were Koch’s hired goons working with New York City police. So, it was back to jail until a judge with a sense of humor sentenced him to 20 minutes of preaching in front of the courthouse.)
Apparently, the Kochs did not repent.
Won’t the economy collapse if we don’t buy, buy, buy at yuletide?
“This economy MUST collapse,” he said. Commercialism “makes us stupid” – and worse. Sitting in the front booth at the window of my favorite diner, his sermon was drawing a little crowd.
“Advertisements are THREATS.”
To explain, he noted that on the TV bolted on the wall above the cashier, a chat show host was talking about the gunman who killed 26 kids and teachers in Connecticut this past Friday. The killer was described as, “a loner, isolated.”
And what is our society’s proposed cure for painful isolation? The answer was in the news show’s Christmas ads: “Buy stuff.” The advertisers were telling us how to express love and how to measure the success of our few years on earth. But more sinister than convincing us to buy disposable sweatshop junk, was the subliminal threat, terrorizing us for failing to imitate the grinning guy in the commercial – odor-free, surrounded by loudly laughing models, fashionable according to a marketers’ idea of fashion and marked with Nike’s swoosh logo.
(The Reverend doesn’t wear a cross – “Just another logo.”)
“The ads are telling us that if we don’t surround ourselves with their stuff, we are loners, we’re oddities, freaks, unhappy, and, in fact, dangerous, to be avoided. Different, outside, not part of the party. This is violence masquerading as market democracy.”
So what, then, do we do for the holidays if we don’t follow the commands of the commercials?
“Commercials are signals from the wrong Christ. If you love someone, MAKE LOVE to them.”
But how do you put a hard-on under a tree?
“OK. Take them for a hike on the Appalachian Trail! YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY TO GIVE!” The minister manqué raised his voice to the heavens – and had to be shushed by shoppers in the next booth.
(Photo: Zach D. Roberts)
The Reverend had a long list of alternatives to One-Click Christmas. (This is the perfect place for a commercial break, and Rev. Billy obliged without asking: “You could donate to truthout.org or GregPalast.com for a friend,” he said, “so each week they’d get a gift of real news.” Amen to that!! Click here: All donations tax-deductible.)
I took the Reverend’s message to my twins. They wanted to give their mom an iPad. That is, they wanted to use my credit card to buy an iPad online and have it shipped to her.
I said, “I really think she’d prefer something from the heart.”
This was met with retching sounds and disgusting suggestions involving buying beef hearts by the pound from the Halal butcher.
We settled on their taking Mom to a play she’ll like (and they swear in advance to hate). And, after only a few threat-tinged hints, they wrote up their own note to her rather than go down to CVS to buy a greeting card with a statement of affection written by one of Hallmark’s minimum-wage poets.
If you want to catch the Anti-Claus in action, the Reverend and his 35-voice Church of Stop Shopping Choir will be in that great cathedral of logos, Times Square, this Friday, December 21, 7 p.m., near the statue of Rev. Duffy. Get there before the arrest – or the Rapture (when your credit card limits are lifted up to heaven) – or, if you’re a Mayan, before the end of the World-Going-Out-of-Business sale.
Catch videos of the Reverend’s bits and busts at www.RevBilly.com.
And to all, a good night.
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. May be reprinted by not-for-profit outlets. Others, please contact Truthout.org for permissions.Original Airdate: August 23, 2010
Written & Storyboarded by: Luther McLaurin & Cole Sanchez
Aside from Heat Signature, another Marceline-centric episode, Henchman is an episode of Adventure Time I’ve most likely viewed the least amount of times. That’s not to say it’s bad either (nor is Heat Signature, for that matter) I’ve just happen to revisit it much less frequently than other episodes. However, upon watching it again, I’ve realized how important it is as a developmental episode for Marceline. Marceline’s relationship with Finn and Jake was left off ambiguously in Evicted!, and it was clear that more had to evolve before the three of them can be considered friends. Here, Jake doesn’t budge, but Finn and Marceline begin to develop a true friendship.
I really miss episodes like this especially. Sometime after season three, Finn and Marceline’s friendship just sorta dies out. Of course, they still hang out from time to time, but really, the show has done its best to shift its focus off of their friendship and more so onto Marceline and Bubblegum’s relationship. Don’t get me wrong, PB and Marcy’s relationship has developed beautifully throughout the series, but I really miss Finn and Marceline just being able to hangout. They’re just two cool people having fun. Watching them onscreen together is always a delightfully good time, and that’s exactly what this episode does best.
One of the true highlights is that this is the first continuity heavy and developmental episode; Marceline’s return, Jake’s fear of vampires, Finn and Marceline bonding, Marceline drinking the color red, and the return of the Duke of Nuts and family. When I first saw it, it was nice for me to see that Adventure Time was a show that didn’t ditch it’s secondary characters. Of course, this is the last time we ever get to see the Duke of Nuts, and I do hope that he was able to get his life together through therapy and rehabilitation. That dude deserves it.
Of course, the backgrounds and scenery are beautiful as always. There are some really rich nighttime colors (outside the Duke of Nuts castle) and some very colorful and bright contrasts (the strawberry patch). I really like how predictable and unpredictable the trials that Marceline put Finn through could be at times as well. You always know there’s a twist, but you’re never certain on how they’re going to be a twist. You’re half expecting Marceline to go through with her demented plans at times, but simultaneously reminded that somehow something is going to subvert it. Really good way of keeping things creative and investing in a somewhat predictable premise.
I’m not a big shipper, but I gotta say guys, I really love when Marceline and Finn hangout. Of course, I know it would never work because of the thousand year age difference, but their interactions between each other are just so cute and fun. They really bring out the most exciting and amusing sides of both characters, and watching them feed off of each other in this episode is just so delightful and charming. I really love the way this episode ends with both of them finding a newfound respect for each other. And of course, I feel as though Finn’s influence on Marceline helps her to become a better person. Or vampire. Or half-demon. Whatever. Also, I’ve always a big fan of Marceline’s wardrobe changes, and her outfit in this episode is one of my favorites. In most of my crude notebook doodles, you’ll usually find Marceline sporting this outfit.
So while I’ve viewed this episode sparingly, it’s proved to be one of the most entertaining, as well as the most developmental episode of season one.
AdvertisementsReaction from Rafa Benitez after his Newcastle side lost 2-1 at Nottingham Forest Reaction from Rafa Benitez after his Newcastle side lost 2-1 at Nottingham Forest
Newcastle boss Rafa Benitez vented his anger at Henri Lansbury as the Nottingham Forest captain played a key role in getting two of his players sent off in a 2-1 defeat at the City Ground on Friday night.
Jonjo Shelvey was dismissed for kicking Lansbury in the 33rd minute, then Paul Dummett suffered the same fate after appearing to bundle him over in the box just before half-time as Forest came from behind to win, despite missing both penalties following the red cards.
Newcastle had taken the lead through Matt Ritchie in-between the two dismissals, but Nicklas Bendtner, having missed the first spot-kick while Lansbury missed the second himself, levelled for Forest after the break before Jamaal Lascelles put through his own net late on.
Benitez was unhappy with Henri Lansbury
"Everything was against us," Benitez told Sky Sports. "You could see in the game we have a lot of things we can complain about. But I was really surprised with Lansbury. The way he was acting, twice with the penalties and also with Jonjo Shelvey, but maybe he's proud of himself.
"If the referee cannot see that Lansbury was kicking Jonjo before, I will not defend Jonjo as he made a mistake, but [Lansbury] was kicking him before from behind. Sometimes the FA take action also on the players that are over-reacting, so [maybe that will happen here].
"[With Dummett's sending off] it was very clear the No 10 (Lansbury) was waiting for him. So maybe again the FA can analyse this and see the behaviour of the No 10."
Reaction from Philippe Montanier after his side won 2-1 at home against Newcastle Reaction from Philippe Montanier after his side won 2-1 at home against Newcastle
Newcastle's third defeat in a row, with their EFL Cup quarter-final exit on penalties against Hull in midweek being sandwiched by two league losses, leaves Benitez's side in danger of losing top spot to Brighton on Saturday.
Despite the disappointing result, though, the Newcastle boss was proud of the way his team reacted to such a difficult situation at the City Ground.
"[The plan was] to try to control the game as we did for awhile then try to score if we could. But with nine players it's not easy, especially when all the decisions have gone against you," he said.
"I think the team reacted against adversity, like we have to do, play football and try to score goals. But it was a difficult day and sometimes the referees have to have more experience."Flyhalf Jake McIntyre will make his Super Rugby debut this Friday after being named in the St.George Queensland Reds starting side to take on the Melbourne Rebels at Suncorp Stadium in Ladies Round.A member of the Reds Elite Development Squad and the starting flyhalf for the majority of Brisbane City’s title run in the inaugural National Rugby Championship, McIntyre’s inclusion is one of two personnel changes and a number of positional shakeups following last week’s loss to the Crusaders. McIntyre had a strong season for Brisbane City in the NRC, but has been unavailable for the majority of the 2015 season due to off-season knee surgery.In the other personnel change, Karmichael Hunt returns to the starting lineup after overcoming an adductor strain to feature in the centres for the first time this season. He will start at outside centre, with Samu Kerevi shifting to inside centre.Graham has also shuffled the outside backs, with James O’Connor shifting to fullback and Lachie Turner moving to the wing.In the reserves, lock Ed O’Donoghue has been named to play in his first match of 2015 after recovering from a knee injury suffered in pre-season. Brothers flyhalf Sam Greene stands to make his Super Rugby debut after being named to the bench. The young pivot featured for Brisbane City in the NRC last year and has been impressive for Brothers in Queensland Premier Rugby this year.Graham said his side recognised the challenge posed by the Rebels this Friday in what is an important clash for both sides.“There has been a fair bit of self-review going on this week but as they say, the great thing about sport is there is always next week. We find ourselves playing again this Friday night in what we all realise is a must-win game," Graham said.“Jake (McIntyre) and I had a discussion about an opportunity for him a few weeks ago. He had a long stint out following the NRC and just needed some time playing club Rugby. We almost gave him a debut last week but felt it was in his best interests to play 80 minutes more on the weekend for Sunnybank.“Sam (Greene) is another who was involved in the NRC. On the back of that and his desire to get better, his performances have improved this season. I have received plenty of positive feedback on Sam from our numerous scouts. On top of that, Easts and Reds A coach Tim Sampson further endorsed his performances following their clash in Premier Rugby recently.“Nick (Frisby) suffered a head knock last week and we won’t know until Thursday if he’ll be cleared to play. We couldn’t prepare as a team under those circumstances. He has been a fantastic contributor to the team over the past two months. He has been unselfish and has demonstrated how quickly he has been able to adapt to a very difficult role. People need to remember that through circumstance he was the sixth-choice flyhalf and in my opinion he has done very well. The consistent time on the field now will benefit him greatly moving forward.“In these times it is not for the team to expect Jake and Sam to solve our problems. They need to be allowed to perform their own roles and the rest of the team needs step up and give them options and opportunity to do that. Will (Genia) has a big role to play in that department and I know he is determined to help them through their debut.“Likewise the forwards have challenges in front of them. The physicality and work ethic of the group will need to be at their best as the Rebels have built their success on their forwards towards the latter stages of the competition.“I have made a number of other changes to the backline. Anthony (Fainga’a) suffered a head knock and is unavailable for selection. In shifting Samu (Kerevi) to inside centre we get a strong ball carrier and big body in a lot of traffic.“By returning Karmichael (Hunt) to the team at outside centre, we hope to get a little bit more talk and variation in the outside channel. I had always thought that given 10 or 12 games he’d naturally shift forward but we haven’t seen too much of him through circumstance. Given our own circumstance, time is not something we have as a luxury and hence the change. The shuffle in the backfield is not a major one. Again it is along similar lines to my thinking around Karmichael.”The Reds and Rebels have met nine times in Super Rugby, with the Reds winning seven times.The Reds play the Melbourne Rebels at Suncorp Stadium this Friday at 7:40pm AEST. Tickets are still available at www.redsrugby.com.au. The match will also be broadcast live on Fox Sports. As part of Ladies Rounds, the Reds will wear specially-designed jerseys featuring the Mater Little Miracles logo in support of the program which supports seriously ill and premature babies at Mater.While Reds prop Ben Daley will miss the remainder of the season due to a shoulder injury suffered in training two weeks ago, he continues to support various charities through his ‘Be Great, Do Good’ campaign. This week he is supporting Mater Little Miracles. ‘Be Great, Do Good’ is an initiative by Daley, in which he will support a different charity every week through a unique headgear to raise awareness and funds for their cause. Click here for more information: http://bit.ly/1Enz3Ja 1. James Slipper (C)2. James Hanson3. Greg Holmes4. Rob Simmons (VC)5. James Horwill6. Adam Thomson7. Liam Gill8. Jake Schatz9. Will Genia10. Jake McIntyre (debut)11. Lachie Turner12. Samu Kerevi13. Karmichael Hunt14. Chris Feauai-Sautia15. James O’Connor16. Andrew Ready17. Pettowa Paraka18. Sam Talakai19. Ed O’Donoghue20. Lolo Fakaosilea21. Nick Frisby/Scott Gale22. Sam Greene (potential debut)23. Ben TapuaiLast Friday, 22-year-old Zeenat heard a knock on the door of her house in Chhoti Mewli, a village in Mewat district of Haryana. When she opened the door, she found a police inspector standing there. He asked for her husband Imam Shahid Mohammed. Shahid was preparing for namaz when police took him away, claiming he was a member of the terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba.
People waiting for Shahid at the local mosque asked police to let him complete his prayers. The men in plainclothes stood guard and took him away the moment the namaz got over. Zeenat says that was the last she saw of her husband.
The Delhi Police Special Cell also searched the house of another Imam in adjoining Gagas village but couldn't find him. They did take away his passport which showed he had visited Pakistan.
A third Imam, Mohammed Aarish, was taken away for questioning from Chhoti Mewli and freed on Monday afternoon. "I was taken to Delhi and questioned along with Imam Shahid for three-four days. I told police that on October 3, Shahid borrowed my phone SIM card. He told me his SIM card was not working, and he needed mine to make a few phone calls. But Shahid kept the SIM card for 20-25 days," Aarish told The Indian Express.
The police claim Shahid and the Imam of Gagas mosque made several calls to LeT financier Javed Baluchi, plotting a terror strike in Delhi.
"My only mistake was that I gave the SIM card to Shahid. I am innocent, that's why the police let me go," Aarish said.
Abdul Hai, uncle of the Imam of the Gagas mosque who is said to be on the run, maintains that his nephew is innocent. "Yes, he has been to Pakistan, so what? The police took awa Rs 15,000-20,000 from the house which they later returned. He will surrender to police when the time is right. They already have his passport," he said.
Meanwhile, Zeenat has returned to her father's house near Nuh town. Married to Shahid nine years ago, Zeenat said her husband first worked at a mobile phone shop in Nuh where he uploaded songs and videos on mobile phones. He had studied the Quran and became the Imam of Chhoti Mewli eight months ago.
"My husband has never been to Pakistan. I do not know why he has been made a terrorist. I do not even know where they have taken him. I have four children, the youngest is just two years old. I hope they let my husband come home," she said.
Zeenat returns with a bag full of clothes. "The police did not take my husband's clothes. I do not know where to find him in Delhi. Please give this bag to the police," she said.
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsTrying to conceive is grim. If this is something you have never tried, you may not understand why anyone would say this. You may think “well, it’s just having sex without contraception – doesn’t sound bad to me!” And yet it is. Whatever your best intentions, once you’ve made the decision to do it, attempting to get pregnant can take over your life.
Naturally you will begin by thinking “oh, let’s see what happens”. You are not going to become some paranoid fertility-zilla, the kind of woman who checks her basal bodily temperature daily, spends a fortune on ovulation tests, constantly frets about her LH surge and is never quite sure whether or not today’s vaginal discharge looks enough like egg white to be of note. You do not want to be that woman because that woman is a) not cool and b) having rubbish sex. It is much better to be the kind of woman who happens to get pregnant within a month or so of (not really) trying. The kind of woman who might want a baby but is also having lots of hot, carefree shags throughout which she is far too turned on to give conception a second thought. To her, getting pregnant will be an added bonus. “Oh look, it must have been that night on the beach! Or maybe by the fire in the log cabin?” That, you tell yourself, is the kind of conceiver you’ll be.
And yet, a few months down the line, should you have failed to conceive by the hot-but-nonchalant shagging method, things will start to change. You no longer measure the passing of time in quite the same way. Each month splits into the two weeks following the start of your period (“fuck it, I’m not pregnant”) and the two weeks after (“I might be, I might be, I might be… How early can I test?”). Sex at what you know to be the “best” time (you don’t want to be the kind of woman who knows what the “best” time is, but you are) now starts to take on a grim significance. It’s still fun, yes, but not as much fun as it was before you started stressing about whether everything was “on target”.
You may try to keep up the cool act with your partner, failing to let him know that thanks to this morning’s piss on a stick you are absolutely sure that the next forty-eight hours are crucial. After all, why stress him out too? You can just seduce him! But then there will be times when he’s tired or busy or simply not around. At this point you may consider sharing with him the sheer importance of the Shag Timetable (I recommend a PowerPoint presentation). Knowledge of the “right” time is an unfair burden for you to carry alone, particularly when it can feel like your body alone is being tested. You’ll be the one who gets the pass or fail at the end of the month. And after a while you may give up on bedroom etiquette completely. Much as you’d like to lie in a post-coital haze, you now stick your legs and arse in the air to make sure it “goes the right way” and doesn’t all dribble out. You make yourself feel like a leaky vessel, your partner, a squeezed-out tube of Frubes. It is not how you pictured it at all.
As if this was not bad enough, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have issued new guidelines advising women who are trying to conceive not to drink any alcohol at all. As ever, we are told that there is no proven safe amount of alcohol for pregnant women to consume (even though there is no evidence that small amounts do harm, either) and that abstaining completely is “the safest approach”. It’s the kind of woolly reasoning which makes most pregnant women think “sod it, I just won’t bother” (indeed, perhaps |
ament negotiations and conducting its second nuclear test (Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press/Washington Post, March 9).Rocket Lab is pleased to announce the completion of the world’s first private orbital launch complex, Launch Complex 1.
Located on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula, Launch Complex 1 is set to enable the highest frequency of space launches in history. The facility will be the primary site for launches of Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle, designed to lift a 150 kg payload to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit.
New Zealand’s remote island location and low volume of marine and air traffic create ideal conditions for frequent launch opportunities. In addition, launches from the site can access a uniquely wide range of orbital inclinations – from 39 degrees through sun-synchronous.
Facilities at Launch Complex 1 include a vehicle processing hangar where the vehicle will be prepared for launch as well as a 50 tonne launch platform. The platform will tilt forward to lift the rocket to a vertical position prior to launch.
Satellites launched from the complex will be used to provide services including optimized crop monitoring, improved weather reporting, internet from space, natural disaster prediction, up-to-date maritime data and search and rescue services.
Rocket Lab has completed major milestones this year with the qualification of the 3D printed Rutherford engine, qualification of the second stage of the Electron rocket and the development of major infrastructure including remote tracking, test facilities and the launch site. The company is currently working through the qualification of the first stage of the Electron rocket and will look to begin the test flight phase once qualification and launch licensing are complete.In a new twist on the control of movement through control of issuance of ID credentials, the Associated Press reports that a U.S. citizen has been trapped in Kuwait after the local U.S. Embassy summarily confiscated his passport:
Aziz Nouhaili, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Morocco, has been trying for nearly four months to get home from Kuwait, where he worked for several years as a military contractor…. Kuwaiti officials have made clear they will allow Nouhaili to leave only if he has a valid U.S. passport.
Kuwait is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which provides in its Article 12 that, “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own,” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”
Regardless of his citizenship or whether he has any passport, Mr. Nouhali is entitled by black-letter international treaty law, expressly acceded to by the Kuwaiti monarchy, to leave Kuwait.
As long as Mr. Nouhali is a U.S. citizen (which appears to be undisputed, at least as of now), the proper course of action for the U.S. State Department, if Kuwait refuses to allow Mr. Nouhali to leave, is a formal diplomatic protest by the U.S. to the Kuwaiti government, followed by a formal complaint to the U.N. Human Right Committee if Kuwait persists in denying Mr. Nouhali’s right to leave.
Mr. Nouhali’s treatment also highlights the significance of State Department or DHS passport issuance procedures and decisions to deny, withhold, or confiscate a passport as tantamount to decisions on whether to permit individual citizens to exercise their right to travel.
Instead of helping Mr. Nouhali to exercise his rights as a U.S. citizen, however, the U.S. government is helping to deny him his rights. A press release from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that:
According to Aziz Nouhaili, [U.S.] embassy officials told him they were considering making a request that he be denaturalized and that he would not receive his passport until the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made a determination on that matter.
The problem is that such summary, extrajudicial denaturalization violates both U.S. law — which specifies procedures, due process, and judicial review for denaturalization decisions — and the prohibition in Article 12 of the ICCPR, to which the U.S. is also a party, on being “arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”
(We’re currently trying to find out who the State Department has designated as the required “single contact officer” responsible for ensuring that complaints like ours of human rights treaty violations by the State Department are responded to, responses to our our complaints to that office at the DHS, and an accounting of what has happened to other such complaints.)
CAIR staff attorney Gadeir Abbas has written on Mr. Nouhali’s behalf, demanding that the State Department return his passport. The letter to Secretary of State Clinton argues that:
Mr. Nouhaili’s account raises concerns that the United States is unlawfully attempting to effect an extrajudicial denaturalization of an American citizen. Because Mr. Nouhaili is an American citizen and has the documentation to prove it, these actions amount to a gross deprivation of Mr. Nouhaili’s Fifth Amendment right to due process as well as a violation of his absolute right as an American citizen to return to the United States. Simply stated, there is no lawful basis upon which the United States can deny Mr. Nouhaili the ability to return to his country of citizenship. American citizenship is too important to be subject to the whims of low level bureaucrats. If there are any concerns about my client’s citizenship, he has the right to have those concerns addressed through the judicial process once he returns to the United States. Indeed, the Supreme Court made clear in Fedorenko v. United States that in order to denaturalize a citizen the United States must provide in federal court ‘evidence justifying revocation of citizenship [that is] ‘clear, unequivocal, and convincing.’ Until that happens, Mr. Nouhaili retains all the rights of a citizen, which include the right to return to his country of citizenship.”
We’re disturbed about many aspects of this incident, of course, but especially by the way that established legal procedures and rights of due process and judicial review are being disregarded.
Once again the State Department and DHS are insisting on secret, summary, extra-judicial, administrative procedures to make decisions about whether to issue ID credentials or whether to allow citizens to exercise their right to travel. No attempt has been made to explain or justify the choice not to pursue existing legal sanctions (in this case, denaturalization) through exisitng legal procedures. Instead, the State department and DHS have simply taken for granted their authority to take such matters into their own hands, and deny U.S. citizens’ rights by secret administrative fiat.
Perhaps that doesn’t offend the sentiments of the Kuwaiti monarchy, which rules by decree of the Emir. But it ought to offend the sentiments of U.S. citizens and advocates of human rights around the world, and further highlight the U.S. as a rogue state when it comes to respect for the right to travel.
[Update: After Mr. Nouhaili’s attorney wrote to Secretary of State Clinton and threatened to sue the State Department if it failed to return his passport, his passport was returned — without explanation. “Gadeir Abbas, Nouhaili’s lawyer, said he is happy the government did the right thing in returning Nouhaili’s passport, but said Nouhaili’s case is one among many where government officials erected bureaucratic obstacles for American Muslims that are removed only when exposed to publicity. ‘These are not isolated cases,’ Abbas said. ‘Aziz reached out to us, but we know there are other people in his situation who are not reaching out.'” AP: US citizen stuck in Kuwait can now leave country.]Lowell Cohn: Raiders need to get tough vs. Colts
Challenge to Oakland Raiders. Get tough. For once, get tough. Get tough against the Indianapolis Colts, who are no big deal. Just get tough.
Seems like an insulting challenge, right? You think you’re tough. You’ve proven that. You’re a spectacular 11-3. You are the surprise of the NFL. The darlings of the NFL. And you already have qualified for the postseason, so what’s the complaint?
Just this — you’re not tough.
Sure, you have 11 wins, but you almost never put away a team. You let teams hang around, give teams extra chances to beat you. With you guys it almost always comes down to the fourth quarter. You’ve won most of those close, heart-thumping games, but when it counts — say, in the playoffs — you might lose a close game. Bad things happen in the playoffs. You need to take charge. Until now, you’ve been leading a charmed life.
Raiders, you’ve got to start putting teams away. Sorry for the nasty image here — but you have to step on opponents’ throats and refuse to let them up. Step on their throats early. That’s football. That’s winning football.
Last Sunday against the Chargers, you allowed that ordinary team to hang around, that team with nothing to play for. And the Chargers did hang around and you had to pull out the win at the end — a field goal with 2:40 left in the fourth quarter. Sure, a win is a win, but that win was not impressive. You can’t play like that in the postseason. If you do, you could lose.
Hey, Raiders, congrats on your 11-3 record, but you aren’t as good as that record. Some of your games could have gone the other way. You live too dangerously. You put yourselves in danger. Needless danger. Get tough. Especially on offense.
Your running game is a finesse running game. Spare us the finesse. It’s all fancy cuts by the backs and zone blocks by the linemen. Not how you put away a team, not how you wear down an opponent.
You need to dominate physically — a cliché way to put it. Call it football-speak. It means you need to knock the snot out of the opposing defense. OK? It means your offensive linemen take the will to fight away from the opponent’s defensive linemen. Your line knocks them back and makes them cry uncle. Or just plain cry.
Do this to the Colts. Let’s see you do it.
The Colts are ready for a fall. Ready to quit in the first quarter if you give them the incentive, if you beat them up at the line. Their playoff chances are hanging by a thread. They may be phoning it in. Cut their phone line.
Can you do that?
Can you sustain long, time-consuming, powerful, painful drives? Can you keep their offense off the field? You don’t want Colts quarterback Andrew Luck to get into his groove. Risky, that. You don’t want receiver T.Y. Hilton to go crazy — he can. And you sure don’t want Frank Gore — an old favorite around here — to stick it to you. He can.President Trump’s job approval rating is 21 percentage points below the historical average for his predecessors at the same point in their presidencies, according to Gallup.
The historical average for elected presidents in mid-February, the polling organization said, is 61 percent. Mr. Trump’s job approval, however, stands at 40 percent, just under a month into his presidency.
At the same point during President Obama’s first term, in February 2009, 64 percent of the public approved of the job he was doing. In February 2001, 62 percent approved of President George W. Bush’s job. President Clinton, meanwhile, was the last president to have a low rating at the beginning of his presidency, when 51 percent approved of the job he was doing.
Mr. Trump’s initial job approval rating, Gallup noted, was 45 percent, which makes him the first president to begin his first term with less than a majority approving of him.
While the president’s job approval has fallen by 5 percentage points since his inauguration, the job approval for Obama during the same period fell by 4 percentage points and fell for Clinton by 7 percentage points. The decline in support for Mr. Trump’s job might be tied to his travel ban, which has been stalled by the court system.
Meanwhile, only 8 percent of Democrats approve of Mr. Trump’s job, 35 percent of independents approve and 87 percent of Republicans approve.
The poll surveyed 1,527 adults between Feb. 13 and 15 with a 3 percentage point margin of error.With the Oklahoma City Thunder deep into the luxury tax following their decision to match the offer sheet on Enes Kanter, they couldn’t pass up on the chance to unload an extra contract, sending Perry Jones III to the Boston Celtics in a salary dump on Tuesday. He joins Jeremy Lamb as another young player who wasn’t able to live up to expectations in Oklahoma City whom they let go this off-eason for essentially nothing. When the two came in 2012, they were supposed to be part of a second wave of young players who would augment the Thunder core as they started making real money. That’s how fast the worm can turn in the NBA - from a key part of the future to yesterday’s news in a snap of the finger.
Talent was never the issue for either. For all the detractors the Thunder front office has picked up over the years, no one has ever questioned their eye for talent in the draft. Forget Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Serge Ibaka. They took Reggie Jackson at No. 24 and he just got a max contract from the Detroit Pistons. Even the guys who haven’t worked out in Oklahoma City, like Jeff Green and Cole Aldrich, have managed to stick in the NBA. Their only first-round pick who has busted out the league completely is Byron Mullens.
At 6’5, 180 with a 6’11 wingspan, Lamb had a spindly build but crazy long arms for a SG. As a freshman at UConn, he was the second option on a team that won the NCAA championship. As a sophomore, he was the primary option, averaging 18 points, 5 rebounds and 2 assists a game on 48 percent shooting. He was a volume three-point shooter with the ability to put the ball on the floor, create shots for others, fill up the stat sheet and score with ease off the bounce.
While PJ3 never quite put it all together at Baylor, he had an absolutely freakish combination of skills. At 6’11, 235 with a 7’2 wingspan, he had the size of a C and the speed of a PG. He was the rare 6’11+ player with the ability to play on the perimeter on both offense and defense - he could shoot and handle the ball like a much smaller player and he could switch out and guard guys like that 25+ feet from the basket. The combination of his college numbers not jumping off the page - 13 points, 7 rebounds and 1 assist on 50% shooting as a sophomore - and lingering questions about the long-term health of his knee pushed him all the way to the No. 28 pick in 2012.
On the surface, playing for a small-market franchise with a proven history of developing young talent and a commitment to the draft seemed like the perfect fit for both guys. The problem was that things had changed in Oklahoma City. They were trying to compete for championships first and develop young talent second. While the Thunder may have been willing to wait on the growing pains of under-22 players when they were a lottery team in the latter half of the 2000’s, they were throwing guys the deep end and saying sink or swim by 2012. As rookies, the two were shunted to the end of the bench and never really given much of a chance to earn a role in the rotation.
The pressure was always harsher on Lamb, who was thrust into the spotlight as part of the Harden trade. The other components were a veteran not expected to stay long-term - Kevin Martin - and two picks that became project big men years down the line - Steven Adams and Mitch McGary. Lamb was a lottery pick playing Harden’s position expected to eventually fill his role as a high-scoring 6th man off the bench. The controversy surrounding the trade meant the knives were out almost as soon as he arrived and spending most of his rookie season in the D-League meant many observers were ready to write him off immediately.
However, in all likelihood, the plan all along was that neither guy was going to play much right away. Where it gets interesting is in their 2nd year, when both showed flashes of being contributors when given playing time in the first half of the season. Lamb averaged 8.5 points on 43% shooting in only 19 minutes a game and he had a number of 15+ point games off the bench. PJ3’s playing time was a bit more sporadic but he showed the ability to shoot 3’s and defend multiple positions, most notably in a regular season game against Miami Heat when he guarded LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Not many basketball players in the world have the physical tools to do that.
The second half of that season is when things started to go south and the story gets a little murky. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear from the outside, they both fell out of favor with Scott Brooks. Once the Thunder picked up Caron Butler after a mid-season buy-out, it was over. Brooks went with battle-tested veterans over young guys who glided around the floor, made mental mistakes and never showed the type of intensity their coach looked for. The decision ended up backfiring on Brooks when Butler and Derek Fisher gave him absolutely nothing in the Western Conference Finals but he was a stubborn coach who was going to go down with guys he could trust.
Coming into their third season, Lamb and PJ3 were on the chopping block. While Butler, Fisher and Thabo Sefolosha were gone, the Thunder signed Anthony Morrow and they had another first-round pick on the wings - Andre Roberson - they wanted to develop. The real missed chance for both was getting injured right in the middle of the historic wave of injuries that sunk the team, not getting the opportunity to play the major minutes that would have been available for the first time in their tenure. When Oklahoma City acquired Kyle Singler, DJ Augustin and Dion Waiters in trades at mid-season, it was proof that not just the coaching staff but the front office as well had given up on them.
The argument for why Lamb deserves another shot is pretty simple. For all the knocks he received in terms of consistency, he consistently put up numbers whenever he got on the floor. His per-36 minute numbers were always good - 16 points, 4 rebounds, 3 assists and 1 steal on 43% shooting in 2014 and 17 points, 6 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1 steal on 42% shooting in 2015. It’s a bit of a chicken and an egg with younger players who can’t get consistent playing time because all they can really control is what they do when they do get to play. Maybe there was some reason why Lamb wasn’t getting time behind guys getting worse numbers or maybe there wasn’t. The NBA isn’t always a meritocracy.
After his per-minute numbers slipped, a lot of the argument for PJ3 comes down to the magical game he had in the first week of the season when he had 32 points, 7 rebounds and 3 assists on 17 shots against the LA Clippers. Watch the clips from that game and you tell me if there isn’t some real talent there. He never got consistent playing time on one of the best teams in the NBA and he was never put in a position to succeed in a rudimentary offense that involved everyone else standing around and watching KD and Westbrook isolate. The real interesting thing is that offense isn’t even his main selling point - he’s a 6’11 guy who can switch screen-rolls and guard all five positions over the course of a possession.
Either way, it appears that neither was going to get another shot in Oklahoma City so it was best for everyone if they got a chance somewhere else. The Thunder certainly don’t need them. They’ve had a ton of draft picks over the last few years and there’s a numbers crunch just to get them all on the roster. They are bringing in two more rookie perimeter players this season in Josh Huestis and Cameron Payne and they’ve got a draft-and-stash guy in Europe - Alex Abrines - who is going to need a shot eventually as well. They’ve got two second round picks in Semaj Christon and Dakari Johnson who may never even get a real chance to make the 15-man roster.
Lamb should get a shot with the Charlotte Hornets but there’s certainly no guarantee of playing time. They are committed to Kemba Walker at point and they brought in Jeremy Lin to play a big role off the bench as a combo guard. On the wings, they just gave up a king’s ransom for Nicolas Batum and they spent a No. 2 overall pick on Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. Lamb will be competing for minutes as a spot-up shooter off the bench with PJ Hairston, a first-round pick in 2014, and Troy Daniels, a knock down shooter who has also been a victim of a numbers game in his first few stops in the league.
PJ3 walks into an even more crowded situation in Boston on a team stockpiling assets without a real clear plan for how they will all fit together. He could play at either forward position but PF is probably out because they have more big men than they can even use with Jared Sullinger, Kelly Olynyk, David Lee, Amir Johnson, Jonas Jerebko and Tyler Zeller. On the perimeter, they have money invested in Avery Bradley, Isaiah Thomas and Jae Crowder and first-round picks invested in Marcus Smart, James Young and Terry Rozier, which doesn’t even count Evan Turner. Even bad teams in the Eastern Conference have a ton of guys dying to get minutes.
Cream tends to rise to the top but there’s only so many chances a guy is going to get to even be in the conversation. Jeremy Lamb is 23 and Perry Jones III is 24 and the clock is already ticking. While a lot of guys need 2-3 stops in the NBA before they find a home and establish themselves as players, even more just wash right out of the league. If your first coach doesn’t play you, people won’t necessarily hold it against you. If your second and third coaches don’t, they will. And once you have been in the league a few years, there’s a whole new wave of young players behind you who need their own chances. Life comes at you fast in the NBA.There’s a lot that can be said about DC Comics, but one thing that can increasingly be said more and more is that their comics are finger licking good. That’s right, another KFC/DC Comics crossover is happening with KFC #3: Across The Universe, available in print EXCLUSIVELY at the DC Comics booth (#1915).
From the press release:
In KFC #3 ACROSS THE UNIVERSE the Colonel goes cosmic in a star-spanning quest to bring crunchy, spicy satisfaction to a hungry universe, only to face a “thieving varmint” who steals his space-bound Zinger chicken sandwiches. Who else but DC’s Green Lantern can help the Colonel scan the universe to catch the thief?! KFC #3’s creative team includes writer Tony Bedard, penciler Tom Derenick, inkers Trevor Scott and Sean Parsons, with a cover by Tom Grummett and Trevor Scott.
Yes, it’s a comic about fried chicken sandwiches. But admit it — this is more exciting than anything Marvel has announced for Legacy so far.
“It’s been an honor, a privilege, and just plain FUN working on the last two KFC comics,” said Bedard in the press release. “I’m super-excited the story is a trilogy now, with the Colonel planet-hopping across the DC Universe. As a former GREEN LANTERN writer, it’s great to revisit Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps. I’ve written many comics over the years, but the response to teaming up the Colonel with DC Super Heroes has been a phenomenon all its own.”
KFC #3: Across The Universe was first teased a few weeks ago with this video:
In addition to being an SDCC EXCLUSIVE in print, the comic will be available for digital download for a limited time starting on July 19.
About Jude Terror A prophecy says that in the comic book industry's darkest days, a hero will come to lead the people through a plague of overpriced floppies, incentive variant covers, #1 issue reboots, and super-mega-crossover events. Scourge of Rich Johnston, maker of puns, and seeker of the Snyder Cut, Jude Terror, sadly, is not the hero comics needs right now... but he's the one the industry deserves.
(Last Updated )
Related PostsAs more and more Americans become tolerant of gay marriage, conservatives are attempting to shore up their defenses against homosexuality.
The so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill, which attempts to prevent any discussion of sexual orientation in elementary and middle schools, is currently on the chopping block in Tennessee, but it's still causing intense debate in Missouri.
Colbert weighed in on the issue on Monday's show, first sarcastically lamenting the shift in attitudes ("Those gays are breeding like gay flies..."), then mock-praising Missouri's Republican leaders who are backing the "Don't Say Gay" bill: "Finding out that homosexuality exists is a slippery slope to tolerating it. Take it from me, when I did Sondheim with Neil Patrick Harris he couldn't have been more friendly or professional, and I will never forgive him for it."
The absurd highlight of the segment, however, didn't come from Colbert, but from a quote by the bill's co-sponsor, Dwight Scharnhorst, who defended the legislation by saying that when it comes to our kids' education, "There is no need to talk about Billy wanting to marry a goat."Qantas says carbon tax didn't put prices up, removal won't send them down
Updated
Qantas says it will not be cutting its fares, despite removing its carbon price surcharge.
The airline says its carbon surcharge of between $2-$7 did not add to the cost of domestic airfares, with overall prices falling due to intense competition with its rival Virgin.
Qantas says the cost of the carbon tax instead fell directly upon its bottom line over the past two financial years, costing the airline a total of more than $100 million per year.
"Given the level of competition and the unique pressures in the domestic aviation market, we haven't been able to recover the cost of the carbon tax through price increases as we originally intended," Qantas said in a statement.
Instead, Qantas says the carbon surcharge was added to fares and retained to help it keep track of how much the tax was costing it.
"Our all-inclusive fares have not risen, though we have kept a small carbon surcharge on domestic fares so that we can keep track internally of the cost of the tax," the airline explained.
"This has now been removed, but there won't be any change to the prices that customers pay."
A capacity war with Virgin that saw both airlines adding more seats to their routes than there was profitable demand from travellers has kept airfares down.
However, Qantas recently announced that it would stop adding domestic capacity over the start of the 2014-15 financial year.
Topics: air-transport, emissions-trading, company-news, business-economics-and-finance, australia
First postedRep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, voted for Donald Trump while still refusing to endorse him Thursday, because "I will never, ever vote for Hillary Clinton," he said.
"I struggled with this," Chaffetz told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. "I am not going to endorse Donald Trump. I am not going to do that.
"I can't defend the comments that he made.
"But elections are tough decisions," he added. "Last week, my wife and I both voted for Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States.
"I think Hillary Clinton is that bad."
Last month, Chaffetz withdrew his Trump endorsement after a 2005 videotape surfaced with the Republican nominee making lewd comments about groping and having sex with married women.
"I’m out," he told Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City. "I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president."
Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Thursday noted the difference between endorsing Trump and supporting him at the polls.
"The endorsement is far different than who you actually vote for," he told Blitzer. "It's the one vote I actually do for myself.
"I don't represent anybody else," Chaffetz added. "We all get the same vote.
"But in the context of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, it's Donald Trump."George Adams Wyman (July 3, 1877 – November 15, 1959) was the first person to make a transcontinental crossing of the United States by motor vehicle.[1] In 1903, Wyman rode his 1902 California Motorcycle Company motor bicycle from San Francisco to New York City in 51 days, finishing 20 days before Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, the first person to cross the continent by automobile.[2]
Early years [ edit ]
Wyman was born on July 3, 1877, in Oakland, California. As a teen, he became interested in bicycle racing, which reached its zenith during the 1890s. He became a leading bicycle racer and, at the turn of the century, moved to Australia to pursue his racing career. Following Australians Arthur Richardson, Alex White, and Donald Mackay, Wyman became the first American to circumnavigate the continent of Australia on a bicycle. In 1902, he returned to California as a top-ranked cyclist, and raced for various Bay Area bicycling clubs. It was during this time that he also began to ride motorized bicycles.
In the summer of 1902, perhaps inspired by the epic 1884 bicycle expedition of Thomas Stevens,[3] Wyman became the first person to cross the Sierra Nevada aboard a motor vehicle, riding his 1.5-hp California motorbike from San Francisco to Reno, Nevada, to compete in a club bicycle race at the Reno Fairgrounds.[4] During the trip, Wyman conceived the idea of riding a motorbike across the United States.
Transcontinental crossing [ edit ]
Wyman used his 1902 California machine for his crossing of the United States. The California had a 200 cc (12 cu in), 1.5 hp (1.1 kW) four-stroke engine attached to an ordinary diamond-frame bicycle.[2][5][6] Wyman's machine was equipped with 28 x 1.5 in. tires, wooden rims, a leading-link front suspension fork, a Garford spring saddle, a Duck Brake Company front roller brake, and a 1902-patent Atherton rear coaster brake.[2][5][7] A leather belt-drive with a spring-loaded idler pulley directly connected the engine output shaft to the rear wheel.[5] Using a standard steel bicycle frame, the California weighed approximately 70–80 pounds (32–36 kg) without rider, and was capable of approximately 25 mph (40 km/h) using the 30-octane gasoline of the day, with a range of 75 to 100 miles (121 to 161 km).[5][8] Throttle control was not yet perfected, and engine revolutions were mainly controlled by means of a spark timing mechanism.[5] The wick-type carburetor was crude, consisting of a metal box with internal baffles stuffed with cotton batting.[9] With no float chamber, the rider had to open the gasoline tap periodically to admit fuel into the carburetor.
For such a long trip, Wyman carried a remarkably small amount of gear. A set of warm clothing, money, water bottle, cans for spare oil and gasoline, a Kodak Vest Pocket camera, a cyclometer, various bicycle tools and spare parts, and a long-barreled.38 Smith & Wesson revolver constituted his total luggage.
Wyman departed from Lotta's Fountain at the corner of Market and Kearny streets in San Francisco at 2:30 P.M on May 16, 1903.[4] He had previously agreed to keep a diary of his journey for later publication in The Motorcycle magazine, a periodical of the time. The first part of his trip took him across the Sierra Nevada, through the Nevada desert into Wyoming, then on through Nebraska to Illinois.
As the dirt trails and wagon tracks of the day were often impassable, Wyman rode the railroad tracks for over half of his journey. During the first part of his trip, he frequently slept in railroad company housing or at rooming houses located in division settlements (small municipalities founded by the railroad).[10] His motorbike suffered several breakdowns along the way, requiring him to make improvised repairs until he could get to a larger town to obtain new parts. As he neared Aurora, Illinois, his engine's crankshaft snapped, and after pedaling his way to Chicago, Wyman was forced to wait there five days for a new crank to arrive by railway express.[11]
After leaving Illinois, Wyman traversed the states of Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before entering New York state. Outside of Albany his engine lost all power, and he was required to pedal his heavy motorbike the remaining 150 miles (240 km) to New York City using a cycle path reserved for licensed cyclists.[12]
On July 6, 1903, Wyman arrived in New York City, completing his transcontinental crossing and becoming the first person to cross the North American continent aboard a motor vehicle.[13] His journey took a total of 51 days to cover some 3,800 miles (6,100 km). Afterwards, Wyman's motorbike was placed on display at the New York Motorcycle Club while Wyman recovered from his grueling journey. While in New York, Wyman was present for the inauguration of the very first nationwide motorcycle organization, the Federation of American Motorcyclists (FAM)[14] at the Kings County Wheelmens' Club in Brooklyn; it was reported at the time that his hands were still in bandages from the trip.[15] Wyman later returned to San Francisco by train. His California motorbike was put on display in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park for a special exhibition commemorating the trip.
Later life [ edit ]
Following his successful crossing of the United States, Wyman settled in San Francisco. He endorsed the Duck Roller Brake in promotional advertisements and worked as a chauffeur before becoming an automobile mechanic. He eventually married and had two sons. Wyman later moved to Eureka, California, continuing to work as an auto mechanic. He died November 15, 1959, at age 82 in San Joaquin County, California. He was cremated and his remains rest with that of his wife Nellie G. Wyman in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, CA, in the main mausoleum, Section 157, Niche 1, Tier 2.NEW YORK—According to confused onlookers inside Penn Station, recently fired New York Rangers head coach John Tortorella is currently wandering around the major rail terminal yelling at complete strangers to clear the puck into the neutral zone. “C’mon! Cover the goddamn high slot and clear the zone!” said a disheveled and slightly off-balance Tortorella, who was reportedly screaming at an elderly couple about to board an Amtrak train to Boston. “Wake up and get the forecheck going right now! I don’t want to hear any excuses—just get out there and either crash the net or move the puck out to point and put some fucking shots on net!” At press time, eyewitnesses confirmed that Tortorella was shouting at travelers in the Grand Concourse to gather around him to talk about the team’s “pathetic penalty kill.”
UPDATE: Reports just confirmed that Tortorella is shouting at a New Jersey Transit employee for missing a blatant cross-checking penalty on the boards.
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UPDATE: According to sources, Tortorella is now incoherently shrieking about “getting the third line off the ice” while frantically pacing around the Penn Station food court.“I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee!”
- Queen Amidala, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Though a Consular knows there are multiple paths to peace, the decision between forging through difficult negotiations or reaching for one's lightsaber is never easy. The role of a Consular is to constantly evaluate the situation at hand and determine the best way to bring about a peaceful resolution. To help attaining this rather nebulous goal, the new Disciples of Harmony sourcebook expands players' choices in the Star Wars™: Force and Destiny™ roleplaying game, and also offers Game Masters a wealth of options for adding depth to a campaign.
More than a supplement for Consular career paths and specializations, Disciples of Harmony supplements the core Force and Destiny rulebook with equipment, droids, starships, and adventure possibilities. Every page works to bring new life to the familiar and build your campaign into an adventure as rich as the Star Wars galaxy deserves.
Today's preview includes a look at new gear to help a Consular bring peace as well as an adventure hook designed to utilize their many diplomatic strengths.
New Gear and Weapons
In a galaxy filled with blaster rifles, vibro-axes, and lightsabers, attempting to find a peaceful resolution can be difficult in the best of situations. Disciples of Harmony brings a diverse selection of new gear to help player characters put an end to conflict as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Ranged Weapons : The AJ-23 Concussive Rifle releases blasts of concussive force capable of knocking down adults of most species without resulting in permanent injury. The Tenloss IDX-9 Ion Stunner also works toward incapacitation, disrupting the neural pathways of living creatures and the electronic components of droids.
: The AJ-23 Concussive Rifle releases blasts of concussive force capable of knocking down adults of most species without resulting in permanent injury. The Tenloss IDX-9 Ion Stunner also works toward incapacitation, disrupting the neural pathways of living creatures and the electronic components of droids. Melee Weapons : A Fear Stick is compact, easily concealable, and undetectable by traditional weapons scanners, injecting a powerful compound that delivers an intense fear response. The new Borstel Neuronic Lash projects a flexible strand of energy that can deliver whip-like attacks to those nearby.
: A Fear Stick is compact, easily concealable, and undetectable by traditional weapons scanners, injecting a powerful compound that delivers an intense fear response. The new Borstel Neuronic Lash projects a flexible strand of energy that can deliver whip-like attacks to those nearby. Survival Gear : The duties of a Consular can take a player all over the galaxy, and one must be prepared for any situation |
diplomatic objectives, the president’s ability to conduct foreign relations would be severely hampered.PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - U.S. cities that have long promoted bicycle use by commuters are now seeing a steady rise in the popularity of pedal power as gasoline prices soar.
A cyclist crosses the 14th Street Bridge connecting Washington DC (rear) to Virginia as she leaves U.S. capital June 11, 2008. REUTERS/Hyungwon Kang
Campaigns originally designed to cut down on traffic and pollution are now paying off for people looking for an option to driving with national gas prices averaging a record $4 per gallon.
People in cities such as Chicago, Washington and Portland, Oregon, can take advantage of bicycle lanes, bike-friendly transit systems and bike-parking locations built in recent years.
“Twelve years ago, I would bike down to City Hall and often it was a lonely ride,” said Ben Gomberg, Chicago’s bicycle program coordinator. “Today, there are often 17 or 18 riders stopped at the intersections.”
Unlike Europeans, Americans use bikes for transport sparingly, even though 40 percent of personal trips in the United States are two miles or less, according to bicycle advocates.
In a country famous for its love of cars and driving, less than 1 percent of personal trips are by bike compared with up to 30 percent in some parts of Europe, campaigners say.
But rates of bike use in some U.S. cities are significantly higher thanks to recognition by urban planners of the environmental, economic and health benefits.
In Portland, widely regarded as America’s most bike-friendly city, 5.4 percent of people said in a 2006 survey that the bicycle was their primary means of getting to work.
“In the last three years, we reached another acceleration point,” said Scott Bricker, executive director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, an advocacy group. “Ridership is increasing exponentially.”
GETTING INTO GEAR
The relative popularity of bicycling in Portland may be linked to bike lanes, locking facilities and programs that encourage public bicycling and safety education for children.
The city has 171 miles of bike lanes along its 2,568 miles of roadways and plans to increase that to 434 miles. Portland has 71 miles of bike trails and a third of its arterial roads have bike lanes or paved shoulders.
Portland’s network includes 114 miles of “bicycle boulevards” — quiet streets where bikes have priority over cars and where traffic speed is restricted.
Those boulevards may be a better way of encouraging riding than traditional bike lanes where riders are still close to speeding cars, Bricker said.
In Chicago, pro-bike policies have resulted in 115 miles
of bike lanes, more than 11,000 bike racks and 50 miles of dedicated bike paths along Lake Michigan, Gomberg said.
Around 1.5 percent of personal trips in Chicago are made by bike and the city aims to boost that to 5 percent by 2015.
Slideshow (5 Images)
In Washington, the proportion of people biking to work rose from 1.2 percent in 2000 to an estimated 2 percent in 2006, said Jim Sebastian, who heads the U.S. capital’s bicycle and pedestrian program.
Bike lanes in Washington now stretch to 33 miles — 11 times longer than in 2001 — and more than half of the city’s subway stops now have bike racks.
Later this summer, Washington plans to launch the first U.S. bike-sharing program in which users will pay $40 a year for a swipe card enabling them to pick up a bike from racks around the city and then return them to any other rack.OLYMPIA, Wash. — For years, experts have debated how more fuel-efficient cars will affect the multibillion-dollar revenue stream from Washington state’s gasoline tax. Starting next year, we’ll find out.
The Washington State Transportation Commission is gearing up for a one-year study to figure out ways to charge vehicle owners a tax based on the number of miles driven within the state, rather than on the amount of gas pumped.
The state plans to seek out and select 2,000 drivers next spring, scattered across metropolitan and rural areas, to take part in the pilot project starting next fall. Officials already have set up a website – WaRoadUsageCharge.org – that will let residents sign up. The state has received more than $3.8 million in federal funding to test such alternative methods of funding highways.
The impetus for the test is the rise of electric cars, hybrids and other fuel-efficient vehicles, said Reema Griffith, the Transportation Commission’s executive director.
These vehicles are expected to fill up our roads in the next 20 years. One side effect: Less gas being pumped means less gasoline tax for the state of Washington. That translates to less revenue available for hundreds of road projects in the state. The tax went up to 49.4 cents a gallon this year, and it’s projected to generate $3.1 billion in revenue for the current budget period.
Washington state’s test comes as the Seattle region’s population swells as a result of the technology boom. Tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon, along with a growing number of tech startups, are attracting large numbers of workers — and their cars — to the region. The influx continues to impact major roadways and corridors in areas including the South Lake Union neighborhood, home to Amazon’s headquarters.
The pilot project will study whether a road-usage tax could be a workable alternative to the gas tax. The methods to measure road-usage will include both high-tech and low-tech approaches, Griffith said. While the exact methods have not been nailed down yet, these are some of the possibilities that have been discussed.
A driver pre-paying for a block of miles with a simulated tax of 2.4 cents per mile. Trying out this method would test how to levy a road-use tax on vehicles with no high-tech features. Another idea that has been discussed is a time-based permit — paying a flat fee to drive unlimited miles in a given period, say, a month or a year.
Using a smartphone to photograph the odometer reading and VIN number of a car at regular intervals — and then transmitting that information to the state.
Attaching a mileage meter to a vehicle that would transmit information to the state automatically.
Attaching a mileage-and-location meter to a vehicle to track in-state and out-of-state miles, so that drivers are only taxed for miles driven in Washington. This could require a multistate network for collecting and sifting taxes also be a tax-collecting-and-sifting factor if Oregon, California and British Columbia also adopt this type of road-tax system. These governments are pondering whether to adopt such a system.
After the test runs end in the fall of 2018, Griffith speculated that the data-crunching will take another nine months. Also after the test runs, the commission also will have to hold sessions with the public to get feedback. She estimated that believed it would take about three years of study before the commission can submit a report to the Washington Legislature and let lawmakers decide whether to to see if the state should pursue this concept further.
Griffith said privacy concerns have not surfaced yet on the state collecting transmitted driving data. “It is a legitimate question,” she added.
Right now, California is conducting a similar set of data-collection runs with 5,000 drivers, which is scheduled to end in spring 2017. Oregon also has a similar project under way with roughly 1,200 drivers. Hawaii will start a study similar to Washington’s pilot program in the fall of 2017.
The concept, Griffith said, “is slowly gaining momentum.”George Hotz, a well known hacker, has secured funding for 'Comma', his self-driving car startup based on artificial intelligence.
Hotz first demonstrated his self-driving car technology last December. It was built as part of a bet with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Hotz promised Musk that he would be able to create a better system than the one Tesla currently gets from Mobileye. If successful, he wanted a lucrative contract with the electric car maker. The deal fell through when apparently, Musk tried to insert an out into the contract.
The company has raised seed investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that values Comma at $20 million, reports Forbes. So far the team includes Yunus Saatchi, who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge in artificial intelligence, as chief machine learning officer; Jake Smith, who is involved in the Bitcoin community, as head of operations; and Elizabeth Stark, another Bitcoin startup figure, as legal advisor. Hotz plans to hire eight people in the next three months with expertise in machine learning and consumer hardware.
Despite not having a prototype, Hotz plans to release something by the end of the year. He's looking to turn the top five selling cars in the U.S. into a semi-autonomous vehicles. At minimum to work with his system, a car will need anti-locking brakes and power steering.
Eventually Comma hopes to provide a system to car makers and auto suppliers but they move too slow for Hotz' liking.
“We believe our killer app is traffic,” Hotz said. “Humans are bad at traffic. We can make something that drives super-humanly smooth through traffic.”
Read MoreAliir Aliir has been dropped from the Swans side for missing a training session
SYDNEY defender Aliir Aliir has been dropped for Sunday's critical clash with the Brisbane Lions for disciplinary reasons.
Aliir, who has spent the past two games in the NEAFL to work on his form and defensive work, failed to attend the Swans' final training session at the SCG on Saturday, and Swans general manager of football, Tom Harley, said the defender's actions were unacceptable.
"It is disappointing and unfortunate that Aliir comes out of the side," he told the club's website.
"We had a training session yesterday and it is disappointing that Aliir didn't attend. We can't stand for that as a football club, so he has taken full responsibility for that."
Harrison Marsh has come in to replace Aliir after recovering from a hamstring strain, and Harley said the West Australian was ready to resume his role in the back half.
"It was a very minor hamstring strain and we were very cautious with it given he has had some soft tissue history, but we are very confident based on the work he has done this season that he can play a role for us this afternoon."Even though the Green Bay Packers waited until Friday to rule out Aaron Rodgers for the seventh straight game, the star quarterback apparently wasn't as close to coming back as it may have appeared.
Rodgers' fractured left collarbone still showed "extraordinary risk" if he returned to the field on Sunday against the Pittsburgh Steelers, sources told ESPN.
Rodgers practiced in a limited fashion this past week. He split snaps with Matt Flynn on Wednesday, but his participation tapered on Thursday, when it became clear the Packers were again preparing Flynn to start against the Steelers.
Upon ruling out Rodgers on Friday, Packers coach Mike McCarthy repeated several times during a short news conference that it was "an organizational decision."
McCarthy used that term at the insistence of Rodgers, who wanted an emphasis placed on his toughness, according to sources. One driving force behind McCarthy's message was Rodgers' sensitivity that his injury absence would be compared to Brett Favre's reputation for toughness, which created palpable tension between the coach and quarterback, a source told ESPN.
It has been seven weeks since Rodgers was injured on Nov. 4 against the Chicago Bears.
"Just as I've stated all along, we've got two different circumstances here," McCarthy said Friday. "We've got Aaron Rodgers' health, and obviously where we are as a football team.
"Until we feel good about where Aaron is medically, that will not be part of the second circumstance. So as an organization, we are not ready for him to play."
Sources told ESPN that McCarthy clearly understood Dr. Patrick McKenzie's unwillingness to give Rodgers' medical clearance and there was no real organizational decision about it. It was a medical decision.
The Packers (7-6-1) will clinch the NFC North title if they win their final two regular-season games.
After going winless in their first four games without Rodgers, the Packers have won their last two contests in large part due to Flynn, who helped Green Bay erase a 23-point halftime deficit in last week's victory over the Dallas Cowboys.Net Applications
Microsoft's Windows 8.1 continues to win over more desktop users.
For the month of November, Windows 8.1 scored 12.1 percent of all Web traffic as seen by Net Applications, up from 10.9 percent in October and just 6.67 percent in September.
At the same time, the no-longer-supported Windows XP continues to see its share of traffic dwindle. Last month, XP's share fell to 13.5 percent from 17.1 percent in October and 23.8 percent in September. At this rate, Windows 8.1 could surpass XP as the second-most popular desktop OS by the time 2014 comes to a close, at least according to Net Applications' data.
The latest stats from fellow Web tracker StatCounter, meanwhile, show Windows 8.1 already having stolen second place from XP. For November, Windows 8.1 took a 10.95 percent share, according to StatCounter, narrowly beating XP's 10.69 percent share.
"Following a somewhat mixed reaction to Windows 8, Windows 8.1 has made steady progress since its launch," StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said in a press release. "It passed Windows 8 in August and has now passed Windows XP in November. The growth trajectory for Windows 8.1 has been positive but if current trends continue it will not topple Windows 7 before Windows 10 is launched in 2015."
Microsoft has already given us a glimpse into the future with the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Released the end of September, the preview reveals an operating system even more desktop-friendly with the return of the Start menu, new trackpad gestures and the ability to run Metro apps in resizable windows.
The software giant is expected to show off a consumer preview of Windows 10 in early 2015, possibly as soon as January.
If you combine the Net Applications data for Windows 8.1 and Windows 8, Microsoft's latest OS has dramatically bested XP for the No. 2 spot. Users still on Windows 8 accounted for 6.5 percent of the traffic recorded in November, which means that 8.1 and 8 collectively took home a share of 18.6, outshining XP's 13.5 percent by several points.
The new stats are critical for Microsoft in two ways.
First, Windows 8 failed to wow the crowds following its official release in October of 2012. Desktop users in particular found the new touchscreen-centric OS too radical a change from Windows 7. But with Windows 8.1, Microsoft has tried to make the OS friendlier to the mouse and keyboard with the option to boot directly to the desktop, a Start screen power button and the ability to run Metro, aka Modern, apps from the desktop.
Second, Microsoft cut off support for XP this past April, which means no more bug fixes, patches, or other updates. As such, the company had been working hard to convince XP users to migrate to Windows 7 or Windows 8 so that their systems would still be protected.
Windows 7 remained on top of the charts last month with a Web traffic share of 53.7 percent, according to Net Applications, up slightly from 53 percent last month. The aged and much-maligned Windows Vista continued to drip its way down the charts with a 2.6 percent share, down from 2.8 percent in October.Brendan Sinclair North American Editor Tuesday 1st April 2014 Share this article Share
Companies in this article Ubisoft
Analytics are great at telling developers what players are doing in their games, but the numbers aren't quite as adept at telling them why. For insight on that, Ubisoft turns to a pair of research scientists it brought on board a year and a half ago: Nicolas Ducheneaut and Nick Yee. At last month's Game Developers Conference, the pair sat down to speak with GamesIndustry International about their latest research into the heaviest spenders in Ubisoft's free-to-play game Ghost Recon Online.
"It's an interesting point in time in the industry because everyone is talking about big data," Yee said. "I think a lot of companies inside and outside the game industry are getting access to these big pools of data and they're starting to get analysts to look through that data. But oftentimes what happens is there's a behavioral finding from the data point of view that they can't understand because they don't know what the player was thinking when those behaviors occurred."
Or as Ducheneaut put it, "It's one thing to have the data. It's another thing to make sense of it."
Sometimes developers may be baffled by the data they see. Other times, they might pull the wrong lessons from it. The pair's research suggests that's what happened with the free-to-play sector's assessment of its heaviest spenders, the so-called "whales." To better understand the motivations of those players, Ducheneaut and Yee surveyed a targeted mix of monetized and active Ghost Recon Online players.
"It's one thing to have the data. It's another thing to make sense of it." Nicolas Ducheneaut
"One thing that came across was this concept of 'whales' was really framing how developers and our marketing folks were thinking about what drives high-value spenders. [The assumption was] it's impulsive, more irrational, kind of hedonistic behavior," Yee said. "What we found was almost the exact opposite. Instead of being impulsive, they were long-term thinkers, cool-headed, methodical, and they really supported the game."
It turns out the heavy spenders weren't spending money on impulse purchases. They valued long-term learning and mastery of the game, so they focused their purchases on new gear and items to help them master different aspects of gameplay, try new tactics, or unlock new classes to become proficient at. As for how developers could turn that knowledge into concrete changes to make in a game, Ducheneaut said they could start by giving rational customers the basics they need to make rational decisions with their money.
"If you want to make an informed purchase decision, you have to be able to compare items in the store very easily and understand what it's going to bring you in terms of added gameplay value," Ducheneaut said. "So you see how you could reframe the design of your shop such that those things are easier to do for those people."
That would seem to fly in the face of some frequently used tactics in successful free-to-play games like mystery boxes and limited-time offers. However, Yee said the revenue spikes those provide may not be as attributable to impulse purchases as some would think. He said there was one game he looked at where the developers ran discounts on in-game currency every few weeks. It turned out many of the heaviest spenders weren't actually making impulse buys at all; they had spotted the pattern and waited to make their big purchases in anticipation of the reliable sale period. Yee said developers' assumptions about their players' behaviors were turning into self-fulfilling prophecies.
"You're confirming your own bias but you're not testing the alternative," Yee said. "And at first we kind of had these biases too, but it helped us rethink, and helped our designers think, 'Ah, we're seeing this pattern, but maybe it's happening for a different reason.'"
One of the things perpetuating those biases is the terminology of the industry itself. The term "whale" is loaded with negative connotations, and Yee said its continued use hurts gamers and developers alike.
"For the gamers, [the word 'whales'] frames them as being pathological. And for the developers, it frames us as being psychologically exploitative." Nick Yee
"For the gamers, it frames them as being pathological," Yee said. "And for the developers, it frames us as being psychologically exploitative. And it's bad in a third way in that it constrains how we design games because we assume gamers to have a certain mindset."
Ducheneaut prefers to think of them not as whales but as hobbyists. He referenced a talk from Kongregate CEO Emily Greer in which she described an expensive single-player game with competitive multiplayer aspects in which she spent thousands on gear and months engaged and levelling up, only to reveal that it was not a free-to-play game she was hooked on; it was figure skating.
"It's really understanding those people as hobbyists," Ducheneaut said. "They're committed to a hobby. They invest resources in their hobby, just like someone would in model trains, figure skating, or whatever. It's no different than that."
Ducheneaut and Yee can relate, as they have their own sometimes costly hobbies. For Ducheneaut, it's sailing. As for how Yee gets rid of pesky disposable income, he said painting miniatures helps. Of course, they're no strangers to gaming either, and hope that their work will help make the industry a better place for anyone who counts gaming among their hobbies.
"Speaking more as a gamer, I often wonder about the games that should exist but don't really exist because we've kind of clung to really strict genres. And it's getting worse, seemingly, over time. I think when we understand gamers more, and understand their personalities and their motivations, we can design truly engaging experiences that may break a little free of the mold these genres cling to.
While Ducheneaut said this research-oriented way of interpreting analytics will be increasingly important to the industry as time goes by, there are limitations to how quickly it could happen. Even if the demand for social scientists in the game industry takes off, Yee said there's a bit of a bottleneck on the other side of the equation.
"Right now we're really limited by the supply of people who have the right skill set, who are gamers and understand game mechanisms, can deal with big data, and have some kind of social science framework for understanding human behavior," Yee said. "And it's really difficult to find people who have that overlap."so, what is a smoke point? it's the temperature at which a fat begins to break down and release smoke. beyond that, well beyond that, is a fat's flash point, or the temperature at which an oil will burst into flame. ignore that one. i've literally only seen it happen once, when my father was cooking and walked away from oil heating in a pan for well over five minutes. the singe marks on the ceiling were there for weeks.
but that's not going to happen to you because you're going to pay attention to your pan. you're going to catch that smoke point.
why is this important? ever put a pan on the stove with some oil in it and cooked something? what you're doing is sauteing, defined by the professional chef as "foods cooked quickly in a small amount of oil over direct heat". let's also talk about what sauteing is not -
sauteing is not searing because the item is completely cooked through.
sauteing is not pan-frying because less oil is used.
sauteing requires that the oil be hot in order to minimize sticking of the protein to the pan. meat naturally has tiny proteins that are unfolded in a specific way. the aim is to get the oil hot enough so that the proteins cook in the moments where the meat passes through the hot air and oil before actually hitting the metal surface of the pan. this causes the proteins to curl in on each other and away from the pan. also, it makes for a really crisp and delicious crust.
one of the things that drives me absolutely crazy about most recipes i come across is the suggestion to start a pan over high heat with a bit of olive oil in it. i can just picture chef ana coming at me with a giant pan screaming 'no!'. so, why is that a bad idea and what can i do instead?
the reason is, of course, the smoke point.
olive oil - 350°
extra virgin olive oil - 325°
canola oil - 400°
grapeseed oil - 390°
peanut oil - 450°
sunflower oil - 440°
safflower oil - 510°
sesame oil - 350°
vegetable oil - 450°
butter - 325°
clarified butter - 485°
sauteing generally uses a temperature of around 350-400 degrees, right in that sweet spot where olive oil is going to begin break down if you keep heating it further. in class we generally use canola oil or clarified butter (you haven't lived until you've smelled 40 pounds of melted butter on the stovetop), at home i tend to reach for either canola or grapeseed, whichever is handier.
do you have a preference on cooking fat? keep a tub of duckfat in your freezer (if so, call me, i'll come right over with potatoes and beer)? stories about singeing your eyebrows off?Last year's launch of Windows 8 and the soon-to-be-released Surface Pro tablet are setting the company on a very different course to the one it has pursued in recent years, and will define its strategy for the next decade.
Even before it was launched, Microsoft executives were describing Windows 8 as a "generational change" in its operating system, the likes of which has not seen for nearly two decades.
"This gives them the new interface and the phone and tablet-centric view and sets them up to try to compete in those markets" — Michael Silver, Gartner
And you shouldn't dismiss this as merely the obligatory hyperbole that attends the debut of every operating system. Not only does Windows 8 feature a brand new user interface, there are also a number of significant, but less obvious, changes underneath the surface. In among them is the fact that Microsoft has decided its future lies down a more cloud-focused path.
The emphasis in Windows 8 is very strongly on the new touch-friendly interface (previously known as Metro). Such a change is a big gamble for Microsoft as it risks upsetting millions of customers who are used to the traditional Windows look and feel, especially as the new interface does take some getting used to.
But changing the look and feel of Windows - the absolute core of Microsoft's offering - is not undertaken lightly.
The change in interface shows Microsoft has taken its cues from the world of smartphones and tablets — largely because it has no other choice. Because, much faster than the PC industry ever believed, consumer (and to a lesser extent business) tech priorities have changed.
Rather than a mostly homogenous market as it was before, when both business and consumers would buy (variously specced) Windows PCs, the PC market is tearing apart.
Most obviously users can choose form factors (notebook, tablet, smartphone) and operating systems (Windows, Android, iOS) in a way that just wasn't possible until now. The busines market is less affected by the changes, for now, so Microsoft is trying to stay relevant and bridge the widening gap between consumer and business in two ways - with software (Windows 8) and hardware (Surface).
As Gartner research director Michael Silver highlights, this is because the PC no longer dominates the average user's technology experience. "A few years ago the PC was the heart of people's technology universe — now it's their phone or their tablet. We've seen PC sales slumping — the world is changing and Microsoft has no market share to speak of in the phone or tablet market.
"They need to change. This gives them the new interface and the phone and tablet-centric view and sets them up to try to compete in those markets. This is the beginning of the end of the old interface."
For Tony Cripps, principal analyst at Ovum, the new UI is bold but necessary move.
"Microsoft had to do something quite spectacularly different if it was to keep Windows relevant as a platform. We've been used to the Windows UI for a long time now and there hadn't been much in the way of evolution. The expectations that many people have of how computing devices work and how they interact with them is rather different to how they were two or three years ago.
Indeed, it could turn out that the new UI is one of the least controversial elements of Microsoft's plan. "Despite some unhappy users, Cripps says: "What I suspect will end up happening is it will be one of those things where, in a couple of years, no one will ever really remember not using it."
A new world of WinRT (and Windows RT)
But it's not just the interface that's different. Windows 8 is also part of transition from Win32 to Windows Runtime (WinRT) APIs and a new programming model. And longer term, that could be a much more fundamental change for developers and users than the interface update.
Read this Surface tension: The long, strange history of the Windows tablet The launch of Surface Pro is Microsoft's most important attempt to build a tablet device. But the company has been trying to get this right for a long, long time. Read More
Microsoft will certainly be hoping the nascent Windows Store could become a far more important software delivery mechanism as Windows 8 deployments increase — an app store on a grand scale (although it will need to improve significantly for that to happen).
As Simon Bisson points out elsewhere on ZDNet, the move to WinRT means the "heart of Windows future isn't the desktop ". Instead, WinRT is the first step towards a world of cloud apps, via Azure. Windows 8 is a transitional release, straddling Win32 and WinRT.
It might not be as radical a departure as Google's Chrome OS, which requires constant connectivity and points you towards apps that are solely cloud-based, but it's heading in the same general direction: towards a world of easier to use, easier to manage devices and appliances — much more the smartphone model than Microsoft's PC heritage.
"It will take quite a while for all your applications to show up in the new Windows Store interface, especially in business. Over time what you'll see is Microsoft continue to advocate writing new applications using the new tools in WinRT and eventually your software will get replaced with new WinRT versions of it," Gartner's Silver says.
Getting beneath the Surface of Microsoft's plans
Microsoft's ongoing hardware adventures, both with the Surface RT and the forthcoming Surface Pro, make sense as part of this broader strategy of managing the decline in PCs and the rise of bring your own device and the cloud.
"In a couple of years, no one will ever really remember not using it" — Tony Cripps, Ovum
Microsoft has already hinted that Surface is likely to be only the first of the devices it builds itself. Microsoft won the desktop operating system battle long ago but now the tech war has moved to a new arena, and controlling the hardware and the app store are the ways to win.
Right now Apple is in pole position when it comes to tablets so Microsoft has been forced to take the unusual step of building its own hardware to make up for the lack of excitment in its hardware partners' offerings to date. The Surface RT is Microsoft's attempt to reach out to consumers and the BYOD brigade, while the Surface Pro is its attempt to bring enterprise-grade tablets to market. Microsoft needs to position Windows 8 as a plausible tablet operating system for both business and consumers to prevent the fragmentation which is occuring in the consumer PC space threatening its position in the enterprise, too.
But Microsoft's success here is by no means certain.
"The question is: can Microsoft capture the consumer market or part of it? Because Microsoft has really not been keeping up and losing mind-share, and has been big in business but even business is seeing the effect of consumerisation make in-roads into the decision-making process," says Silver.
Balancing consumers and business
And balancing all these competing pressures - the rise of tablets, cloud and BYOD - without alienating its core business audience is a challenge for Microsoft. If it goes too far down the route of consumerised products, it could risk its enterprise popularity, says Silver.
"The real problem is that as they look to consumerise some of these products they become less appropriate for the enterprise, so the space where they are strong, they start giving up.
"Microsoft has a great business supporting the enterprise and if they tilt too much towards the consumer, that's going to be another problem. Businesses are going to have to rethink their commitment and it really opens the door for Apple because if enterprises are dealing with a consumer product company... then why do they need to deal just with Microsoft?"Commentary by Leila Mouri*
The recent sharp exchange during a press conference between Morteza Talai, Deputy Chairperson of the Tehran City Council, and a female journalist from Sharq newspapers over Talai’s support of a recent gender-segregation initiative in the Municipality of Tehran, reflects the intensifying struggle between hardliners intent on controlling the domestic sphere and more moderate elements of Iranian society who resist relinquishing their basic rights.
The initiative separates men and women’s offices in the municipality and limits women’s access to managerial and clerical positions. Talai, who was clearly angered by the journalist’s persistent criticism of the policy, accused her of “compromising her dignity.” The incident received considerable attention by the media inside and outside Iran as the latest manifestation of hardliners’ recent measures to enforce more conservative rules in the country and regulate women’s presence in the public sphere.
Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government has been enforcing gender segregation regulations in certain public spaces such as schools (from primary to high school), sports centers, and public transportation. Although there is not comprehensive nationwide legislation regarding gender segregation in Iran, various organizations have adopted internal rules to ensure it is observed. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, gender segregation gained more attention by the authorities.
In 2011, his administration formed The Committee of Protection of Modesty and Hijab to draft a series of regulations which would enforce their interpretation of modesty in public spaces, which included gender segregation in workplaces. However, the policy was not enforced and many governmental and non-governmental offices did not adopt it. However, during the last few weeks, gender segregation has again turned into a leading issue, with the decision by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the mayor of Tehran, to order the separation of his male and female employees in the municipality.
Ghalibaf’s decision is facing strong opposition by progressive journalists, civil and women’s activists, and officials such as Shahindokht Molaverdi, Vice President of Women’s Affairs in Rouhani’s cabinet. She criticized Ghalibaf’s initiative and explicitly asserted that the administration does not approve of gender segregation in the workplace. Ghalibaf’s comments also angered social media users on Facebook and Twitter, who expressed their dissatisfaction and ridiculed the move.
To date, however, despite the fact that this policy has the potential to profoundly affect the livelihood of all women across Iran who work in various governmental offices, there has not been a significant outcry beyond these largely liberal and middle class segments of society.
In a speech at Tehran Friday prayers, Ghalibaf defended his decree in the name of dignity and Islamic discipline. He said: “We are an Islamic system and have a religious dignity and we should not let unrelated men and women intermingle [in the workplace] more than they spend time with their family members.”
He also claimed that gender segregation is for the good of Iranian women and that they support his segregation projects. Ghalibaf’s actions and remarks were welcomed by Iranian hardliners who control the Parliament, the Judiciary, and the intelligence and security organizations. This widespread power grants hardliners an upper hand in pursuing their conservative agenda in domestic affairs, despite the large electoral victory of the more centrist Rouhani.
The extent to which other municipalities will follow Tehran’s model is as yet unclear. The municipality of Ardabil in Northwestern Iran, known for the religiosity of its residents, also ordered the separation of men and women in the workplace. The mayor of Ardabil argued that this arrangement would increase efficiency and security in the organization.
However, in Mashhad, one of Iran’s major cities and the site of one of its most sacred Shiite shrines, a City Council member brushed away the idea and told reporters that “the Council has not approved any such policy as of yet.” In the absence of an institutionalized policy, gender-segregation is usually enforced locally and arbitrarily, and in most cases it is solely based on decisions taken by the head of an organization.
At the time the segregation initiative was introduced, it was reported that Tehran’s municipality dismissed an unidentified number of female employees holding secretarial and managerial positions, all of whom were to be replaced by male personnel. Farzad Khalafi, Media Affairs Deputy of Tehran’s Municipality, told reporters that management is a “time consuming and lengthy job” and therefore this was “for the comfort and well-being of the women”.
Though it is not known how many employees were dismissed, the number of women potentially affected is great: the Municipality of Tehran’s website states it has 8,275 female employees (14.9% of all employees). Mohammad Taqi Hosseini, the Deputy of Minister of Labor, criticized the dismissal of female employees in an official letter and called it “discrimination based on gender,” and against international conventions, but he did not directly question the segregation policy.
Despite Rouhani’s position opposing discrimination against female employees and gender segregation, his administration has largely refrained from taking on the hardliners on gender issues. It is unclear whether this reflects fear of a harsh backlash from the hardliners and thus unwillingness to confront them, or simply a preference to concentrate for now on what they see as the more pressing issue of moving forward with the P5+1 nuclear negotiations. Regardless, there has been little challenge to the conservatives’ violations of the civil rights of Iranian citizens.
Gender segregation regulations during the past 35 years have been a pretext to deprive Iranian women of access to high-ranking positions, such as the presidency and judgeships. Women are also barred from attending certain public spaces such as sports stadiums. During the last few years, hardliners have also limited women’s access to higher education institutions and programs.
In 2012, the state excluded women from 77 majors in specific universities, including management, mathematics, physics, and computer engineering. Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, condemned the measure as “part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena.”
Women and men’s mingling in public and private spheres has also been a concern for the government since the 1979 revolution, although the level of enforcement has ebbed and flowed depending on the administration, reflecting the lack of comprehensive institutionalized legislation on the matter.
The police have regularly raided private parties to arrest young men and women solely for having a mixed gathering. Questioning men and women’s relationship on the streets by morality police (a branch of security forces co-directed by the Revolutionary Guards and Interior Ministry) and arresting them if not related has been a |
ory internal investigation and noted that it was the second time that Klise was suspected of releasing information.
LaForce was accused in two incidents.
On Oct. 31, 2011 he's accused of releasing information regarding a felony warrant for his brother Michael Christopher Welch. Ralls 911 employee Janis Caldwell told Means about the incident. There was no information about the complaint in LaForce's personnel file.
Another officer made a similar complaint about LaForce on May 18, 2012. New London police officer Chris Flynn said he documented LaForce reaching out to his half brother in connection with a criminal investigation.
LaForce, Means and former dispatcher Steven McLaine are also accused of trying to cover up a shooting that took place in the early morning of April 11, 2012 inside the 911 center building.
Police confiscated sections of drywall and insulation. An examination with a metal detector revealed a metal fragment of a jacketed bullet buried inside, according to court documents.
Means documented the incident that day saying that LaForce got angry and threw his phone and struck a mirror, according to the documents. Means issued a false reprimand for the incident.
However, several dispatchers and employees said that they viewed video surveillance footage of the morning in question. They saw the mirror shatter and LaForce and McLaine clean up the area. Means patched a hole in the drywall.
LaForce was later seen leaving the building with a black bag he used to carry his guns, according to the paperwork. Several employees previous complained about LaForce bringing his gun to work.
LaForce was later put in charge of rewiring the dispatch center's surveillance system. The video in question was deleted, according to court documents.
Caldwell complained to two Ralls County 911 board members and told investigators that she was scheduled to work the night of the regular meeting once Means learned what she planned to tell the board.
Caldwell later gave a statement to the board via speakerphone during her dispatching shift.
Current Ralls County Sheriff Gerry Dinwiddie, a former Ralls County 911 board member, also appears in the investigative documents.
In a document found in her office, Means accused Dinwiddie of pressuring dispatcher Caldwell to appear before the 911 board. The pressure, according to Means, led to Caldwell's eventual resignation from the 911 dispatch center, according to documents. Caldwell later told investigators that she left because Means stopped putting her on the schedules.
Monroe County Prosecuting Attorney Talley Kendrick was appointed to oversee the investigation.
There have been no criminal charges filed, but an investigating officer recommended that Means, LaForce and McLaine face criminal charges.This article has been corrected.
Not one but two companies have now decided that they’re going to mine asteroids to collect gold and platinum. The aptly named Deep Space Industries joins Planetary Resources in the competition for meteor material—and we wish them the best of luck. But we’re a little concerned here; a NASA mission to an asteroid to bring back 2 kg of material in 2021 is expected to cost the space agency $1 billion. Before we turn over billions of dollars as angel investors, we’d like to run some math on this venture.
These mining ventures aim to bring back resources like platinum, water, and gold. At market close Jan. 24, one troy ounce of platinum sold for $1681.30, and 32.15 troy ounces equal 1 kg. Even if NASA could bring back 2 kg of pure platinum, it would only net $108,107.59. Clearly that’s not going to bring in the big bucks. But we’re going to consider that private companies might be able to mine galactic material more cheaply—US government spending is hardly known for its efficiency—so bear with us.
Now, the risk of an asteroid being steered off course and crashing into the Earth, though unlikely, is not one we’d really like to run. So we capitalists would rather not screw around with anything remotely close to the size of the Chicxulub meteor, which killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and was probably about 15 km wide.
For this reason, Deep Space Industries has said that it will initially target very small asteroids of 10 meters or less:
These sorts of asteroids hit the Earth every day, but disintegrate and burn up high in the atmosphere. The meteorites that do survive passage to the surface generally come from much larger objects, 30 or more meters, and even those are blasted into smaller pieces before they reach the ground. It takes a really large meteorite (50 or more meters in diameter, depending upon its composition and structure) to actually impact the Earth hard enough to make a crater.
So if a mining operation could mine a roughy spherical asteroid with a diameter of 10 meters, and if the entire asteroid were made out of minable material (we’re going to say platinum), how much money would that company be able to bring back?
The density of platinum is 21.45 grams per cubic centimeter. (Okay fine, science nerds—that’s at room temperature, but in space we’re going to assume it’s still a solid and therefore reasonably similar. Deal with it.) If we assume that an entire spherical asteroid with a 10 m diameter (about 523 cubic meters) is made of platinum, and that one of these asteroid miners could harvest the whole thing, then they’d get about 11.2 million kg of platinum. At current market rates, that comes out to $605 billion.
Of course, this is wildly optimistic. Although asteroids of pure metal exist, they’re most likely to be mixes of roughly 90% iron and 10% nickel. A tenth of our asteroid (52.3 cu m, or 466,000 kg) made of nickel would be worth about $8.1 million at last month’s market rates. The iron—well, iron ore is so cheap that it hardly adds anything.
So it’s a little harder to make the commercial case. It’s also likely that a massive influx of any of these materials would deflate its market price. Still, this is not the same order of crazy as building a Death Star (price tag: $850 trillion). What’s more, private companies are taking a bigger role in space exploration and galactic commercial ventures; SpaceX has already delivered commercial cargo to the International Space Station.
We were prepared to laugh at the plans proposed by Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources. But hey, who knows? No wonder the latter counts Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Google CEO Larry Page, and one-time US third-party presidential candidate—and Texas billionaire—Ross Perot as its investors.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece mis-stated the price of platinum as $1681.30 per 50 troy ounces rather than per troy ounce, which made the value of a pure-platinum asteroid come out to $12.1 billion instead of $605 billion.[Editor’s note: The following was released by the NFL on Monday, December 31, the day after the end of the regular season.]
The opponents for all 2013 regular-season games have been determined and a complete list of each team’s home and away matchups was issued today by the NFL.
The scheduling formula implemented in 2002 with realignment guarantees that all teams play each other on a regular, rotating basis.
Under the formula, every team plays 16 games as follows:
· Home and away against its three division opponents (6 games).
· The four teams from another division within its conference on a rotating three-year cycle (4 games).
· The four teams from a division in the other conference on a rotating four-year cycle (4 games).
· Two intraconference games based on the prior year’s standings (2 games). These games match a first-place team against the first-place teams in the two same-conference divisions the team is not scheduled to play that season. The second-place, third-place, and fourth-place teams in a conference are matched in the same way each year.
Beginning in 2010, a change was made to how teams are paired in the schedule rotation to ensure that teams playing the AFC and NFC West divisions would not be required to make two west coast trips (e.g. at San Francisco and at Seattle), while other teams in their division had none (e.g. at St. Louis and at Arizona).
The official 2013 schedule, with playing dates and times, will be announced in the spring.
NFL Kickoff 2013 Weekend will begin on Thursday night, September 5, and the regular season will conclude on December 29.
Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey will be played on Sunday, February 2.
2013 OPPONENTS
AFC EAST
1. New England Patriots Home: Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Denver Broncos, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Away: Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Houston Texans, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers
2. Miami Dolphins Home: Buffalo Bills, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, San Diego Chargers, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers
Away: Buffalo Bills, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Indianapolis Colts, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
3. New York Jets Home: Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Oakland Raiders, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Away: Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Tennessee Titans, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers
4. Buffalo Bills Home: Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers
Away: Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Jacksonville Jaguars, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
AFC NORTH
1. Baltimore Ravens Home: Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Houston Texans, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings
Away: Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions
2. Cincinnati Bengals Home: Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Indianapolis Colts, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings
Away: Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, San Diego Chargers, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions
3. Pittsburgh Steelers Home: Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, Tennessee Titans, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions
Away: Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Oakland Raiders, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings
4. Cleveland Browns Home: Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, Jacksonville Jaguars, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions
Away: Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals, Pittsburgh Steelers, New England Patriots, New York Jets, Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings
AFC SOUTH
1. Houston Texans Home: Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, New England Patriots, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks
Away: Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, Baltimore Ravens, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers
2. Indianapolis Colts Home: Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, Miami Dolphins, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks
Away: Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, Cincinnati Bengals, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers
3. Tennessee Titans Home: Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, New York Jets, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers
Away: Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, Pittsburgh Steelers, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks
4. Jacksonville Jaguars Home: Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Tennessee Titans, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, Buffalo Bills, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers
Away: Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Tennessee Titans, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, Cleveland Browns, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks
AFC WEST
1. Denver Broncos Home: Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Baltimore Ravens, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins
Away: Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants
2. San Diego Chargers Home: Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Cincinnati Bengals, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants
Away: Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Miami Dolphins, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins
3. Oakland Raiders Home: Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Pittsburgh Steelers, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins
Away: Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, New York Jets, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants
4. Kansas City Chiefs Home: Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Cleveland Browns, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants
Away: Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, Buffalo Bills, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins
NFC EAST
1. Washington Redskins Home: Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, San Francisco 49ers, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers
Away: Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Atlanta Falcons, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders
2. New York Giants Home: Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders
Away: Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Carolina Panthers, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers
3. Dallas Cowboys Home: New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, St. Louis Rams, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders
Away: New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, New Orleans Saints, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers
4. Philadelphia Eagles Home: Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Washington Redskins, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Arizona Cardinals, Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers
Away: Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Washington Redskins, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders
NFC NORTH
1. Green Bay Packers Home: Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Atlanta Falcons, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers
Away: Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Minnesota Vikings, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, San Francisco 49ers, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals
2. Minnesota Vikings Home: Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Carolina Panthers, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers
Away: Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Seattle Seahawks, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals
3. Chicago Bears Home: Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, New Orleans Saints, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals
Away: Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, St. Louis Rams, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers
4. Detroit Lions Home: Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Baltimore Ravens, Cincinnati Bengals
Away: Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles, Washington Redskins, Arizona Cardinals, Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers
NFC SOUTH
1. Atlanta Falcons Home: Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Washington Redskins, New England Patriots, New York Jets
Away: Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Green Bay Packers, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins
2. Carolina Panthers Home: Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, New York Giants, New England Patriots, New York Jets
Away: Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Minnesota Vikings, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins
3. New Orleans Saints Home: Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins
Away: Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Chicago Bears, New England Patriots, New York Jets
4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers Home: Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Philadelphia Eagles, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins
Away: Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Detroit Lions, New England Patriots, New York Jets
NFC WEST
1. San Francisco 49ers Home: Arizona Cardinals, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Green Bay Packers, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts
Away: Arizona Cardinals, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Washington Redskins, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans
2. Seattle Seahawks Home: Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, St. Louis Rams, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Minnesota Vikings, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans
Away: Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, St. Louis Rams, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, New York Giants, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts
3. St. Louis Rams Home: Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Chicago Bears, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans
Away: Arizona Cardinals, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Dallas Cowboys, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts
4. Arizona Cardinals Home: St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts
Away: St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, New Orleans Saints, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Philadelphia Eagles, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee TitansSam Nunberg was a former aide/adviser to the Donald Trump campaign who was fired for previously leaking salacious inflammatory information to the media. Upon firing Nunberg went to join the Ted Cruz campaign, and became a Cruz advocate.
Later it was revealed that Nunberg had written very divisive and racist material to his social media.
Everyone distanced themselves from him.
However, as a result of the initial firing, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against Nunberg for violating the terms of a confidentiality agreement. Mr. Nunberg is facing the very real possibility of losing a $10 million civil action.
That’s the backdrop for today, when, in an effort to skirt around the non-disclosure confidentiality agreement, Nunberg, through his lawyers, leaked their response to the Trump lawsuit.
The Associated Press was first out of the gate with the story. The remaining MSM, generally -and transparently- biased against Trump, latched on to the leaked Nunberg legal filing and is now selling their own custom story about the lawsuit.
Time Inc, provides copies of all the current legal Nunberg response filings which can be seen here.
Nunberg previously claimed Ms. Hope Hicks (Trump Communication Lead) and Mr. Corey Lewandowski (former Trump Campaign Head) were having an affair. This claim was without any foundation other than the asserted word of Mr. Nunberg.
In essence that’s what led to Nunberg’s original firing, and the reason the Trump campaign lawyers requested the lawsuit be sealed to protect the character of Hicks and Lewandowski.
Both Ms. Hicks and Mr. Lewandowski have families who Donald Trump sought to protect from any salacious media inquisitions.
Mr. Nunberg is attempting to litigate/deflect the substantive issues surrounding his firing, and the associated breech of contract, through the media as a legal strategy. In doing so Nunberg’s “leverage” per se’, is to get the $10 million lawsuit dropped by positioning (threatening) an uncomfortable story (Hicks/Lewandowski) to come out amid the published headlines of the lawsuit.
In order to maximize the impact, the Nunberg legal response, and the associated media leak, was timed to coincide with the lead-up to the GOP convention. The timing is simply to provide greater leverage, and to create additional anxiety around a time when the removal of distractions is a campaign goal. Nothing more.
Those of you familiar with CTH discussion threads will note our own presentation surrounding why Mr. Lewandowski was later released from the Trump campaign.
AdvertisementsScience has learned many lessons about what makes something addictive. And now this knowledge is being used by the tech business to gain our attention, and keep us coming back for more. In his new book, “Irresistible,” New York University associate professor of marketing Adam Alter argues that society is experiencing the beginnings of an epidemic of “behavioral addiction,” and that this could have dangerous and far-reaching implications for us all. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
Early in your book, you say that our understanding of addiction is too narrow. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Our understanding of addiction is too narrow in two respects.
First, we typically think of addiction as a response to substances, including drugs, alcohol, and nicotine, but humans can develop addictions to a wide range of experiences, too. Recently, for example, people have developed clinical addictions to video games, social media platforms (including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat), and even Google's augmented reality glasses, Google Glass. Since addiction is essentially the drive to engage in an immediately rewarding behavior despite negative long-term consequences for physical, mental, social or financial well-being, it can arise in response to both substance and behaviors.
Credit: John Fitzgerald
Second, we tend to think of addiction as a problem that affects certain kinds of people, whereas others are in some sense immune. We refer to "addictive personalities," for example, to describe people who are prone to addiction. In truth, we are all potential addicts waiting for the "right" circumstances to trigger our own personal addiction. For some people, that experience is loneliness and access to a video game that connects them to millions of other humans around the world. For others, that experience is depression and a social network that numbs their emotions by presenting an endless feed of information. For others, still, it might be self-doubt coupled with access to a device that counts how many steps they take each day, which encourages them to exercise more and more with each passing day until they continue exercising through debilitating injuries. Some estimates suggest that up to half the developed world has at least one so-called behavioral addiction, which suggests that addiction is a problem for the masses, rather than a problem reserved for a small group.
When did you start to see this as a real problem?
I started to see this as a problem near the end of the first decade of the 2000s, shortly after the release of the first generation of iPhones (2007) and iPads (2010). Games and social networks had been around for many years, but iPhones and iPads delivered those experiences in an irresistible, portable package. Now millions of people could play games anywhere; connect with other people anywhere; access their emails from anywhere. Accessibility is a major component of addiction—you can't be addicted to what you can't reach with ease—so portable screens began to drive many forms of behavioral addiction. When I spoke to Kimberly Young, a psychologist who treats internet addiction at a hospital in Pennsylvania, she agreed that, "The biggest changes, by far, were the introduction of the iPhone and then the iPad in 2010." Second to iPhones and iPads, Young said, was the rise of internet speed in the mid-2000s. With infrastructure and a new vehicle for delivering content came new programs that were easier to test, design, and sell en masse.
Can you give some examples of the kinds of techniques designers use to get us addicted?
Much of the process is driven by A/B testing. Designers will release several versions of a game, for example, and they'll track how long players engage with the game before ending a session. They might find, for example, that a mission is more engaging if it involves rescuing a person than if it involves finding a lost object. So they'll design new missions that involve rescuing people and stop producing missions that involve finding objects. Then they might discover that a particular color of arrow or "ding" sound encourages a particular action, so they'll use those colors and sounds in preference to others. Over time, with enough testing, they develop the most addictive, weaponized version of the original game—a version that combines the game's most compelling features to produce a package that is very hard to resist.
How do you see this problem playing out a societal level? What are its political implications?
The implications are huge. For example, behavioral addiction has the capacity to damage relationships between friends and romantic partners (by replacing face-to-face interactions with impoverished online interactions), to make people less healthy by encouraging them to exercise too seldom (by making screens more attractive) and sometimes too often (by inducing them to overexercise with the aid of fitness watches that encourage activity escalation), and by encouraging them to overspend on experiences like in-app game purchases and online shopping. In time, most of us will own virtual reality goggles, and the temptation to spend time in an idealized virtual world will almost always trump the temptation of living in the imperfect offline world. Why have a potentially boring conversation with a real person when you can spend time in a virtual world doing exactly what you'd like to be doing, from playing games to sitting on a beach in Spain to having virtual sex?
The political implications are also profound. If the problem becomes more severe, as it's sure to do with the advent of cheaper, sophisticated virtual reality experiences, the government will be forced to consider regulating tech-driven behavior. Korea and China have already considered so-called Cinderella Laws, prohibiting children from playing games between midnight and six in the morning. Governments around the world will have to consider similar laws as the social, financial, psychological, and physiological consequences of addictive tech rise in severity and impair a greater proportion of the population.A Kentucky Republican lawmaker wants to classify abortion as a form of domestic violence.
“The most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children, and this particular bill would prohibit abortions after the fetus feels pain, which is 20 weeks and older,” said Rep. Joe Fischer (R-Fort Thomas).
The bill, HB 8, would allow victims of alleged abuse to seek domestic violence protection orders from the courts against former spouses and relative living with a child.
Kentucky law currently permits only married or cohabitating couples to seek protection orders.
Fischer tacked on his amendment banning abortions at 20 weeks based on the scientifically unproven claim that fetuses can feel pain at that stage of development.
A similar bill was introduced last month in the Kentucky Senate, and the proposed ban is based on those enacted in other states, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and recently proposed by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.).
“This tactic is really sad,” Derek Selznick, of the ACLU of Kentucky, told RH Reality Check. “It’s pushing a political agenda and ignores the daily realities that thousands of Kentucky women and men face trying to get protective orders from the court system.”
House Speaker Greg Stumbo (D-Prestonsburg) said he would likely rule that Fischer’s amendments are not relevant to the original legislation, which has strong Democratic support, and can thus be ignored.
Fischer said he was frustrated that his anti-abortion proposals – such as an informed consent and fetal heartbeat bills — were so frequently shot down before receiving a vote.
“This is a solidly pro-life state, even if you don’t see it reflected in what happens here in the House,” Fischer said. “But elections ultimately will decide the issue.”
The Democratic chair of the Kentucky House Health and Welfare Committee has kept anti-choice legislation from the floor over the past decade, but Republicans could pass some of those restrictions if they regained control of the House in November.
The state currently has only two abortion clinics – one in Louisville that operates five days a week and another in Lexington that operates only two days a week.The number of senior-care facilities in B.C. that don’t meet Ministry of Health staffing guidelines has increased by 10 per cent over the last year, despite a government-ordered review.
The newly updated Residential Care Facilities Quick Facts Directory, a report that compiles information for all publicly funded seniors facilities in B.C. for 2015-16, has found that a whopping 91 per cent of care homes — 254 out of 280 facilities — failed to meet the Ministry of Health’s staffing guideline of 3.36 hours of care per senior every day.
The George Pearson Centre in Vancouver’s Marpole had the highest number of direct-care hours per patient per day, at 5.72, followed by the Houston Health Centre in northern B.C. (5.53) and CareLife Fleetwood in Surrey (4.18). The West Vancouver Care Centre ranked lowest by this measure, at 2.31, followed by the Fort Nelson Multi Level Unit at 2.33 and Waverly-Grosvenor House in Chilliwack (2.52).
Twelve facilities weren’t included in this year’s directory due to a lack of information.
Last year, 231 facilities, or about 80 per cent, didn’t meet the recommended minimum of care hours for work that includes helping seniors with tasks such as eating, bathing or going to the toilet.
“We are disappointed in the care hours. We went in the wrong direction,” said Isobel Mackenzie, seniors advocate for B.C. “We had hoped the attention focused on it (last year) meant the health authorities might ensure more funding, but we have moved a bit backwards.”
Lack of adequate staffing hours at care homes can have serious consequences on seniors’ health and quality of life and could lead to increases in depression, agitation, and infection and hospitalization rates, said Mackenzie. “There are significant deleterious effects on the body that can occur if we don’t have the proper level of support.”
Of the 26 facilities that met the standard, all but three were run by health authorities.
The data shows publicly operated facilities receive 40-per-cent more physical-therapy hours and almost double the occupational-therapy hours of their privately operated counterparts. Privately operated facilities also experience 26-per-cent more reportable incidents than health-authority-operated facilities.
Last year’s findings prompted Health Minister Terry Lake to ask for a review on how health authorities fund seniors homes, including looking at care hours. The review is still pending. The ministry didn’t provide a timeline for its completion.
The seniors advocate’s report showed improvements on other fronts. According to the data, the number of reportable incidents per 100 beds decreased by 7.4 per cent over the previous year. Reportable incidents include cases of abuse or neglect, medication error with an adverse event, missing or wandering seniors and resident-to-resident aggression.
The use of antipsychotic medication for seniors who don’t have a diagnosis for that condition also decreased from 31 per cent to 27 per cent. The drugs are sometimes used to manage seniors who have sudden outbursts of agitation, anxiety or aggression.
Jennifer Whiteside of the Hospital Employees Union, which represents care aides, said there is a staffing crisis in seniors care, fuelled by underfunding and excessive privatization over the last decade. The union is calling on the province to legislate minimum staffing levels and inject funds to enable facilities to achieve those levels.
“Clearly, guidelines aren’t working if 90 per cent of facilities aren’t providing the minimum standard,” said Whiteside, adding the figures confirm what the union hears from its members. “There are not enough hands on deck to ensure seniors are getting the care they need. Workers are stretched to the limit, seniors are left waiting and families worry whether their loved ones get the care they need.”
The B.C. Care Providers Association has called for up to $337 million a year for seniors care over the next five years. It released a report Tuesday that included 30 recommendations on improving seniors care, aimed at bringing the issue to the forefront ahead of the budget announcement in February and provincial election in May.
NDP critic Selina Robinson also slammed the provincial government’s failure to act on last year’s findings.
“Here we are a year later and things aren’t working for seniors,” said Robinson, adding she’d like to see a commitment from the Liberal party to reach the 3.36-hour minimum guideline. “Those are our grandparents and our parents … They’ve become tasks to be taken care of rather than people, because there’s not enough time in the system, and there’s not enough resources.”
In a statement, Darryl Plecas, parliamentary secretary for seniors, said B.C. has increased its spending on home and community care from about $1.3 billion in 2001 to $2.9 billion last year.
“The standard we are most focused on is having care-providers deliver high-quality care at whatever level is most appropriate for an individual resident.”
Mackenzie, who wants staffing levels at seniors-care facilities to be regulated similar to child-care centres, said fixing the problem in seniors care would require more funding.
“There’s no way around it,” she said. “Fixing direct-care hours is going to cost money. It’s about having the bodies there, and the bodies have to be paid.”
chchan@postmedia.com
tacarman@postmedia.com
Earlier this year, The Vancouver Sun created a searchable, online database that allowed users to see, for the first time, how publicly funded care homes rank in terms of various factors, including care hours and the number of serious incidents in the facilities. We will be working to update the database with this year’s data.
CLICK HERE to report a typo.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has denied the Washington Post’s report that President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information during a meeting with Russian diplomats last week.
“There is nothing the president takes more seriously than the security of the American people. The story that came out tonight as reported is false,” McMaster told reporters outside the White House. “The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time, at no time, were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.”
McMaster continued, “Two other senior officials who were present, including the Secretary of State, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh anonymous sources. And I was in the room, it didn’t happen.”
McMaster did not take questions after reading the statement.
The Washington Post did not report that Trump discussed “sources or methods” with the Russians, as McMaster claims. The statement does not specifically deny that Trump revealed classified information during the meeting last week.
The sources told the Post Trump disclosed information to Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador about the Islamic State, jeopardizing a critical source of intelligence on ISIS.
Trump revealed “code-word information” and “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our allies,” the source told the Post.
According to the Post, Trump revealed the information during the meeting while appearing to boast about his insider knowledge of a threat to the Western world from ISIS involving the potential use of laptops to conceal explosives on airplanes. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel everyday,” Trump told the Russian ambassador, according to the Post. Trump then revealed aspects of the threat that the U.S. has learned through espionage capabilities of a key partner. As president, Trump is allowed to declassify information, the Post reports.
“It is all kind of shocking,” a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials told the Post. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”
Right now, the WH's main push back is on something the story doesn't mention. https://t.co/s7zAdhQ8Bz — Ali Vitali (@alivitali) May 15, 2017
The White House and State Department had already denied the report in written statements. The Washington Post broke the story, citing current and former U.S. officials as sources, and the New York Times and Buzzfeed News later confirmed the report, though it is unclear if their sources differ from those who spoke to the Post.
“During President Trump’s meeting with Foreign Minister Lavrov a broad range of subjects were discussed among which were common efforts and threats regarding counter-terrorism,” Tillerson said. “During that exchange the nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods or military operations.”
Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell said in a statement, “This story is false. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced.”Realmode Assembly - Writing bootable stuff
Part 5: Graphic Mode
What is this?
This is going to be a walk-through in writing Operation Systems in assembly which operate purely in Realmode.
Goal will be writing different kernels from a simple “Hello World” over small terminal programs to
graphically displayed games.
I decided to split this walk-through into small parts so those few who are interested in this have
enough time to read the necessary theory and references before getting code smashed in the face,
I hope this prevents the parts from getting unnecessary long or confusing and it also gives
me the time to properly check the information and code I provide (although errors might sneak in
which makes reading the sources for reliable information the recommended way if you are really interested in how this works)
Requirements
Understanding x86 assembly
Reading the previous articles
Notes
This information is the result of my research and own programming, everything said here might be wrong, correct me if you spot mistakes though!
I will try to list my sources at the bottom but I can’t guarantee that these are all of them.
I’M NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU BREAK SOMETHING USING INFORMATION I PROVIDED HERE.
Content of this Article
This article is about rendering pixel, shapes and images in real mode using BIOS interrupts.
Look into the git repository if you are interested in details not covered in this article
How to render in real mode
You might have asked yourself how the BIOS was able to render text as shown in the previous parts.
Well the answer to that is also the answer of how to render more custom images/shapes (as it uses the same interrupt routines):
After the system BIOS (the one installed on the motherboard) is done with its basic initializing it starts loading the Video BIOS (installed on the |
’t think you can focus on anything but your fear of flying over water, I recommend you purchase The Fearless Flight™ Harmonizer available at Fearless Flight.com. This audio product is designed to help people overcome their fear of flying so they can take advantage of the wonderful convenience of traveling on a modern airline and arriving rested and ready for business or recreation. The FearlessFlight ™ Harmonizer is uniquely designed to distract you from your fearful thoughts. Many people are flying free from fear courtesy of this unique audio distraction tool. Some people find it so effective that they fell asleep while flying the first time they listened to it.
It’s all about where you’re focusing your thoughts, and if you cannot focus on anything but your fear, it makes flying very difficult. The Fearless Flight™ Harmonizer is a huge help to taking your focus off your fear—whether it’s flying over land or water!The fire was attended by 20 firefighters. The building, part of the otherwise demolished Furulidsskolan, was to be prepared to greet asylum seekers in the affluent area of Kungsbacka.
“Half the building has been damaged by fire,” said Mikael Lindgren, lead operator of the emergency services in Greater Gothenburg.
The cause of the fire is unclear but police will cordon off the area and carry out a technical examination when the emergency services have finished making the property secure.
The fire occurred just a day after a school, just south of Ljungby in Småland, was also destroyed by fire. The school building was to be used to accommodate refugees and had recently been decorated.
On Tuesday night a building in Arlöv in Skåne, designed for unaccompanied refugee children, was badly damaged. The centre was due to be open to the children the following day.
Two months ago, two other refugee centres were the targets of arson attacks.
There have been a suspected 14 arson attacks on asylum centres since the start of the year.
As The Local has previously reported, more refugees have sought asylum in Sweden so far in 2015 than in any other year in the Nordic nation's history.
Last week Migrationsverket revealed that a total of 86,223 people had launched cases so far in 2015, surpassing a previous record set in 1992 when 84,016 people asked for asylum following fighting in the Balkans.USA Weightlifting is pleased to announce their planned competition calendar through the 2020 Olympic Games.
The USA Weightlifting Board Directors, working on advice from Head Coach Zygmunt Smalcerz, agreed upon the following calendar for the 2016 – 2020 Olympic Quadrennial.
USA Weightlifting, in concert with the competition committee, will immediately begin seeking sites for events beginning with the 2017 National Junior Championships. If your club or city is interested in hosting an event, please reach out to Phil Andrews, Director of Events & Programs at phil.andrews@usaweightlifting.org
This calendar is designed to give coaches and athletes clear guidance on when USA Weightlifting competitions will take place each year in order to aid them in making competition plans. USA Weightlifting will work with host cities to maintain consistent timing throughout the quadrennial period.
Please note that in the event a major IWF or PAWF event overlaps with one of the following events, the timing of the USAW event may need to be adjusted.
Qualifying totals will still be approved on an annual basis, based off of the previous events and the advice of the competition and technical committees.
Month 2017, 2018, 2019 2020 Jan Feb (Late February) National Juniors National Juniors March American Open Series 1 American Open Series 1 April National University & U25 National University & U25 May (Early May) USA Weightlifting National Championships US Olympic Team Trials & Nationals June (Late June) National Youth Championships National Youth Championships July American Open Series 2 American Open Series 2 August September World University, World Team Final Trials & AO Series 3 World University Team Trials & AO Series 3 October November December American Open Final American Open Final
Introducing the American Open Series
To meet the increasing demand of athletes wanting to compete in the sport of weightlifting, USA Weightlifting will be introducing the American Open Series.
Based in part on the German Bundesliga and Polish league systems, as well as the advice of Head Coach Zygmunt Smalcerz, the series will be held three times a year with a finals in the place of the current American Open event.
This series will include sessions for senior, master, youth, and junior athletes and provide an opportunity to earn points throughout the year using the IWF Points system (points given for total only).
Double points will be on offer at the American Open Finals. Team entries will also be able to be taken across the entire series.
Athletes and teams do not need to attend the entire series, but rather, may pick and choose the events that they wish to attend. The events are entirely optional, and athletes are not expected to “max out” at each and every event if they do chose to attend. This aligns with the German Bundesliga concept.
While the American Open events are classified as national rather than regional events, it is the intent of USA Weightlifting to spread the series around the nation to reduce travel costs for those who wish to only one event.Would charging GST on Australian Netflix subscriptions push more consumers towards piracy?
THE movies, songs, books and streaming services Australians buy online could be more expensive from next month as Joe Hockey looks to extend the reach of the GST.
Such a move — being dubbed the “Netflix Tax” — would make those products 10 per cent dearer for consumers but could add billions of dollars to the public purse.
Mr Hockey said the plan was an “integrity” measure, not a broadening of the GST; something the Abbott Government has promised it wouldn’t do.
The plan would update the GST to include “intangible services” such as online downloads, which obviously weren’t thought of when the Goods and Services Tax was conceived two decades ago.
It’s been flagged after a week of tax-related hearings in Canberra, including a Senate inquiry into big companies avoiding Australian tax and a meeting of state treasurers discussing a fairer carve-up of GST revenue.
State treasurers have agreed to the measures after meeting with Mr Hockey yesterday.
“The states agreed in principle that we should move in that regard and we have offered to work as quickly as possible with them to introduce legislation to address that,” Mr Hockey said yesterday.
Some online streaming services have already responded to the plan.
Netflix US says it will happily add the GST to the cost of its service once the federal government makes it legal.
Treasury deputy secretary Rob Heferen told a Senate inquiry yesterday that through the work of the OECD it had found compliance costs would be very low if international providers of imported goods had to register and simply pay the GST.
He said there was no legal obstacle to the change.
“Australia wouldn’t need the agreement of any country to do this. The federal government would need the agreement of the states and territories,” Mr Heferen said.
Mr Hockey said the move had the potential to generate billions of dollars in revenue.
It could be followed by a further change involving applying the GST to goods imported online which are valued at less than $1000.
Labor is willing to look at the plan to impose the GST on downloaded products. But Opposition Leader Bill Shorten warns the coalition has a reputation for having “thought bubbles” when it comes to tax.
He criticised the government for not targeting the “big end of town”.
“I’ve some sympathy for people who say that these internet-provided media products don’t pay the GST, but I think we need to go back one step,” Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said.
Australians already thinking of ways around paying
Australians who conceal their location to download music, TV shows, books and music may escape paying the GST even if it is imposed in the Federal Budget.
Consumer advocacy group Choice says Australians who use virtual private networks (VPNs), which make them appear to be outside the country, could avoid the GST.
Instead, the government should tackle the root cause of the problem — the exorbitant domestic costs of TV shows, music and movies, and difficulties accessing them.
“We need to make it easier... in order to encourage greater competition,” Choice chief executive Alan Kirkland told ABC radio on Friday.With continued instability in the energy and commodity markets, Canada’s growing technology sector is going to be a major economic driver for the foreseeable future, according to new research from the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship (BII+E) at Ryerson University.
The value of Canada’s tech sector, which encompasses a wide range of industries from digital technologies, to aerospace and pharmaceuticals, has grown steadily, says report, entitled The State of Canada’s Tech Sector, 2016.
In 2015, the technology sector was directly responsible for $117 billion or 7.1 per cent of Canada’s economic output—greater than that of the finance and insurance industry, said Sean Mullin, executive director of the BII+E.
(click to listen the full interview with Sean Mullin)
“Over the last ten years the tech sector has been a much more stable source of growth than say resource or mining, or oil extraction industries that are very much impacted by things like the price of oil, the value of Canada’s dollar and other things that are beyond our control,” Mullin said. “So for us it’s another reason why the tech sector is a very important sector to not only be aware of, but also to foster and grow because it’s much less dependent on external factors and it’s something that continues to contribute to our growth even in these times of volatility and uncertainty.”
The Void-developed ’Rapture’, a head-mounted display with a wide field of vision, is pictured during the TED Conference on February 17, 2016 in Vancouver, Canada. © GLENN CHAPMAN
The tech sector was directly responsible for $117 billion or 7.1 per cent of Canada’s economic output, greater than that of the finance and insurance industry, said the report.
About 864,000 Canadians were employed in the tech sector, which made up 5.6 per cent of Canada’s total employment. On average, tech sector employees earn approximately $67,000 a year, compared to the national average of nearly $48,000.
It’s also a much better educated workforce. Over half of tech industry employees had a university education, compared to 29 per cent across Canada’s labour force.
And the tech sector was by far the largest private investor in research and development, said Mullin.
Still Canada lags behind other OECD countries, such as Sweden, Finland and the U.S., in terms of the tech sector’s share of gross domestic product, pointing to the fact that it still has place to grow, Mullin said.A delegation of scientists, professors, business leaders and artists from Rzeszow, Poland, met their counterparts in Gainesville from Sept. 3 to Monday.
Over the past week, Gainesville received a visit from the Polish ambassador to the U.S., interest from a Polish aerospace company looking to locate its U.S. operations and even an invitation from the Polish American Football Association to play the Florida Gators.
A delegation of scientists, professors, business leaders and artists from Rzeszow, Poland, met their counterparts in Gainesville from Sept. 3 to Monday to set the stage for collaborating on research projects and cementing business ties as part of the Sister City program.
It was the third visit since Gainesville and Rzeszow started the sister city program a year ago.
Ultratech — a Polish company that makes parts for airplanes, helicopters and energy turbines — plans to open a U.S. division and has keyed in on Florida to be near other aerospace manufacturers. Vice President Marek Bujny said he is interested in Gainesville as a possible location.
He said Ultratech already has an agreement with the Miami airport to handle its exports to U.S. airplane manufacturers and energy companies.
Bujny also represents Aviation Valley, a 200-company aerospace trade association from Rzeszow, and met with aerospace engineering faculty at the University of Florida to talk about collaborating with scientists there.
A chemical manufacturer from Poland met with local polymer plastics companies and a UF chemical engineering professor to discuss a possible collaboration project, according to Margaret Andraka, chairwoman of international trade for the Polish American Chamber of Commerce of Eastern USA.
Andraka lives in Gainesville, where her husband is a physics professor, and owns a company that provides software for construction projects throughout Europe.
Rzeszow Deputy Mayor Stanislaw Sienko said through a translator that a Gainesville delegation is invited to attend a large chemical engineering conference in Rzeszow next year.
He said Rzeszow has sister city programs with 12 cities, and the one with Gainesville is the most productive.
“The biggest springboard I feel for our collaboration is starting with the University of Florida because we have 60,000 students and pretty much the same departments as UF,” he said. “We look forward to collaboration in aerospace, medical innovations as well as others like chemistry. From that, business opportunities will develop once we start some innovative work and produce innovative goods.”
He said the program includes a cultural exchange — the delegation brought a classical pianist and a chef — and they would like to organize a sporting event between the two cities, perhaps in volleyball or American football.
“I’m pleasantly surprised by the beauty of Gainesville, how green and a wonderful place it is to live,” Sienko said. “We can see a very effective management of the city by the leaders.
“When we were invited first to become a partner city we wondered if it would work because the ocean divides us, but after three visits we are convinced it will be an excellent future for us.”
The visit included a business summit at the UF Innovation Hub, tours of UF and Santa Fe College facilities, Friday’s concert on the downtown plaza and the UF football game on Saturday. Polish Ambassador Ryszard Schnepf was also in town Sept. 3-5.Something happens to golfers when they see a forged muscle back iron, golf’s smallest, least forgiving type of iron that only a small percentage of golfers have the talent to use effectively.
The response is similar to how motorists feel when they see an accident on the freeway. They know that shouldn’t look, that it’s potentially hazardous for them to do so, but they just can’t help themselves.
Mizuno’s new MP-4 irons will take many golfers’ intrigue with muscle back irons a step farther. They have a classic shape and understated graphics that traditionalists will praise, and according to Chuck Couch, vice president of golf product for Mizuno, they feel as good if not better than any iron Mizuno has ever produced.
To say that a golf club has good feel sounds like a subjective statement, because good feel often means something different to different golfers. But Couch said that Mizuno has established a way to quantify feel and improve it scientifically, which is exactly what the company has done with the muscle back MP-4 irons, as well as with its new forged cavity back MP-54 irons.
Click here to see what members are saying about the MP-4 and MP-54 irons in the forums.
Mizuno MP-4 Irons
[youtube id=”PeEkuYDdWoI” width=”620″ height=”360″]
The first thing most golfers will notice about the MP-4 irons is that they look small at address, and that’s no illusion.
In most iron sets, the blade lengths of the irons get longer as the clubs gets shorter. That’s because of the weight progression of the heads – short irons (which have shorter shaft lengths) have to be heavier than longer irons (which have longer shaft lengths) for the clubs to have a similar balance point, or swing weight.
For example, Mizuno’s previous muscle back iron, the MP-69, had a blade length that grew 1.5 millimeters from the 3 iron (74.5 mm) to pitching wedge (76 mm). That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but for the exacting golfers who tend to play muscleback irons, it’s noticeable.
Above: The “Pure Muscle” on a Mizuno MP-4 model 7 iron.
Instead of increasing blade length, engineers added weight to the MP-4 irons by increasing the size of the muscle pad behind the sweetspot of the irons, which is the reason for the irons’ pronounced bulge, or “Pure Muscle,” in the back. According to Couch, the added mass amplifies the MP-4’s “Harmonic Number,” the frequencies created at impact that golfers equate with feel.
By raising the harmonic number, and tweaking the shape of the muscle pad to ensure that the frequencies have even levels, Couch said engineers can create a more pleasing sound that translates into the “sticky, soft feel” at impact that golfers rave about.
Mizuno MP-54 Irons
If most golfers are honest with themselves, they’ll come to the conclusion that irons like the MP-4 aren’t for them. Couch speculated that not even Luke Donald, Mizuno’s highest-ranked professional golfer, will play the MP-4 irons. He’ll likely stick with the MP-64 irons, which are slightly larger and more forgiving (Click here to read our full review on the MP-64’s).
The MP-64 irons were one of our top-rated irons for 2013, but even for some of Mizuno’s staff players they’re still smaller and less forgiving than they’d like. That’s why Mizuno decided to create the MP-54 irons, which like the MP-4 and MP-64 are forged from 1025E “Pure Select” Carbon Steel to help create the soft, solid feel Mizuno irons are known for. But they’re slightly larger than the MP-64’s, which Couch said allowed engineers to take total advantage of modern iron technology.
The MP-54 irons have longer blade lengths, thicker top lines, more offset and a thicker sole than the MP-64 and MP-4 irons. Their most important characteristic, however, is the 16 grams of weight that Mizuno removes from the cavities of the 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 irons (see photo 1). That discretionary weight was repositioned in areas that give the irons a higher peak trajectory and more forgiveness than Mizuno’s smaller-sized irons.
Photo 1
Photo 2
The MP-54’s 8 iron, 9 iron and pitching wedge do not have the weight removed from the cavity, however, which gives the clubs a flatter, more penetrating trajectory that better golfers prefer with their short irons (see photos 2).
Couch emphasized that the “Step Muscle” design – a.k.a. the hole that’s left in the cavity after milling out 16 grams of weight – does not compromise the feel of the irons.
“We left as much maximum thickness as we could behind the impact area, and use that to drive our feel,” Couch said. “And we used H.I.T. [Harmonic Impact Technology] to make the irons feel amazing.”
The MP-4 and MP-54 irons, which will hit shelves on Sept. 9, come stock with True Temper’s Dynamic Gold S300 shafts and will retail for $999.
Both sets have similar lofts – the 6 irons measure 30 degrees, the pitching wedges measure 46 degrees — to allow golfers to mix and match Mizuno iron models for a combo set.
Click here to see what members are saying about the MP-4 and MP-54 irons in the forums.
Click here to see what members are saying about the MP-4 and MP-54 irons in the forums.Running Wild with Bear Grylls - Season 2
Drew Brees on 'Running Wild with Bear Grylls.'
(NBC)
Sean Payton thought Drew Brees was entering a "Sea World" atmosphere when it was explained to him the New Orleans Saints quarterback would be participating "Running Wild with Bear Grylls."
Instead, Brees' trip into the Panama wilderness with Grylls, which aired Monday on NBC, took Payton by surprise. And also took Payton aback.
"Listen I'm being serious... what I saw the other night was completely (not what he expected," Payton said more in a half serious/half joking tone. "First off, when you live in Louisiana, you don't have to go to South America (Panama) to jump on an alligator.
"It was a lot different than it was described to me. And it wasn't described to me by him, but I'm sure we would look closely at the structure of his contract. It was pretty unbelievable."
Among the several dangerous tasks performed by Brees and Grylls on the episode, Brees jumped on the back of a crocodile with Grylls holding the croc in place with a rope. Brees and Grylls then tied up the croc's mouth and Brees killed the croc by stabbing it through the top of its head. Brees then carried it to the campsite.
Would Payton let Brees do it again?
"No!," Payton exclaimed. "No! No!"
Payton was then asked he was was truly upset about Brees' participation.
"Listen, it's happening and I'm watching it live and I'm looking at it and I keep waiting and the helicopter is going to South America and I keep thinking, 'Alright what's the catch here?'" Payton said. "I keep watching it and I'm watching this guy with an Australian accent who everyone knows, and I must not have been in tune with the television lately and I don't know him and he's throwing a noose around an alligator's mouth and I'm watching our quarterback jump on it.
"It was all news to me."
Payton figured there were precautions he didn't see on TV if something were to go catastrophic with Brees. Still, Payton was unsettled by what he watched.
"It's after the fact. I had heard something three, four, five months ago about him jumping on an alligator. I didn't envision the environment or the setup to be like that. I don't know that I've talked to him or grabbed him about. But I'm sure it was a great experience for him.... But you've watched these shows, right? Every time they go to commercial break, they're talking about 'THIS MIGHT BE DEATH!' I'm sure they had him in safe hands."Introduction, at Home Apps, Racks, Closing Start
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At a Glance Product Untangle at Home [Website] Summary Home version of powerful open source solution for blocking spam, spyware, viruses, adware and unwanted content. Pros Very full-featured UTM feature set
Runs on ASUS RT-AC88U
$5 / month for all Untangle features / apps Cons Might be too challenging for networking novices to set up
No other consumer routers supported yet
Introduction
Untangle is a security software company that creates a firewall product currently called Next Generation Firewall (NG Firewall). They have been around since 2003, founded as Metavize and renaming to Untangle in 2007.
Untangle has created an open source firewall platform aimed at helping small to medium businesses secure and protect their networks. More than just a firewall, Untangle raises the job of the simple firewall to a much more advanced category, a Unified Threat Management firewall (UTM). Untangle NG Firewall can be installed on a PC hardware platform, there are 32 and 64 bit ISO downloads available, as well as be virtualized via an OVA download, or even an image for a USB stick, giving end users tremendous flexibility to the size of the network it will protect, as well as flexibility in budget.
I reviewed Untangle Gateway, an earlier version of NG Firewall, over eight (!) years ago. So when Untangle asked me to look at NG Firewall, I figured it was time. Specifically, they wanted me to review a version aimed at home and SOHO users, appropriately named Untangle at Home.
A little background first. While NG Firewall is based on open source, it pulls together hundreds of technologies, from open source, commercial, or in-house home grown, into a powerful platform that provides many different functions. These functions include such features such as web filtering, bandwidth management/QoS, application control, antivirus, antispam, phish blocking, ssl inspection, advanced firewall, ad blocking, VPN, intrusion inspection and detection, active directory connector to tie in with users, and policy management to define access and control by users or devices.
NG Firewall also has a very flexible routing component that supports multiple WAN and LAN interfaces, and virtual interfaces added to a physical interface including virtual VLANs. The applications, most of which run at layer 7 on the OSI model, can be individually installed from an “App Store”. This allows customizing your instance of NG Firewall to your needs and not waste compute resources on unused modules.
As a network professional, I often tinkered at home, and years ago I became interested in the many open source firewall distros available. I had downloaded, installed, and played with just about all the various Linux router distros out at that time. Since I am an IT consultant for SMBs for a living, I saw the need for firewall protection above what a traditional NAT router provided. I was a firm believer in “layered protection” before it became a trendy name in the IT consulting world. In the mid 2000’s I spent a lot of time playing with various *nix firewall distros, and then I discovered Untangle…back when it was around version 5.
Our SMB consulting group then had quite a few “MSP clients”, meaning clients on fixed monthly fees for unlimited support. I immediately saw the value of layered protection, since adding protection to a client should result in fewer malware calls, thus less time spent having to support the client, thus, the client is more profitable. So I started installing the base/free version of a few of the UTM *nix distro products, and I definitely saw a reduction in malware related calls to our clients.
Over time, Untangle developed nicely, had a great, active support forum, and I began using it as our “go-to firewall product” and became a reseller around the time of the previous review.
Untangle at Home
Today's homes have a lot more connected to the internet than computers. Home automation, security systems, appliances, media streamers and game consoles share your internet connection with computers, smart phones and tablets. These new devices increase the possible vectors of attack and raise your network's threat profile significantly.
Untangle has to date been aimed at small to medium businesses, so needed some “good horsepower” to run on. It likes at least a multi-core processor, a Gigabyte or more of RAM, and good hardware-based network cards to run on. Fortunately, some consumer routers now have quad-core processors, over a Gigabyte of RAM and USB 3.0 ports that enable storage expansion via SSD or hard drives.
So with increased need plus reasonably priced hardware, “Untangle at Home” was born!
Untangle at Home is a special package designed to be affordable for the home user at $50.00 per year or $5.00 per month! Compare this special “Home” price, to the normal NG Firewall Complete bundle for businesses that starts at $540.00 annually for up to 25 devices! So, for $50.00 per year, you can run Untangle at Home that provides the same features as the full Complete Package on a home-built or repurposed computer, any Untangle hardware appliance, or ASUS RT-AC88U.
Since Untangle has developed features for business networks, the services that a growing number of home users desire are already included in Untangle for Home. Features include:
Parental control. Log or block websites based on category or specific addresses.
Robust bandwidth control
VPN
Guest device management
Multiple layers of security, including dual antivirus engines (Clam and BitDefender), webfiltering, anti phishing, deep SPI and intrusion prevention.
Reporting and a dashboard of their network
It even has a darned good SPAM filter.
Built in Ad Blocker….block ads at the edge, save on network traffic, and cut down on your exposure to malware since poisoned advertisements are widely used for drive by malware exploits/installs.
After building your Untangle firewall and booting it up for the first time, you run through a quick configuration wizard. You get to select your login credentials and how you want to use Untangle. You can use it either as your main router/firewall/gateway, or in bridged model (transparent proxy) behind your existing firewall. Usually you’re going to have it be your router/firewall/gateway, so you’ll configure the WAN connection type, internal IP and DHCP server. From there, you’ll select the default apps to install. More on apps later.
Let’s start by taking a look at the Untangle management page. Untangle currently maintains an online demo you can log into and poke around in. Username and password are already filled in. Just click Login and go ahead and look around. Clicking through this will allow you to better see what we’re talking about.
The new Dashboard page is greatly improved from prior versions of Untangle. You can manage widgets to customize it to your preferences. By default, the Dashboard provides a quick glimpse of your network, hardware resources being used (CPU, memory, disk), active sessions on interfaces, traffic flow on interfaces, overall bandwidth being used, global map showing where traffic is going, and some high level views of bandwidth usage per host and by application.
Untangle DashboardOne day before Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis, the NFL announced its 2012 class of Hall of Fame inductees. These men will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August to kick off the 2012 NFL season.
Again this year, the wide receivers were left out. Among the snubs was Andre Reed, who made the cut to 10 finalists, but did not make the final cut.
Reed had a long run as the top receiver for the Bills, finishing his playing career with 13,198 yards on 951 catches, as well as scoring 87 touchdowns. He ranks in the all-time top 10 in receptions and receiving yards and is 11th in career touchdown receptions.
His four Super Bowl appearances also add to his legacy. Reed has the second-most receptions in Super Bowl history behind Jerry Rice and is third in all-time Super Bowl receiving yards.
Reed was already a member of the Bills Wall of Fame as well as the Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame, but will have to wait, hoping to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame
For complete coverage of the 2012 Hall of Fame class and all other football news, stay tuned to SB Nation's dedicated NFL hub.In two instances, groups of six to 10 young men attacked their victims, robbing them of little more than cell phones, according to police.
In an incident at 6:23 p.m. Wednesday, ten males in their twenties approached two young men – ages 23 and 24 – and chased them from 18th and Dolores to Church Street. One of the suspects brandished what appeared to be a gun. The suspects assaulted the two victims and robbed them of a cell phone and necklace, police report.
The victims were taken to San Francisco General Hospital and treated for non-life threatening injuries. Police recovered a toy gun at the scene of the incident.
At 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, six males between 17 and 20 years old attacked a 35-year-old man at 16th and Capp streets, stealing his cell phone, cash and passport. He too was treated for non-life threatening injuries.
The incidents follow one last week in which a group of men chased down two victims in Dolores Park.
Police officer Giselle Talkoff said it was unclear if the incidents involving groups of men were connected. “There are gang members who hang out “at Dolores Park, Talkoff said. “We do monitor them.”
One Cell Phone Recovered
Earlier in the day at 7:30 a.m. at 15th and Caledonia, a male between the ages of 17 and 25 punched a 31-year-old man, knocking the victim to the ground. The suspect grabbed the victim’s cellphone and ran, but the victim recovered and chased after the suspect, yelling for help. The cries were enough to inspire the suspect to drop the victim’s phone.
No arrests have been made in any of the incidents.
Crime is trauma and the county offers different services, which can be found here. Victims of violent crime can also contact the Trauma Recovery Center at UCSF.Could we face gas rationing? British gas reserves could run dry in 36 HOURS after freezing householders turn the heating up
Plunging temperatures forced millions to turn up their heating
Shortfall could add more than £200 to family bills, analysts warn
Gas stores at their lowest level for three years with snow forecast
Government insists gas needs are 'continuing to be met'
Britain relying on pipelines from Norway and shipments of liquefied gas
Energy giant SSE was of'very real risk' of lights going out
Downing Street spokesman said: 'It is absolutely clear that supplies are not running out'
Freezing Britain was last night facing the unprecedented prospect of gas rationing.
A combination of bitterly cold weather and pipeline failures has left the energy grid at breaking point.
The country has less than 36 hours of gas reserves remaining and one energy expert warned yesterday that if the cold snap continues, rationing is ‘inevitable’.
If this happens, businesses and power stations will be restricted first, but then householders will be ordered to cut down on the amount of gas they use for heating their homes.
Britain’s gas stores are dangerously low as unexpectedly low temperatures have forced people to keep their heating on.
The crisis deepened yesterday when a crucial undersea pipeline connecting Britain and Belgium shut down without warning, pushing the price of gas up by 50 per cent to a record high.
Ships bringing desperately needed supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar are still more than two days away, and could be delayed further because of the bad weather.
The looming national energy crisis also threatens to push up household bills for hard-pressed families.
The Government admitted gas supplies were under pressure, but Downing Street said David Cameron was ‘confident’ that they would not run out. But energy analysts warned that with the freezing conditions set to last into next month the consequences were ‘worrying’.
Ann Robinson, analyst for uSwitch, said: ‘If this dreadful weather continues for the next two or three weeks we should be very worried, because if we get into a position where we do run out of gas there is not a lot that can be done in the short term.
Running low: Britain's gas reserves could run out in 36 hours ¿ leaving the country dependent on costly foreign imports.
‘Rationing would be inevitable, for businesses and domestic users and maybe for gas-powered electricity producers as well, so we might be looking at electricity rationing too.’ She said the Government’s response to the crisis had been ‘very complacent’.
Angelos Anastasiou, from investment bank Liberum Capital, added: ‘There’s a bit from the pipes and there’s LNG but that’s it. There isn’t any more. I would say rationing is a distinct possibility. We’re not there just yet, but it’s a distinct possibility.’
Energy Minister John Hayes said the issue was ‘a priority’ and confirmed he has held ‘discussions with industry and others about gas security’.
Michelle Mitchell, Age UK’s charity director general, highlighted fears for the elderly if the gas shortages become a reality.
She said: ‘This continuing bitter weather is a major threat to the health of older people, and older people need to know their gas supplies are guaranteed. Age UK would like the Government and the industry to offer them some public reassurance this weekend that the UK’s gas will continue to flow.’
The crisis was sparked early yesterday morning when a water pump failed at one of the four underwater pipelines that connect the UK and the Continent. The pipeline from Belgium, which has the capacity to supply around a fifth of the UK’s gas needs, was immediately shut down by operator Interconnector UK. The group said it ‘has a technical issue at its Bacton terminal which stopped gas flow into the UK’.
It began pumping gas at a reduced rate later in the morning, but had to shut operations again completely in the afternoon.
The full flow did not begin until late afternoon, and no one from Interconnector UK was last night able to say how much gas had been lost as a result of the outage.
The other pipelines – two from Norway and one from the Netherlands – were open during the day, although one is due to be shut down at the beginning of April for routine maintenance.
The daily price of gas rocketed to 150p a therm – up from Thursday’s price of 100p. It is the highest level ever seen in the UK gas markets, according to traders.
It came just hours after it emerged that the UK’s domestic gas stores have fallen to a new low after millions of households turned up their heating. The stores are now more than 90 per cent empty and have less than two days’ worth of gas remaining. They are forecast to be completely empty by early next month.
WHY SUPPLIES ARE ON A KNIFE EDGE AS well as dwindling North Sea reserves, gas is running low in Britain because of the ‘limited’ size of storage facilities.
This means the UK is in a worse position than other EU countries when families turn up the heating to cope with cold winters.
At full capacity, Britain’s storage infrastructure can stockpile enough gas for up to 20 days.
This compares with more than 100 days in France, 92 days in Germany and 70 days in Italy. The US protects itself against gas shortages by storing contingencies for up to six months.
The historic lack of storage facilities and a failure to attract investment to build new ones has helped create the current crisis.
One reason for the lack of storage facilities is that the importing of gas, whether from the North Sea or overseas, fluctuates throughout the year.
In the UK, more gas is shipped in during the winter and is effectively dumped straight into the national grid so people can heat their homes. In the summer, demand drops off as householders switch off the heating.
This has been the case since British Gas began exploiting the resource in the 1960s. Consequently the country has never needed huge storage facilities.
On the continent, the supply of gas is ‘flatter’, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, so bigger stockpiles build up during the summer.
This means countries such as Germany have bigger storage facilities.
Analysts warned that higher gas prices now could push up long-term rates for next winter, adding 15 per cent, or more than £200, to the average family |
2.0.
“We think we have a strong line-up so far, Jake and Jack will work together, learn together and bring lots of info to rookie, but quick-learner Anton.”The UK is set to deploy attack dogs to defend Parliament in new plans to protect Westminster from terrorism following the deadly attack in March.
The dogs would be stationed with police handlers at the gates through which Muslim convert Khalid Masood tried to storm after killing four pedestrians, PC Keith Palmer, and injuring more than 50 with his car.
Former chairman of the House of Commons administration committee, Sir Paul Beresford, told The Sunday Times that dogs were being “seriously considered” in a review of perimeter security.
“If we’d had a dog there PC Palmer might have been saved,” he said, and explained that a dog could stop a terrorist without killing protesters.
“If some idiot who is not a terrorist runs in, and there are a few of those out there, the dog will drop them and they won’t be shot.”
Dogs, typically Alsatians, are already used on gate duties at British military bases during times of increased terror threat and can be trained to respond only to particular commands or acts.
Other measures which are likely to be recommended by the perimeter review include stronger barriers to guard against vehicle attacks, and measures to keep pedestrians further away from Parliament.
Beresford said the gates at Westminster were recognised as a particular point of weakness due to the frequency with which they have to be used, telling The Sunday Times: “The gates have to be open when MPs are coming in to vote, but we recognise it is a chink in the armour.”
A Parliamentary spokesman said: “Two reviews have now been commissioned into the perimeter security at Parliament and into the Houses’ response following the incident on 22nd March.
“Both reviews have encouraged and sought the views of those on the estate on that day and from the public. This feedback will be considered in detail along with other evidence.”With water scarcity plaguing prime regions in India this summer, there is an urgent need to find an affordable solution. One possible alternative that can substitute water sources during the scorching summers in India is Gabrielle Diamanti’s solar powered saline water purifier.
The simple effective device is a personal desalination still that can be designed with expenditure falling under fifty dollars. The ‘Eliodomestico’ work like an upside down coffee percolator and has a simple design that can be achieved with widely available materials.
The desalination takes place in two ceramic pieces that sit one atop the other. In the top piece is a black container where the saline water is poured. The sun heats the container, converting water into steam. As the pressure of the steam builds in the top container, it is forced down a tube into the lower ceramic piece where it condenses and collects in the basin of the container.
The remarkable utility of this device is defined by its capacity to collect and purify about five litres of water per day. The container is designed to be transported on the head- a common practice of water collection in many rural regions in India. This device is half the price of a normal solar still and provides two litres of more freshwater than the normal still.
No fuel, no electricity. and no maintenance make it ideal for usage by people from all walks of life. The design is available as an open-source project for anyone who wants to make one and is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/. This device can be built from readily available materials anywhere.
The design was a finalist at Prix Emile Hermes competition 201 and also received a special mention at the Well-Tech Award 2012. It was also the pro winner of the Core 77 Design Awards 2012 in the social impact category.
As the journalist Jay Syrmopoulos of The Free Thought Project puts it, this revolutionary ceramic solar-powered still has the ability to combat one of the greatest threats to human life in the developing world, that is, water scarcity.
The Logical Indian appreciates the efforts of Gabrielle Diamonti for this innovative design that could be a lifesaver for numerous people from all the developing countries.Phinal Closing Statement from Owner Ben Rogers:
June 1, 2015
For immediate release:
Official message from Ben Rogers – Retired Owner and Founder.
“Thank you Louisville. It was a great gig!”
The Phoenix Hill Tavern and Jim Porter’s Good Time Emporium closed permanently today.
Please accept my VERY sincere apologies for the abrupt manner in which the clubs closed; and to anyone the closings will effect in a negative manner. (Especially staff members and entertainers.) Because of some agreed to contractual terms, and concerns about safety and liability issues after a closing warning announcement - while trying to control a cash only business - well…“pulling the plug” was just the safest way to do this. PHT is under contract with a first class real estate developer who
I've personally researched and selected. The developer is proposing to work closely with The City to deliver a best of class development that will be very positive for the community. Based upon confidentiality agreements, the developer cannot be disclosed at this time, but they plan to introduce themselves and their plans in the near future.
Jim Porters has been bought out by MSD to make way for the MSD “Project WIN.” I want to emphasize that the earlier than expected closing for Porters was my own personal decision and not at MSD’s insistence. I am sure MSD will move forward and do great things for the health and environment of our community. The contents of Jim Porters will be sold very soon in a series of online auctions at wardlowauc.com.
So… this is my heartfelt goodbye… It has been my great honor and privilege to serve literally generations of Louisvillian’s for the past approximately 40 years. I started Phoenix Hill Tavern in 1976, when I was 21 years old, in one tiny room - on the 2nd floor - of a run down warehouse, that my beloved parents Sonny and Mary Ruth Rogers owned on Baxter Ave. “PHT” / “The Hill” eventually expanded into the entire warehouse and became a sprawling 25K sq. ft. “Live Music Showcase.” It operated continuously for 40 years.
I took over the lease at Jim Porters / “Porters” after the building on Lexington Road, also owned by my parents, sat vacant for 2 or 3 years. I completely remodeled and upgraded it, re-opening it as an 18K sq. ft. “Good Time Emporium” in 1990. It operated continuously for 25 years.
In my very biased opinion, I believe these were the 2 most successful nightclubs in the history of our city. It wasn’t because of me; it was because of the people who worked for me. The clubs were certainly two of the most enduring. I do know that they were deeply enjoyed and loved by many - especially me. I always thought of the clubs and staff members as family members. For me personally, this will be bittersweet. I have truly loved being in the bar business. I am so grateful for so many things; the people I’ve met, the tremendous staff members I’ve worked with, the experiences I’ve enjoyed, the life and business lessons I’ve learned, the bands I’ve booked and the friends I’ve made; but most of all I am SO grateful and humbled by the loyalty and support of our community over the years. I wish I could stay forever, however after 40 years in the bar business and having just turned 60 years old - with some increasing health related issues - this was just something whose time had finally come. A natural evolution of things, if you will… “It’s finally just time for me to hang up my spurs and turn the page.” I have no plans to continue on in the bar / restaurant business in any capacity.
Finally, I thank God for allowing me to end this incredible 40 year journey on my own terms.
This will be my only statement. Please, no media interview requests.
__First of all, I am glad to be here and to have the opportunity of sharing my ideas on this collective blog on Operations Research, which is a project that I should especially express my appreciation for. My friends, Sertalp, Ahmet and Pelin are doing a great job by running this blog and I believe that, in the next few years, many people in the field will be following this blog, if we can manage to keep it active.
In my first post, I would like to touch a topic that is closely related to what we are doing here in this blog: Sharing ideas and the knowledge. I would like to talk about open courses on Operations Research.
As a PhD student, in order to internalize a subject in mathematics or in any other field, it is not enough to take its course most of the time. While taking a course for the first time, you may miss some important details. That is why I would go and listen some basic courses again and again in order to completely absorb its intuition, if I had enough time. And there are courses that I took years ago that I did not really use and therefore forgot them. Moreover, I don’t have reach to some courses in my school or I would prefer to listen it from its pioneers at MIT. One can put forward many similar arguments for why most of us need open courses available on YouTube etc. But beyond all of these arguments, in this century, it is senseless to make the (well organized) basic knowledge to privilege to some people, e.g. those who live in the U.S., go to X university, are able to pay more than $1000 to a few text books etc. I think that this is an obstacle in front of the development, in a global and broad sense. For all these reasons, I am a deep-heart fan of open course initiatives.
I cannot tell how much I like being able to listen to Linear Algebra from Prof. Gilbert Strang from MIT, or the Sociology 1 course from Prof. Ann Swidler from Stanford, and similarly, how much I wish to had Operations Research courses online, such as, Dynamic Programming from Prof. Dimitri Bertsekas. Here, in this collective blog on OR, I would like to kindly ask the professors in the universities who are teaching OR courses: If you are teaching an OR course, and if you believe that you are good at teaching, please encourage your university to put them online. It is going to motivate many people, all around the world, to learn this material and employ them in their research in very different fields. Being have to read that material from the book is discouraging for many people, not necessarily because people are lazy, but because learning is affected by many factors, even by the mimics of the professor while explaining the topic.
Here, I want to list some open courses of which the complete set of video lectures are available online at selected universities. If you guys know similar other courses that are not listed here, you can write them down in the comments with a link, so we can use this post as a resource for OR students.
Thanks in advance and see you in the new posts.
* We keep updating the list. Thanks everyone for contributing in the list. Last Update: 02/15/13
Courses on Operations Research (or related):
Courses for necessary Mathematical Background:
Online Books on Operations Research:We’ve been talking about deploy and releases with Elixir lately, like how to run migrations on top of a release or how to deal with environment variables. Now it’s time to discover another tool that can help us release our Elixir application.
After practicing deploy and tracing through nodes with Exrm, we got more comfortable knowing that there is a tool we can count on for managing production releases. Our next biggest concern was how could we make the deploy process more manageable. We couldn’t stop thinking about Capistrano, which we normally use for our Rails projects, then we found Edeliver. From Edeliver’s README description:
edeliver is based on deliver and provides a bash script to build and deploy Elixir and Erlang applications and perform hot-code upgrades.
Trying the whole deploy process manually was a bit harsh with some repetitive tasks. Using Edeliver for our first script/deploy was awkwardly easy! In the end, the whole manual process was simplified to:
#!/bin/bash -ex BRANCH=${1:-master}; mix edeliver build release --branch=BRANCH --verbose mix edeliver deploy release to production --verbose mix edeliver start production --verbose mix edeliver migrate production up --verbose
You’re probably going to need to customize this script, adapting it for your needs. In this case, we’re using this script only for production deploys, but you can customize it for staging servers pretty easily. We’ll explain how environments work further along.
How it works
As we saw before in the README quote, Edeliver makes pretty much everything with bash scripts. The Mix tasks we saw above will be executed with Elixir, but they’ll result in bash script instructions. Part of the instructions are executed in the scripts locally, which will build new instructions that will run remotely via RPC (Remote procedure call).
Let’s go deeper in some aspects of the lib.
Environments
Edeliver is a cool option for launching and distributing releases in multiple environments. It has a concept of three environments: build, staging and production. Among these, only the build environment should get a bit more of attention.
For a release to work in a server, it must have been built in a machine with the same architecture where the release will run. That’s because Edeliver uses Exrm for building its releases. Exrm will internally use its local NIFs (C functions used by Erlang) which may vary in a different architecture, thus causing, for example, an OSX release not working on Linux. You can read more about it in this Phoenix issue where people are discussing cross-compiling issues and there are some other issues in Exrm as well.
In order to use the build environment in our own development machine, it needs to use the same architecture of our staging and production servers, otherwise it won’t work.
To configure our environments, we’ll need to create a.deliver directory in our project and add a config file. Let’s see the suggested configs from Edeliver’s README for this file:
#!/usr/bin/env bash APP="your-erlang-app" # name of your release BUILD_HOST="build-system.acme.org" # host where to build the release BUILD_USER="build" # local user at build host BUILD_AT="/tmp/erlang/my-app/builds" # build directory on build host STAGING_HOSTS="test1.acme.org test2.acme.org" # staging / test hosts separated by space STAGING_USER="test" # local user at staging hosts TEST_AT="/test/my-erlang-app" # deploy directory on staging hosts. default is DELIVER_TO PRODUCTION_HOSTS="deploy1.acme.org deploy2.acme.org" # deploy / production hosts separated by space PRODUCTION_USER="production" # local user at deploy hosts DELIVER_TO="/opt/my-erlang-app" # deploy directory on production hosts
It’s pretty easy to configure our environments, we only need to make sure we have ssh permission for these servers specified. A cool thing about this whole configuration, as mentioned before, is that it’s possible to distribute the releases through several servers.
How can I include extra tasks to my deploy process?
What Edeliver does is generic for Elixir and Erlang applications. When we’re using Phoenix, for example, we need to run some tasks before generating the release. The most important tasks are brunch build --production and mix phoenix.digest so we can have our assets working on our release.
To make these work, we’ll need to define a hook in our.deliver/config file:
pre_erlang_clean_compile() { status "Preparing assets with: brunch build and phoenix.digest" __sync_remote " # runs the commands on the build host [ -f ~/.profile ] && source ~/.profile # load profile (optional) # fail if any command fails (recommended) set -e # enter the build directory on the build host (required) cd '$BUILD_AT' mkdir -p priv/static # required by the phoenix.digest task # installing npm dependencies npm install # building brunch brunch build --production # run your custom task APP='$APP' MIX_ENV='$TARGET_MIX_ENV' $MIX_CMD phoenix.digest $SILENCE " }
This was extracted from an Edeliver doc sample, which explains all the possibilities of hooks.
What about my environment variables?
We shared a tip on dealing with environment variables with Exrm in order to avoid exporting them in our build environment and it’s still up! Although, there’s an important detail we’ll need to pay attention.
In order to make the environments replaceable we needed to set RELX_REPLACE_OS_VARS=true before our start command. But that’s not possible with Edeliver because the start task runs locally.
mix edeliver start production
Then a possible solution is to export the RELX_REPLACE_OS_VARS in your production environment.
Considerations
Edeliver seems like a cool option for dealing with our releases and deploy process, I found it really easy to use. I didn’t enter in implementation details in this post, so make sure to read its README and docs, they’re very useful and well-explained.
This was a solution we found to ease our deploy process. How have you been managing your process? Did this post help you?1000 and 1 days of waking up without snooze button
Trikita Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 17, 2016
Let’s talk about one of the most frustrating moments of each day — time when you have to wake up. Some of us are night owls. Some of us are early birds. But most of us need to get out of bed at a certain time unless you want to hear something like that.
Many studies, tutorials and zen techniques have been developed to help people control their internal alarm clock so it would kick them out of bed on time. I do understand that going to bed at the same time builds a habit of getting up at the same time. I do believe that it might be a matter of motivation which I need to build before going to sleep so it would trick my mind to wake up later. And I do know people who let their body tell them when to wake up because if it doesn’t want to, then you haven’t rebooted yet. All is good except for this is not the case. My internal alarm clock just doesn’t work this way.
So I rely on an external one.
How I gave up reading scientific non-sense and started living
A while ago, we in Trikita agreed that simple things rule the world and we swore to God of Simplicity that our products would be as minimal and elegant as a single-function tool could be. This is when Talalarmo alarm clock was brought to life and all former ones from stock or Google Play vanished into oblivion.
Anyhow, I wouldn’t be honest with the large Android community if I talked about the alarm clock I don’t even use myself. So I do. Every day since its first stable release. And I’m going to tell you why it’s worth it.
What in your alarm clock do you like the most? Customization, snooze, bizarre puzzle to dismiss it, fancy look?
I love free time that the alarm clock saves me for doing something I really want.
3 alarm clock anti-patterns that ruin your life
Snooze. It is the biggest delusion of self-control that works exactly the opposite way you expect. This situation may seem pretty appealing to everyone. An alarm has just gone off right in the middle of a dream and you think — it’s OK to allow five more minutes. You start falling asleep and oops! — time to wake up again. It gets into a vicious circle until you finally realize that time is lost, you gain nothing of it.
So, my motivational mantra is simple — if alarm clock goes off, face it with dignity! When Talalarmo breaks the silence, no snooze is given and no excuse is accepted.
Multiple alarms. It’s another side of the anti-pattern #1, but with less faith in your own powers. People believe that it will be extremely hard to wake up tomorrow and they will fail. So, to increase their chances they set up several alarms supposing that two is better than one, three is better than two, etc, etc. I foresee that in the future scientists will even give it a name. “Alarm addiction — irresistible hunger for keeping a big number of alarm clocks on to feel safer.” This is surely the best way to train immunity to any disturbance while sleeping.
Another thing is that alarm clocks are normally recurring and one day you won’t need some of them. You will have to cancel as many alarms as you have set. Be ready to waste some time before going to sleep.
Talalarmo is designed not to be abusive in this sense. It supports a single alarm and helps to turn one’s weakness into a strength. So, it’s more like “get up or die trying” than “come to the Dark side”.
Alarm dismissal. This is the most irritating in my opinion because typically done in a way that makes people suffer. Why on earth do I have to solve puzzles, jump on one foot, tap on some narrow area of the phone screen to cut it out? If the first thing I’m forced to do in the morning is to take up an inhumane challenge, I don’t want this day to happen.
Waking up may be stressful. I always try to overcome this moment of denial thinking positively. All I want from the alarm clock is to trigger such thoughts leaving intelligent reasoning of a wake-up to myself. With Talalarmo I don’t concern myself about dismissing alarm. I can do it by tapping anywhere on the phone screen. Let me show you how I usually dismiss alarm..
…with an entire palm of my hand without even looking at the phone.
Two taps or not two taps
How many steps do you think you need to take to set up an alarm clock? In the perfect world, it would be one for hours and another one for minutes. Well, I may say I’m living in the perfect world.
So, it takes me two taps on the large easy-to-hit widgets. I don’t stumble over annoying dialogs, pop-up settings, irrelevant switchers. It is my strong opinion that the most popular action performed within any application should be the most intuitive and fastest thing to do.
We gave a lot of thoughts to the Talalarmo main screen look so that it would be aesthetically pleasing, minimal and yet exposing utterly practical way to set the alarm clock. Two non-overlapping circles for hours and minutes seemed pretty much meeting our high expectations.
As time passed by, we came to the flat material UI theme, but left untouched the core concept of the clock presentation. I like using the dark theme as it is less disturbing for my eyes in the darkness when I normally set the alarm clock.
Admirers of minimalism would agree that not only do simple tools derive aesthetic pleasure, but they are likely to be more trustworthy in practice. It’s easier to get a minimal function flawless. So, if your alarm clock is not stable at this and lets you oversleep from time to time, then throw it away and have a cat instead. It’s fluffy at least.
***
On a side note, Talalarmo is Free³: free of charge, free of ads, and it’s a free open source software. So, if it’s not Talalarmo waking you up yet, think about it ;)Early on the morning of 23 February 2016, Israeli military forces came to the villages of Deir Samit and Dura in the Hebron District and demolished both an apartment belonging to the family of Muhammad al-Harub and the home of the Raed Khalil’s family. The demolitions were carried out by way of punishment for the involvement of the two men - who are in custody - in two attacks that killed four Israelis and one Palestinian. On 14 February 2016, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) denied the petitions filed by the families and HaMoked - Center for Defence of the Individual, and approved the demolitions.
Al-Harub family home in Deir Samit after the demolition. Photo by Nasser Nawaj’ah, B’Tselem, 23 Feb. 2016
In Deir Samit, the military demolished the second story of a three-story building belonging to the family of Muhammad al-Harub. Al-Harub has been indicted for the attack in Gush Etzion on 19 November 2015, in which Ya’akov Don, Ezra Schwartz and Shadi ‘Arfah were killed. He has been remanded to custody for the duration of the legal proceedings. Al-Harub’s family says that prior to his arrest he had been living in an apartment on the first story of the building; his father and younger brothers in apartments on the second and third stories; and his older brothers and their families lived in additional apartments. On 30 December 2015, military officials informed the family that they plan to demolish the apartment on the second story, claiming that Muhammad al-Harub had lived in that apartment, rather than the one on the first floor. The HCJ denied the family’s petition, accepting the state’s argument that according to information provided by the Israel Security Agency (ISA) al-Harub had lived on the second story, and permitted the demolition of the apartment.
On 23 February 2016, large military forces arrived and demolished the exterior walls of the second story and some of its interior walls as well. The family says there were two apartments the second story and they are now unfit for habitation. The petition against the demolition which the family submitted to the HCJ noted that nine people, including four minors, lived in the two apartments.
In the village of Dura, the military demolished the home of Raed Khalil’s family. Khalil has been indicted for the attack in Tel Aviv on 19 November 2015 in which Aharon Yesayev and Reuven Aviram were killed, and remanded to custody for the duration of the legal proceedings. His wife Samaher Khalil and their five minor children lived in the home, which three rooms and a basement. The military forces demolished the house in its entirety.
Khalil family home in Dura - before and after demolition. Photos by Nasser Nawaj’ah, B’Tselem, 18 and 23 Feb. 2016
These demolitions by Israeli security forces rendered homeless 15 persons, including nine minors - none of whom were suspected or accused of any wrongdoing. Since October 2015, Israel has stepped up its use of home demolitions as a punitive measure. Including these latest demolitions, the total number of apartments demolished or sealed by the authorities since the beginning of October has now reached 31. This figure includes 14 apartments that were not even slated for demolition by the authorities, but were so badly damaged during the demolition of nearby homes they became unfit for habitation. In addition, in recent months security forces have surveyed dozens of homes belonging to the families of Palestinians who either perpetrated attacks or are suspected of perpetration or involvement in such attacks, with the intention of demolishing these homes in the future.
The justices of the HCJ have repeatedly sanctioned the state’s use of this measure, which is prohibited under international law and constitutes collective punishment. The HCJ has permitted Israeli authorities to pursue this course of action despite its severity and the clear position of jurists in Israel and abroad that it is unlawful. Petitions to the HCJ concerning home demolitions are based on a 1988 ruling of the HCJ itself. Further to a petition by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) it ruled that in cases concerning punitive demolition, authorities must allow families to turn to the court before demolition takes place. Since that ruling, however, the HCJ has denied almost all petitions on the matter, allowing the military to carry out the demolitions. Such conduct cannot pass for judicial review and is no more than lip service to the notion of judicial review.Rodrigo Duterte — with his outsider rhetoric — is the favorite going into Monday’s presidential election in the Philippines. (Dondi Tawatao/Getty Images)
It seems to be the season for tough-talk politics.
As the United States adjusts to the rise of Donald Trump, the Philippines, a former colony and longtime ally, is observing the rise of its own populist phenom, presidential front-runner Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte, a motorcycle-riding, rape-joke-making mayor, is the favorite heading into the Philippines’ presidential vote Monday, commanding a solid but not certain lead over a pack of challengers with strong links to the country’s political and showbiz elite.
The election centers on domestic issues such as crime, corruption, poverty and transportation. At stake are years of solid economic gains under the current president, Benigno Aquino III.
But with China pressing its claims in the South China Sea and the U.S. military increasing its presence on Philippine soil, questions of foreign policy are coming to the fore. The vote will have global implications — which is why Duterte has people talking.
One of the Philippines's leading presidential contenders refused to formally apologize for a controversial rape joke he made at a campaign rally April 12. (AP)
It’s easy to see how Duterte has drawn comparisons to Trump. They are both self-professed political outsiders with a penchant for tough talk and shocking turns of phrase. Both have made misogynistic comments. And both are very — and somewhat unexpectedly — popular.
The “Trump of the East” sobriquet undersells some of Duterte’s more surprising positions — he has publicly backed death squads; the Donald merely endorses torture — and does little to explain his popularity here.
For many Filipinos, Duterte is the candidate of change.
Politics here has long been a family affair, with oligarchic clans dominating public life and often private business, too.
The current president, Aquino, is the son of a former president. His hand-picked successor, Manuel Roxas II, is the grandson of a former president. Among the vice-presidential hopefuls is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the country’s former dictator.
Grace Poe, long thought to be Duterte’s biggest competitor, is the adopted daughter of one of the country’s most-loved movie stars. Before becoming a senator in 2013, she lived for years in the United States.
Duterte, meanwhile, comes from the country’s less-developed south and spent more than two decades running Davao City in Mindanao, where he reportedly patrolled the streets on a Harley-Davidson in a bid to stop crime. When a reporter from Time magazine visited “the punisher” in 2002, Duterte was drinking brandy with a.38-caliber pistol tucked in his waistband.
Supporters see him as different from the rest of the pack.
“There is lingering hostility among middle-class and lower-middle-class voters against elite domination of politics and the economy, despite strong growth under Aquino,” said Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Critics wonder how Duterte’s sharp-tongued showmanship will translate in terms of policy. His tough-on-crime stance is attractive to many voters, but he also seems to support official impunity, threatening to “kill all” suspected criminals or “joking” that he wished he had “been first” to rape an Australian nun who was murdered in a 1989 prison riot.
In a June 2015 report, “The rise of the Philippines’ death squad mayor,” Phelim Kine, deputy director for Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, traced Duterte’s history of endorsing the summary killing of suspected criminals.
“Duterte’s boastful brand of violent impunity should be a path to prosecution, not a platform for political office,” he wrote.
The Philippines’ next president faces a daunting challenge in terms of balancing relations with two big powers: China and the United States.
China claims much of the South China Sea, based on maps with a U-shaped, dashed line that cuts into exclusive maritime economic zones claimed by the Philippines and others. China has been constructing man-made islands and reefs, complete with airstrips and docking facilities, and many worry that Beijing will soon start construction work at a new location, the Scarborough Shoal.
Beijing’s island-building is bringing the Philippines and the United States back together — much to China’s dismay. A new defense pact allows the U.S. military to build facilities at five Philippine military bases, while a growing number of ships are anchoring at the former U.S. base at Subic Bay, not far from where Chinese ships are patrolling.
Duterte’s challengers have generally expressed some degree of support for the Aquino government’s South China Sea stance, saying they will back Manila’s move to challenge China at a United Nations-appointed tribunal in the Hague rather than immediately press for bilateral talks.
Duterte has not been clear on how he would proceed. He said he might be willing to negotiate directly with China or could be persuaded to “put aside” disputes if Beijing, say, built some trains in his home region.
If that doesn’t work, Duterte has another plan: Ride a Jet Ski to the Scarborough Shoal and plant the Philippine flag.
Jay L. Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines’ Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea called Duterte’s comments “dangerous.”
The idea that big-ticket infrastructure spending could resolve the dispute is “music to the ears of the Chinese government,” said Richard Javad Heydarian, an assistant professor at Manila’s De La Salle University and author of “Asia’s New Battlefield: The USA, China and the Struggle for the Western Pacific.”
Duterte’s words also resonated with those who have much to lose as China’s ships press south.
Domingo C. Cabacungan Jr., 44, a fisherman in the town of Infante, just east of the Scarborough Shoal, has been chased by Chinese coast guard ships while working in the disputed waters. He said Duterte was the only candidate with the strength to stand up to China.
“He has a heart of stone,” he said.There has always been a big market for direct-to-video sequels. Back in the Ye Olden Tymes, you could walk down the “New Releases” section of your friendly neighborhood video rental establishment and find low-rent sequels to some of your favorite hits from a decade earlier. The connections to the original film usually ended with the title, but there was something oddly fascinating about this kind of junk. These movies existed simply to trick uninformed movie viewers into watching something rushed out on the cheap just because it has a familiar title.
And while we may be living in the age of streaming, it’s nice to see this ugly, low-budget torch picked up by the likes of Kindergarten Cop 2. The first trailer for this 26-years-in-the-making sequel has arrived and it looks just about as bad as you’d expect for a 2016 family comedy starring Dolph Lundren.
Yes, Kindergarten Cop 2 has replaced Arnold Schwarzenegger with Dolph Lundren, which is a fascinating downgrade. After all, these two are weird reflections of one another. Both are musclebound European action stars whose early battles with the English language represent as huge part of their appeal. Both have a shocking amount of intelligence lurking behind their meathead frames, with Schwarzenegger famously breaking into politics and Lundgren holding a degree in chemical engineering. And while both have fallen out of the spotlight in the past decade or so, Schwarzenegger remains widely beloved and Lundgren is the guy you get to star in Kindergarten Cop 2. Lundgren is the B-tier Arnold, the surprisingly intelligent muscle man who doesn’t have an impressive legacy to fall back on. It’s a little sad, but contemplating that sadness is the key to appreciating Lundgren as a performer and a presence.
In any case, any appreciation you do have for this mealy-mouthed Swede will be tested when you actually click play on the Kindergarten Cop 2 trailer below:
Yikes. So Kindergarten Cop 2 looks like a remake of the first film, with another inscrutably accented action hero going undercover at a school. Naturally, he teaches the kids and they teach him and so on and so forth. The first Kindergarten Cop is not a particularly good movie, but at least it had Schwarzenegger operating at the peak of his powers, when every sinewy muscle on his body seemingly built and released infectious, airborne charisma. The sequel has Dolph Lundgren looking very, very tired.
Entertainment Weekly premiered the trailer and they provided this brief synopsis:
The 58-year-old actor plays an FBI agent assigned to hunt down sensitive stolen data. While undercover as a kindergarten teacher, the gruff, old-school Agent Reed finds himself at odds with the school’s liberal, politically correct environment.
Kindergarten Cop 2 hits DVD and VOD on May 17, 2016. You probably have better things to do with your time, but you’re going to watch it too, huh? I know I am. Because I am a sick, bad person with too much love for Dolph freakin’ Lundgren.Mass Internet surveillance endangers fundamental human rights and has not helped to prevent terrorist attacks, a top European human rights body concluded after analyzing documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013.
The leaks detailing government mass surveillance programs have shown “compelling evidence” of “far-reaching, technologically advanced systems” put in place by U.S. intelligence services and their partners to collect, store and analyze communication data on a massive scale, which threaten fundamental privacy rights, a report by the legal affairs and human rights committee of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe found. States should do more to protect whistleblowers like Snowden, the report said.
The parliamentary assembly can’t create legislation, but has the right to hold the governments of Council of Europe member states to account over their human rights records. It can also press those states, including those in the European Union and some in the former Soviet Union, to achieve and maintain democratic standards.
Its legal affairs committee is “deeply concerned” about the mass surveillance practices and found that mass surveillance does not appear to have contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks, contrary to earlier assertions made by senior intelligence officials. “Instead, resources that might prevent attacks are diverted to mass surveillance, leaving potentially dangerous persons free to act,” it said.
That conclusion puts the committee at odds with those who have called for more surveillance powers in the EU in the wake of the shootings at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The EU’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator for instance has called on the European Commission to oblige Internet companies to share encryption keys with police and intelligence agencies to fight terrorism. That’s a remarkable suggestion given that Internet companies including Google and Facebook have just begun encrypting their traffic because of the Snowden revelations.
The committee’s report, released on Monday, instead calls on countries to promote wide use of encryption technology and to “resist any attempts to weaken encryption and other Internet safety standards.” That, it said, will help protect citizens’ privacy and also help countries defend national security from spying by rogue states, terrorists and ordinary criminals.
The Council of Europe’s parliamentary |
in his career, both taking place last season.
To shore up this problem, the Clippers hired renowned shooting coach Bob Thate, who has been working with Griffin and Jordan since June. Thate was the New Jersey Nets’ shooting coach from 2005 to 2008 and has worked with Jason Kidd and Vince Carter.
The first thing Thate did was breakdown both players’ shooting form before building it back up, which wasn’t an easy process.
“The first couple of weeks I didn’t like it at all,” Jordan said. “I’m going to be honest with you. I didn’t like it because I was too cramped in shooting the ball. But when he recorded it and I saw it, it looked like a good shot.
“Before when I would shoot the ball, I really didn’t have control of the ball. I thought I did, but he broke it down. The first two weeks I was taking the ball and putting it on my forehead just to get used to it. Now I’ve put everything together and I’m working with him every day.”
Griffin, who shot 64% from the free throw line his rookie season, also had difficulty adjusting to his new form when he first began working with Thate.
“It’s definitely frustrating but you have to stick with it,” Griffin said. “That was my main thing. No matter how poorly I shot one day I had to stick with it because it’s one of those things you completely change what you’ve been doing and it takes a while to get used to it.”
Griffin’s time with Thate during the off-season was broken up. He began working with him in the middle of June but that got cut short when Griffin left for Team USA’s training camp in Las Vegas.
Thate flew to Vegas to work with Griffin but barely got to see him when Griffin suffered a torn medial meniscus in his left knee during training camp that required surgery. About three weeks after his surgery Griffin and Thate worked on form shots, after four weeks they worked on free throws and after six weeks they worked on jump shots.
“A lot of times when I would shoot I would fade back a little bit unnecessarily and sometimes I would hang and keep the ball up high for a while and we’ve pretty much gotten rid of all that,” Griffin said. “Now it’s a matter of getting reps and shooting the same way every single time.”
Griffin said you won’t notice a dramatic difference in his shot physically but obviously anticipates a big difference in it statistically.
“It’s not one of those things where you’re going to look at it and go, ‘Wow, it’s completely different,’” Griffin said. “But for me the feel is different and it’s much more compact. I feel there’s less chance for error but I still have a long way to go.”
For Jordan, the breakdown of his shot will be slightly more noticeable as he tucks in his elbow and taps the ball on his forehead before releasing the ball and following through down the center and not allowing his arm to fall to the left or to the right.
“I’m confident in my shot now,” Jordan said. “It’s improved. … It was tough at the beginning and I’m still working on it but I’ve definitely improved a lot since last year.”
Jordan also worked out with Clippers assistant coach Marc Iavaroni most of the summer on developing a more refined post game.
“I’ve worked on go-to moves and got as many reps as possible,” Jordan said. “Left-hand jumper, right-hand jumpers, counter moves. I really wanted to work on that just in case if I got the ball in the post. I really wanted to be a force in there for us this year.”
No one is more excited about the development of Griffin and Jordan than Chris Paul, who wants to see how much his teammates have improved once they start playing games.
“Man, they worked their tails off all summer long, both Blake and D.J....,” Paul said. "I’m excited to get out there and see what it’s all about.”During a press conference, Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced vetoes of portions of the state budget, and laid out his plan for addressing Medicaid expansion.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe
WikiMedia Commons
After months of debate over whether or not the state would expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said Friday that he would move forward unilaterally without legislative action.
During a press conference, McAuliffe announced vetoes of portions of the state budget, and laid out his plan for addressing Medicaid expansion.
There has been much speculation about whether McAuliffe would or could bypass the legislature to expand Medicaid.
The Republican-controlled legislature passed a budget earlier this month that did not include a plan to expand Medicaid, which is expected to provide health insurance to 400,000 low-income residents in the state.
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During his remarks, McAuliffe said he would veto the Medicaid Innovation and Reform Commission (MIRC), calling it a “sham to pretend that the legislature is serious about Medicaid reform and expansion.” The governor noted that even former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli raised questions about MIRC’s constitutionality.
McAuliffe said he has instructed William Hazel, the secretary of health and human resources, and Ric Brown, his secretary of finance, and their respective staffers to no longer attend or assist with any “meaningless” MIRC meetings. The governor also vetoed an amendment that banned the state from expanding Medicaid pursuant to the Affordable Care Act.
“I am moving forward,” said McAuliffe. “There are several options available to me.”
McAuliffe said Hazel has been directed to work with federal partners in Washington, D.C., the insurance industry, health-care providers, university medical centers, nonprofit organizations, local health departments, and the hospital industry, and to deliver a plan no later than September 1.
“We can move Virginia health care forward even in the face of the demagoguery, lies, fear and cowardice that have gripped this debate for too long,” said McAuliffe.
This is not the first executive action McAuliffe has taken to bypass the legislature. In May, the governor directed the state’s health board to review the regulations governing clinics that provide abortion services. The health board is moving forward with the review process, which is expected to be completed by no later than October 1.(January 17th WSB photo by Patrick Sand)
Two and a half weeks ago, hundreds rallied at Alki Beach to support freedom for the last surviving captive Puget Sound orca, best known as “Lolita.” The rally was partly in anticipation of a federal decision on whether to include Lolita in the endangered-species listing that already covers her wild family members. Today, this federal news release announces, the decision is in:
While Lolita will now share the endangered listing status of the population she came from, the decision does not impact her residence at the Miami Seaquarium.
NOAA Fisheries will issue a final rule to include Lolita, a captive killer whale at the Miami Seaquarium, in the endangered species listing for Southern Resident Killer Whales that spend much of the year in the inland waters of Washington and British Columbia.
Lolita is a killer whale that has resided at the Miami Seaquarium since 1970. She was caught in Puget Sound, and the Southern Resident killer whale population she originated from was later listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
However, because that listing included an exemption for captive members of the population like Lolita, she did not share the endangered listing status of the Southern Resident population. In 2013, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation petitioned NOAA Fisheries to drop the exclusion, so the listing would also cover Lolita.
NOAA Fisheries considered the petition and concluded that captive animals such as Lolita cannot be assigned separate legal status from their wild counterparts. The final rule NOAA Fisheries issued today will include Lolita in the endangered listing status of the Southern Resident killer whale population.
NOAA Fisheries received many public comments on the proposal to list Lolita as endangered along with the Southern Resident population. Most of the comments favored including Lolita in the endangered listing, and many also urged that Lolita be returned to the Pacific Northwest and eventually released into the wild.
Currently, the Miami Seaquarium is not proposing to move Lolita. While issues concerning release into the wild are not related to this Endangered Species Act listing decision, any future plan to move or release Lolita would require a permit from NOAA Fisheries and would undergo rigorous scientific review.
Releasing a whale which has spent most of its life in captivity raises many concerns that would need to be carefully addressed. These concerns include disease transmission, the ability of released animals to adequately find food, difficulty in social integration, and that behavioral patterns developed in captivity could impact wild animals. Previous attempts to release captive killer whales and dolphins have often been unsuccessful, and some have ended tragically with the death of the released animal.
NOAA Fisheries’ remains focused on the protection and recovery of Southern Resident Killer Whales, an imperiled population of fewer than 80 whales that primarily eat fish and travel in social groups called pods. They are the subject of extensive research including an ongoing project using satellite tracking to better understand their feeding patterns and habitat needs.
“We are focusing time, resources and attention on the future of the Southern Resident killer whales population,” said Will Stelle, regional administrator of NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region. “NOAA Fisheries and our many partners are working very hard to learn more about these endangered whales and to protect them and their habitats, which is the only way we’re going to recover this population.”
Last year NOAA Fisheries released a comprehensive report summarizing the last 10 years of research and conservation of Southern Resident Killer Whales and outlining NOAA’s research and management priorities to help with their long-term recovery.Seattle recently rezoned large swaths of Downtown and South Lake Union and the University District in the hopes of increasing development capacity for new development and delivering affordable housing. The rezones were paired with Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements giving a choice to developers to build affordable units or pay the City a fee to create affordable housing units instead. The MHA program applies to most new multi-family residential and commercial development, though the rates differ by zone and use.
Before passing the Downtown and South Lake Union rezones, Councilmember Rob Johnson (District 4, Northeast Seattle) sponsored a provision (referred to as the “opt-in provision”) allowing developers with vested development projects to revise their project proposals so as to use added development capacity from the rezone changes if they choose to voluntarily participate in the MHA program. In other words, developers could benefit from the zoning changes without having to restart the permitting process while generating affordable housing that may not otherwise be realized. Some developers already appear poised to do just that.
Yesterday, Councilmember Johnson held a press conference at a windswept parking lot of a former gas station in the University District to highlight how the Downtown and South Lake Union opt-in provision is already generating serious interest amongst developers and how one developer in the University District is canceling his building permits to take advantage of the recent neighborhood rezone.
Councilmember Johnson reported that developers of seven projects in Downtown and South Lake Union have expressed interest in modifying their projects to use the opt-in provision. According to analysis by the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI), those seven projects are estimated to deliver $25 million for affordable housing using the in lieu fee payment option available under the MHA program. The SDCI estimate also suggests that approximately 320 affordable housing units could be produced using a mix of the in lieu fee payments and leveraging other sources, such as federal tax credits geared toward affordable housing developments. While the fee in lieu payments mean that affordable housing will not be provided on-site, City analysis shows that more affordable housing will be created in absolute terms due to the financing arrangements and design of the MHA program. Where affordable units are located by the City is through specific criteria, such as proximity to where the fees were derived, proximity to high quality transit, and proximity to an urban village or urban center.
Under the MHA framework, any units created through the fee lieu payment option are required to be rented to households with incomes at or below 60% of the area median income for at least 50 years or sold as ownership units to households with incomes at or below 80% of the area median income for a minimum period of 50 years. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) modifies area median income limits by households annually. For a single individual, an income of $43,680 would constitute 60% of the area median income whereas a family of four making an income of $57,600 would.
Developers shepherding another 10 projects in Downtown and SLU through the land use permitting process could elect to opt-in as well. Their participation in the MHA program could net another $18 million and 240 affordable housing units*. Between these 17 projects, a total of $43 million could be put towards development of 560 affordable housing units*, representing 9% of the City’s 10-year to create 6,000 affordable housing units through the MHA program. *Again, leveraging other financing sources in addition to the in lieu fees.
Councilmember Johnson lauded developers considering opting in:
What better way for us to celebrate Affordable Housing Week than to recognize these kinds of early successes indicating great momentum for the MHA program. Today I’ve asked our land use department to prioritize getting these seven projects opted into the MHA program, and I also call on the 10 projects identified as good candidates to opt in to help us meet our ambitious and critical goals.
Eran Fields, a California developer, shows how the MHA program is having a huge impact. Fields’ development company had plans for a low-rise mixed-use project on the former gas station site flanking the northeast corner of NE 47th St and Brooklyn Ave NE. His development company plans to abandon their already-issued land use and pending building permits for the site and start anew in order to take advantage of the recently approved University District rezone. Fields’ mixed-use project had already received design review and land use approvals, even submitting building permits to construct the six-story structure. A total of 74 residential units and 5,885 square feet of ground floor retail space had been planned, but no affordable housing was on the table as part of it.
Zoning for the site has gone from NC3-65 (a mixed-use zone with a 65-foot height limit) to SM-U 75-240 (a mixed-use zone with a flexible 75- to 240-foot height limit). In other words, zoning on the site could allow for a tower rising more than 20 stories.
Fields’s announcement may come as a surprise to some given that he’s walking away from a fully approved project to embark on a new one, but the immense amount of additional development capacity unlocked by the rezone and added premium that high-rise construction can command undoubtedly factored into the decision. Fields praised the rezone for other reasons though. “Dense urban development must be coupled with public benefits, such as affordable and family-friendly housing, public open spaces, and streetscaping, while stimulating new and varied housing choices and neighborhood-serving retail,” he said. “The new zoning embraces these requirements and responsibilities, and I look forward to redeveloping and converting an auto-oriented site and use into a building that defers to the values and vision of this newly adopted progressive zoning.” His new project will do just that.
The new project will be nearly twice the size as the last with 142 apartment units, meaning that 13 units will be set aside as affordable or $3.2 million in affordable housing contributions will be made to the City. Fields is also considering construction of two-bedroom units using the special family-sized floor area exemption allowed under the recent rezone. Other aspects of the rezone could require or incentivize the project to contribute to the development of Green Streets, be constructed to LEED Gold certification standards, purchase Transfer of Development Rights to preserve open space or historic structures in the neighborhood, and provide higher quality design techniques.
Councilmember Johnson, for his part, made a poignant statement on Fields’ ambitious decision to go bigger. “It is not lost on me that this site, a former gas station, represents an unsustainable, car-dependent past,” he said. “This new project represents our future vision for this city–an affordable, green, and vibrant future for Seattle and all of its current and future residents. And that is certainly something to celebrate.”
The title image is of the proposed Block V (2301 7th Avenue) development in the Denny Triangle, courtesy of Graphite and Clise Properties, Inc.
Choose an Affordable Seattle
We hope you loved this article. If so, please consider supporting our work. The Urbanist is a non-profit that depends on donations from readers like you.In case the parade of trade shows and device announcements in the first half of the year aren't enough to keep you excited, Google I/O stands as the centerpiece of Android and Google hype. If you're just too eager to see what's going to happen late this June, then here's something to whet your appetite: The Google I/O schedule is now live at Google's developer site.
The schedule includes information for all tracks, including Android, Chrome, Google TV, YouTube, and all your other favorite Google products. As always, we can expect some great announcements at the keynote sessions, which will likely be the highlight of the event for most of us. However, if you're a developer who's attending and you want to map out your schedule, head over to the site at the source link below.
As for the rest of you, who wants to get started on the speculation about what Google will announce? And how many of those announcements won't be released until six months to an eternity later?
Source: Google I/O 20120
In the wake of the massive success of the first Transformers movie, there was a boom to acquire a bunch of Hasbro toy properties and turn them into films. Everything from Stretch Armstrong to Candy Land was on the table, but studios subsequently got cold feet and the only two that made it to the screen were the underrated Battleship (yes, I said underrated) and a low-budget horror iteration of Quija that came and went last year with barely a whimper. There’s one property that seemed stronger than the others, though, and that’s the Monopoly movie. After a fairly long development period that saw Ridley Scott flirt with the prospect of directing, the film is finally poised to start production this summer as a family adventure film.
Steve recently spoke with producer Randall Emmett, whose independent production company Emmett/Furla Films acquired the rights to Monopoly from Hasbro, and during the course of their conversation he provided a status update on the film. He revealed that shooting begins this summer, a big cast and director announcement is coming soon, and the Goonies-esque story involves a treasure map and revolves around a bunch of kids being chased by an adult. Much more after the jump.
Emmett told Steve that after working on the script for a time (he declined to reveal the writers just yet), filming on the Monopoly movie begins this summer:
“We’ve worked on the script for about nine months, we now have a script that we’re going to go make this summer.”
The producer added that they’ll probably be shooting in Georgia or Louisiana, with essential exterior work poised to be done in Atlantic City at the boardwalk. He also said to expect a big announcement revealing the cast, director, and logline at the beginning of February, offering a tease of the story:
“[For] the director, we’re on a shortlist of a few names, and we’re beyond excited about whichever of these directors ends up coming together. The cast is young kids but there is one lead, older—a guy chasing kids, lets say.”
Steve subsequently remarked that the one-liner reminded him of Goonies, and Emmett said that’s the film they hope to emulate:
“That’s a perfect analogy to what Monopoly will hopefully be. There is a treasure map… It’s a family adventure film.”
While this is Emmett/Furla’s first foray into the world of family films, Emmett said they want to ensure that the movie is enjoyable for everyone and not just younger audiences:
“We really spent a lot of time on the script really trying to create family fun for everybody.”
While I think many are dubious that a Monopoly movie can work, iffy concepts have been known to surprise us before (see: Pirates of the Caribbean, The LEGO Movie). We’ll know much more about what to expect from Monopoly very soon.Planning is underway for TCF Bank Stadium to be Minnesota United FC’s home for the 2017 soccer season while the club waits for its newly approved soccer stadium to be built.
The home of the Gophers’ football program would play host to Minnesota’s first season of Major League Soccer (MLS), likely to begin next March. The university has been in talks with United officials about parameters for using the stadium, including how to handle scheduling when Gopher football overlaps the soccer season.
The stadium’s turf field is not preferred. But the longer and wider field are better suited for the team’s personnel and playing style, a source with knowledge of the situation said.
Soccer matches would not be scheduled on Sundays after Gopher home games on Saturdays in the fall, according to another official close to the discussions. There also could be soccer restrictions during spring football practice.
In May, the university installed new FieldTurf but without football yard lines. It purposely kept the permanent design of the new turf less sport-specific, so it would be easier to host other events such as soccer games.
A soccer doubleheader was played in 2014 at the stadium. Minnesota played Ottawa, followed by Greek club Olympiakos against Manchester City of the English Premier League. Manuel Pellegrini, manager of Manchester City, made pessimistic remarks about TCF’s sod-over-turf pitch at the time.
Minnesota will play host to Club Leon in a friendly match June 25 at Target Field, the first soccer match held at the Twins stadium. The match likely will not factor into a decision about where the team plays in 2017.
The Loons are awaiting Gov. Mark Dayton’s signature on newly passed legislation that clears the way for a 21,500-seat stadium in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood. Lawmakers agreed to a property tax exemption for the land where the team wants to build the stadium and approved a liquor license for it. The team also sought — but did not get — a sales tax exemption on construction materials.
The team would begin playing there in 2018. Stadium approval likely triggers MLS officials to announce the club’s start date. Minnesota United President Nick Rogers has said the team hopes to start MLS play in 2017, which means finding a temporary home stadium for that season.
MLS officials have visited both TCF Bank Stadium and Target Field, which boast ready-made infrastructure and significantly more seating than United’s current home field at the National Sports Center in Blaine. An MLS visit to the Twin Cities in January to look at stadiums did not include the National Sports Center.
It has a soccer specific, grass-field facility that has been the home of Minnesota pro soccer since 2008. But its capacity of about 10,000 is less than half of what the new stadium in St. Paul is designed to hold.
Note: Nottingham Forest central midfielder and Scottish youth international player Jack Blake signed with Minnesota United FC.Human minds have hit an evolutionary "sweet spot" and - unlike computers - cannot continually get smarter without trade-offs elsewhere, according to research by the University of Warwick.
Researchers asked the question why we are not more intelligent than we are given the adaptive evolutionary process. Their conclusions show that you can have too much of a good thing when it comes to mental performance.
The evidence suggests that for every gain in cognitive functions, for example better memory, increased attention or improved intelligence, there is a price to pay elsewhere - meaning a highly-evolved "supermind" is the stuff of science fiction.
University of Warwick psychology researcher Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig of the University of Basel looked at a range of studies, including research into the use of drugs like Ritalan which help with attention, studies of people with autism as well as a study of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
For instance, among individuals with enhanced cognitive abilities- such as savants, people with photographic memories, and even genetically segregated populations of individuals with above average IQ, these individuals often suffer from related disorders, such as autism, debilitating synaesthesia and neural disorders linked with enhanced brain growth.
Similarly, drugs like Ritalan only help people with lower attention spans whereas people who don't have trouble focusing can actually perform worse when they take attention-enhancing drugs.
Dr Hills said: "These kinds of studies suggest there is an upper limit to how much people can or should improve their mental functions like attention, memory or intelligence.
"Take a complex task like driving, where the mind needs to be dynamically focused, attending to the right things such as the road ahead and other road users - which are changing all the time.
"If you enhance your ability to focus too much, and end up over-focusing on specific details, like the driver trying to hide in your blind spot, then you may fail to see another driver suddenly veering into your lane from the other direction.
"Or if you drink coffee to make yourself more alert, the trade-off is that it is likely to increase your anxiety levels and lose your fine motor control. There are always trade-offs.
"In other words, there is a'sweet spot' in terms of enhancing our mental abilities - if you go beyond that spot - just like in the fairy-tales - you have to pay the price."
###
The research, entitled 'Why Aren't We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements,' is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Notes to editors
Thomas Hills can be contacted on 44-2476-575527 or t.t.hills@warwick.ac.uk.
Or you can contact Anna Blackaby, University of Warwick press officer, on 44-2476-575910 or 44-7785-433155 or a.blackaby@warwick.ac.uk
The DOI for this paper is 10.1177/0963721411418300Inspired by what I learned and saw at the Emerging Languages Camp, I’ve started working on Magpie again. It’s more or less been dormant while I figured out what kind of language I wanted it to be.
One big change is that Magpie Redux is going to be object-oriented where the original Magpie was procedural. Magpie was an experiment to see if a procedural language can be as nice to use as an OOP one if you give it memory management and a decent type system. For my purposes, the answer was that it’s not too bad, but objects are really nice to have.
So I started working on a fresh Magpie interpreter in Java that’s class-based and dynamically-typed. (As a nice bonus, Magpie going forward won’t be as tied to the MS stack as the old C# one is.) This post is about one implementation detail I think is kind of interesting: even though Magpie-the-language is class-based, under the hood, the interpreter uses prototypes.
What’s in a Class?
Before we get too far, let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. In Magpie, all objects are instances of a class. The class determines what methods an object has. The pseudocode for invoking a method is:
invoke ( obj, methodName, arg ) class = obj.getClass method = class.findMethod ( methodName ) method.invoke ( obj, arg ) end
Under the hood then, a class is a bag of methods, something like:
class ClassObj { Map < String, Method > methods ; }
And an object is just a reference to its class (and some data, but we won’t worry about that here):
class Obj { ClassObj theClass ; }
However, there are actually two kinds of methods. There are regular instance methods, like we’ve seen and “static” or “class” methods that you invoke directly on the class. These include things like constructors (which are like Ruby’s new methods). For example:
def foo = Foo.new // call a class method on Foo foo.toString // call an instance method on a Foo
So our class object really needs two dictionaries, one for class and one for instance methods:
class ClassObj { Map < String, Method > classMethods ; Map < String, Method > instanceMethods ; }
It also ends up needing to duplicate the API for using them: separate methods for defining a method, looking one up, invoking one, etc. I hate redundancy so this rubbed me the wrong way.
Split-aparts
Instead of having a single class object that does two things, I thought why not split that up into two separate objects? One represents the class itself and has the static or class methods like constructors. The other represents the set of methods you can call on an instance of the class.
My ClassObj type disappeared, to just be:
class Obj { Map < String, Method > methods ; }
The only missing piece was that an instance of some object needed to have a reference to the other object that contains its methods, like so:
class Obj { Obj parent ; Map < String, Method > methods ; }
Now our pseudo-code for invoking a method is:
invoke ( obj, methodName, arg ) thisObj = obj loop method = thisObj.findMethod ( methodName ) if method!= null then return method.invoke ( obj, arg ) end // walk up the parent chain thisObj = obj.parent end end
You’ll note that this pseudocode handles both instance and class methods. With instance methods, obj will be the class object itself (since classes are first-class objects) and it will find the method and immediately invoke it.
With instance methods, the object’s parent will be the special object that holds all of the instance methods. So we’ll fail to find the method on the object itself, walk up to its parent, find it and be done.
Familiar?
This started to look pretty familiar. I had an object that represented a class, and another object that represented the methods all objects of that class have in common. There’s a name for that second object: a prototype. In the name of getting rid of duplicate code, I basically stumbled backwards onto the same type system that Javascript and Finch use.
The interesting part is that this is hidden completely from the user. Magpie code is still written using classes and instances. If you have this in Magpie:
class Foo def sayHi () print "hi" end def a = Foo.new def b = Foo.new a.sayHi b.sayHi
At runtime, the interpreter will build this object hierarchy:
Every box represents an object and is of the same Java class in the interpreter ( Obj ). Objects a and b both have Foo proto as their parent, which is the prototype object holding the instance methods. The class methods like new are held in a separate object Foo class representing the class itself and bound to the variable Foo.
The class and proto objects don’t have each other as parents because they aren’t directly related (i.e. there’s no “is-a” relationship between them). Instead, the class stores a reference to the prototype in a “proto” field so that it can find it when it needs to create new instances. Conversely, the prototype stores a reference to the class so that it can find it when you ask an instance what its class is.
Doing things this way let me simplify a lot of the underlying code while still having the convenience of classes at the user level. This is the best of both worlds: prototypes are easier for the language implementer to code and classes are easier for the user to use.
Of course, I still have a ton of work to do before Magpie is anywhere near usable again and this may all be nullified by something I run into along the way, but so far it seems to be working.School District police department replaces chief
The Clark County School District named Deputy Chief James Ketsaa as acting chief of the school district police department last week, officials confirmed Monday.
Ketsaa is a former New York firefighter and 20-year veteran of the department, according to the district's website. He replaced former police chief Filiberto Arroyo, who was appointed to the position in February 2008.
School District officials wouldn't comment on why the decision was made to replace Arroyo. KLAS Channel 8 is reporting Arroyo has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an internal investigation into an off-campus 2009 party – attended by CCSD police officers – at which alcohol was served to minors.
"CCSD respects the privacy of our valued employees and abides by a long-standing policy not to discuss personnel matters," said chief communications officer Amanda Fulkerson. "Parents should be assured that safety of our students is a top priority of CCSD and any personnel matters will not impact ongoing safety programs."Without me realizing until just now, the San Diego Chargers have released a list of their 2012 opponents for the regular season. The scheduling of games has yet to be released, but we at least now know who the Bolts will match up against. Here we go:
Home Games
Ron Rivera and Rob Chudzinski return to San Diego along with a whole host of Chargers cast-offs. That should be a fun game. Playing the Falcons away from their dome is a good thing, as is forcing the Ravens and Bengals to travel cross-country.
After the jump, we'll look at the away games and figure out just how tough this schedule is in relation to the rest of the NFL.
Away Games
Doesn't it seem like we play the Steelers in Pittsburgh and the Jets in New Jersey every year?
None of these scare me all that much, with the possible exception of the Saints in the Superdome. Fingers crossed that Drew Brees sits out the first few games of the season and misses that matchup. Tampa Bay is still very beatable, even with Vincent Jackson. The Browns still are not very good. As long as the Chargers can avoid Cleveland, Pittsburgh and New Jersey in the month of December, this should be a pretty easy schedule. But how does it match up?
According to Blogging the Boys, who do all the heavy-lifting for us, the Chargers have the 6th toughest schedule according to the 2011 win % of the teams they face. The good news is that the teams they have to travel to face finished.500% last season while the teams that come to San Diego finished with a.539% winning percentage. Facing tougher teams at home is always preferred.
However, since the AFC West had such a terrible point differential last year, the Chargers actually have the easiest schedule in the league according to that metric. The 2012 Chargers opponents were outscored by 368 points in 2011.
All in all, not a terrible schedule. The key to the Chargers making the playoffs, as it is for every team, will be winning games against their own division. If they can finish with a winning record against the Chiefs, Broncos and Raiders, that makes things significantly easier.Strong female film characters came into their own as feminism did, toward the end of the 20th century. They started in exploitation flicks—low-budget and sensationalist genre movies which were produced with no intention of meeting critical standards, let alone creating a lasting legacy. The Final Girls of horror, the ultraviolent survivors in rape revenge flicks like Ms. 45, or Pam Grier, whose roles in Coffy and Foxy Brown made her the first real female action star: Their artistic legitimacy was questioned, but they were what people needed to see.
Those movies were based on simple math: If watching violence was fun, and watching pretty girls was fun, then pretty violent girls would be fun squared. But the combination was resonant; in the late '70s and early '80s, people were simply ready to see women taking charge, and claiming the same right to plow through enemies that their fictional male counterparts had always enjoyed.
The idea of the woman as action star permeated the culture; soon enough, big- budget movies joined in. James Cameron gave us Sarah Connor in The Terminator, and perhaps the best version of the iconic Ellen Ripley in Aliens. Both of these women are defined around motherhood. But they're strong, smart, and very capable of dispatching killer robots or aliens when duty calls. These women, while carefully constructed to be "feminine" enough to appease a public that liked its gender roles predictable, were decisively not girly; their wardrobes were unisex, their style was military, and one could not imagine them shopping for anything but a more effective flame-thrower. In a way, they were '80s career women—succeeding at a man's game, by men's rules. They just happened to be wearing robotic exoskeletons instead of suits with shoulder pads and built-in bow ties.
And then, we hit the '90s, and the third wave of feminism, and the genre exploded. Movies, television, and even video games were stuffed with action girls. Sarah Connor came back, with more muscles. Ellen Ripley came back, and shaved her head. The new recruits were often disposable or goofy—Lara Croft didn't make it into a movie until 2000, but her omnipresent Tomb Raiding started to grate well before that; those who remember the Tank Girl movie regret it—but at least they weren't rare. And some of them were genuine winners: Lo and behold, there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the unapologetically perky, fashionable blonde cheerleader who could fight back the very powers of Hell.
So why have we ended up here? Why Sucker Punch? Well: Movies have to make money. And risks don't sell. After the '90s came the backlash; Strong Women survived, but they no longer got the attention they once did. In the absence of a widespread enthusiasm for Girly Power, misogyny—as always—crept back in.
The Strong Woman Action Heroine may have resonance for women, but she was always based on math: If watching violence is fun, and watching pretty girls is fun, then pretty violent girls will be fun squared. Filmmakers just reverted to that reliable formula. Sure, Quentin Tarantino got to make Kill Bill; he's Quentin Tarantino. But as for the rest of it, we got a slew of interchangeable Ultraviolets and Underworlds with interchangeable latex-and-leather clad heroines, and a revivified Charlie's Angels franchise, for those who preferred their action in a bikini. You could blame the shift on Lara Croft's skin-tight outfits, Tarantino's fetishistic recreations of the exploitation flicks from which female action heroines emerged, or even Buffy and her girl-power miniskirts. But at least two of those three things had redeeming value. And redeeming value is expendable, if you assume your audience would be satisfied with mini-skirts and exploitation.- Roman Reigns appeared on Good Day New York this morning to promote |
ody. Careers mentioned include the usual grunge band (so what if music is now free--I'm gonna be a rock star!), wallpaper designer, intern at a modeling agency and party organizer. Apparently the trustafarian youth of America (or at least of New York City) have degenerated to the point that they need to hire a pal to organize their parties. Or maybe they're just too busy... but doing what?
And can organizing a few parties for buds really net out the $2,500 per month you need to pay $1,500 rent and pursue your career designing wallpaper while also "having fun"? Somehow I doubt it.
The U.S. runs a surplus in agricultural products, aircraft, software--and precious little else. On the other side of the ledger, we import hundreds of billions of dollars of goods. Little things like oil (2/3 of what we consume is imported).
The sad truth is the chief export of the U.S. is the simulacrum "value" of the U.S. dollar: we ship you this worthless paper and you ship us actual stuff. The con has worked brilliantly for 25 years, only now the marks (exporters) are slowly waking up to the realization the paper they took is, well, paper--and a "promise" that the U.S. won't depreciate the paper to zero too quickly.
Yeah--and the check's in the mail, we promise.
The boldness and longevity of this con still amazes me. Yes, I understand that exporters had no choice; there was literally nobody else to sell to except the magical-thinking-lovin' U.S. consumer. So taking the paper con (dollars) was still slightly more attractive than the alternative: economic decay and domestic insurrection.
Various cheerleaders in the mainstream media hawked America's vaunted surplus in services as the "way we're gonna balance the trade deficit." Nice idea, but it turned out much of that supposed surplus was just a higher-level con: so-called "financial services" of the innovatively fraudulent sort which have now cost the rest of the world trillions of dollars in losses.
An economy with little surplus in goods and services has no foundation. The con worked for 25 golden years. Now we as a nation will soon find the marks have finally grown weary of the dollar con. Soon they will demand a lot more dollars for the goods they ship, or they will demand payment in other currencies or in gold. One way or the other, the marks are moving away from the shell-game table where they have lost trillions, and the dollar will lose half its value.
When the dollar loses half its value, then oil will double in price for those of us paid in dollars. And everything else which is imported will also double in price.
How much grunge music, wallpaper designs, social networking marketing and event planning can we export and sell at a profit? Would you part with a barrel of oil for any of the above? Maybe for a bushel of wheat--especially if the "street" is hungry and a mob is forming.
But growing food has a funny little characteristic: it's bloody hard work.Ditto making anything you can exchange for something of tangible value. As for services: the only services of measurable value are those which enhance, repair or enable productive output which can be traded for tangible goods. Designing wallpaper and planning parties don't cut it.
I don't mean to pound on those of you fortunate enough to make a living planning events or designing wallpaper patterns; great gigs if you can get them. I am the first to admit this blog is not exactly an exportable good.... (maybe an exportable bad....) My point is simply that productive assets and labor will be scarce/in demand while superfluous services will be in oversupply/not in demand. Thus everyone hoping to make a living providing superfluous/frivolous services would be prudent to have a Plan B trade/craft/service.
I am not going to trade the hours spent repairing a chicken coop (food production) or solar-water heater (energy capture/production) for some trust-baby's ability to organize a party or program an iPod. Amazingly, perhaps, I can manage the former on my own (it's called potluck) and have zero need for the latter service. I can also figure out the worthlessness of social networking on my own as well.
Examples of things for which there will probably be demand globally:
-- flexible thin-film photovoltaic cells which can be installed on any surface
-- thin-film polymers which when placed on windows cut heat loss dramatically
-- inexpensive solar ovens
-- homebrew beer
-- software which simplifies and improves network security
A powerful concept, scarcity; where there is no scarcity, there is little value. Cash and net income will be scarce, while there will be few scarcities in services of any kind. That's what happens when a top-level economy crashes back down to its foundations.
Here are a few titles of note on food/diet:
It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
Diet for a Small Planet
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
And some classics in case you missed them:
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler
The Future of Life E.O. Wilson
On Peak Oil:
Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
On chemical/toxins overload:
Our Stolen Future: How We Are Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival
On the demographic time bomb about to explode:
Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future
The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future
On collapse of advanced civilization:
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond)
The Collapse of Complex Societies
A realistic appraisal of alternative energy:
Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air
Our previous lists of hot reading and viewing can be found at Books and Films.
Of Two Minds is now available via Kindle: Of Two Minds blog-Kindle
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Thank you, Cheryl A. ($100), for your unparalleled contributions of money, ideas, and aid to this site. I am greatly honored by your support and readership.Note from James:
Although, I always type or transcribe exactly what is channeled, I hesitated to put this date (deadline) on the Internet as these things have thus far shown to seldom come true. However, it would seem that at some point, things will have to begin in earnest and this is the first time my sources have given an exact date, so here it is. Also, I am aware that Ashtar also gave the same date of November 4th. We will know shortly if this is accurate.
One Who Serves:
Greetings. Good to be here with you in this way, so enjoying these times that we can be here with you and be of service in any way that we can, for certainly that is what we are called, we are The One Who Serves. And, that is what we do, we enjoy it so much when we can be this way with you, but understand that very shortly many of you, if not all of you and then others that read these words after this, will be experiencing us in a more personal way because as you know there is that which is called the ascension process that is upon you now in a very short time. You will be experiencing these things that have been talked about and have been spoken of through many different sources and in many different ways. You will have experiences that are beyond your mind, what you say will blow your mind. You will have these experiences and they will be wonderful but you have no idea yet of what is to come, what it is going to be like. Several of you do here but others do not and you will experience much that you have been preparing for eons of time. Now, I will release here for another. Sananda willl speak with you and then I will be back, ok.
Sananda:
I am Sananda, and I come to be with you at this time, in this momentous occasion, this time that is fast approaching now, times you have been waiting for, for a very long time. For long, long time ago and yes in a galaxy far, far, far away, you experienced what is called a conclave. Many of you were there if not all of you in this room and many others that will read these words, were there at that time with me and many others who were ready to experience a new evolution on this planet for the earth. Earth was calling out, earth was calling out in dyer need, that there needed to be a change, a transformation on the earth and in the earth, and those people that were there at that time, those of you that were there, you experienced a tremendous love, a love that was unbridled at that time. You were in a direct connection with the God Source. If you could remember back to this time as I am speaking these words, you will know and understand that which I speak of here. For, it was a grand time, a grand reunion, a grand union of people coming together to be of service, for that was the only thing that mattered at that time, was to be of service and you knew you were going to come to be of service to the earth and to the people of the earth. But, understand that at time many of you were called to this conclave but very few were chosen. You had to be chosen to be a part of this, you had to be of the Elect and yes it is the same as the Elect from your bible. They are one and the same. You are the Elect, you are the ones who came to be a part of this expression of the earth, to bring her out of the dark ages and into the ages of light and you each one, knew you had a tremendous up hill battle you might say.
From the very beginning you knew that is was going to be difficult times, you knew you were going to have tremendous travails to pass through and you knew all along that your path would be very difficult to follow at times. But you also knew that there would be those who would mentor to you, those who would be within you, those who would be within earshot of you where you could reach out and speak to them and ask them for their guidance and they would lead you on and guide you. They would give you that little bit of inspiration that was needed to carry on when it was time for that. Know and understand, that at this time and at this place and at this moment, you have reached the end of those travails, You have reached the culmination of all that you came here to do, for certainly these are the end time that have been spoken of in the bible. These are those times when you have prepared to be a part of the new expression on the earth. It was said a long time ago, by myself as Jeshua, that there would be a new heaven and a new earth, and yes that time is now. There will be a new earth, there will be a new heaven on earth, and you will be a part of that, each one of you, to be a part of this new expression, this new love that will cascade across the entire planet and it is already doing so because as we look from our vantage point we see millions of flickers of light everywhere and those lights are becoming brighter and brighter and they are spreading through the darkness that has once been there but is now fast diminishing.
So understand that those of you that came here with me in that time long ago, those of you are ready now to move and take the next step, those things that you have been brought here for, that you brought yourself here for. You are being prepared now to go into action, to go about your mission that you have been called here for. Several of you here have already been on your mission, have already been working on it, and others of you will be called very shortly to assume your position in this mission that you have taken on. Do understand as you continue this process, as you continue this journey, you have all the help from the celestial heavens that you could possibly ask for. We are all here to assist you, no one will be left behind, understand that. For as the times come very shortly, you will be experiencing that which is the Ascension process, that which has been spoken of in many different realms, from many different sources you will experience that very shortly and it will be different for all of you. All of you will have your own experience of this. Several of you have already been having those experiences and you will fast be approaching that which is the next experience for yourselves. That is my message but also understand that very shortly, very shortly indeed there is an event that is coming a special series of events that will be a part of this expression and you will each be a part of that and know it is very soon, very soon indeed because it is before your fourth of November. Remember that date, for many things are going to be changing before that and even very shortly now. When those times come, when you begin to see those changes developing you will understand that which we are speaking of here. That is my message, I am Sananda, my peace and love be with all of you.
The One Who Serves:
Greetings to you once again, One Who Serves back with you. We will not have any message here for that is already been given Are there any questions. Would there be any questions that you would have at this time, pertaining especially to that which has already been given here?
“I have a question. Sananda said November 4th, did he mean that there would be an event on November 4th or the culmination”?
Or before yes.
“So the understanding of the events that would occur during the time before November 4th would be fully culminated on November 4th and then we would understand what was happening”?
Yes, it would be in terms of many will be looking at this now, many that are not in this group that you find yourself in now but in many other groups, in mainstream you might say, and for the first time, they will take a look at this and might say ‘Oh my god what is happening here what is occurring?’ (Laughter) And you, those of you the lightworkers, will be on your mission at that point, if you are not already. And, you will know and understand, what you are to do, what you are about here. That will be completely obvious to you at that time, what you are to do when the time arises. For understand that times are growing very short in this process, for on the December 21stof this year 2012 there is a mass ascension coming and you are all to be a part of it, if you aren’t already by that time.
“I Have one more question”. If each one would experience an individual ascension process and have a different outcome how could we better prepare that we would have the best outcome that we could have”?
That is very simple my dear sister, be in love at all times. Be in love, love with yourself, yes that certainly, but in love with all around you, everything, the birds, the plants, even the rocks, you see? For all is consciousness, find yourself expressing your love for all around you and within you and then you will have the greatest expression the greatest experience you will have when the time comes. And as was said earlier another time, that you would go with the flow. This is very important. Go with the flow at all times, let go, stop the resistance. The resistance creates much anguish in your life, let it go. What is the saying from the old Beatles song, “Let it Be,” go with the flow, let the current take you wherever it will. For understand that the current is God, the God Source moving through you and it will take you as it will. But when you try to swim against the currents, how far do you get? You see, let it take you and experience love all around you, for that will certainly propel you into the higher dimensional frequencies. Does this answer your question Joanna?
“Thank you yes”
Other question here.
“Yes I have a question. Some people are talking about the three days of darkness. Can you connect it with what’s supposed to happen in November to that day?”
No, not before that but understand that the three days of darkness you are speaking of was metaphorically. It was not to be a three days of darkness directly. That was in the old times, that was the prophets of old times that talked about this. But understand that was also another time line, that was a time line where there were going to be catastrophes and many things like earthquakes and volcanoes and many things destroying much upon the planet, but that is the old timeline. You are in the new timeline now, you are in the timeline of ascension, you see? And many have tried to block this timeline from your understanding but they cannot and have not and cannot do that. So the three days of darkness is not anymore here now. That is not to say you will not experience a little bit of darkness within yourself. You will have that experience but it does not have to be anything in terms of negative expression, it can be very positive because you will be finding yourself at a time in what is called a void and that can be a term of darkness but it is a good darkness you see? Other questions here?
“In my situation I’ve lived with someone that’s very much into fear of what’s going on with the government and all that stuff, how can I best balance myself from that energy and be able to serve her and myself at the same time because I find myself just wanting to block and protect myself”.
Yes, and that is number one for you, that is important for you, to block out all negativity, all fear, all of these things for yourself. As to the other, it is good to love that person as much as you can, but do not get caught up in their expression of fear and all of these things, you see? There are many that will experience this fear in this society, in these cultures, in the world. They will experience that and that will be their expression their understanding of the dangers as the ascension process moves closer and closer. But you yourselves, who know and understand these processes, you do not have to be a part of that. You can be a part of the love expression, just sail through the whole experience you see? If you go with the current and not against it, you will have a grand experience through out it all. But there will be many who are experiencing fear mongering and all of these things that have been set up previously by the powers that be here on the earth, but that is to be over. Does this answer your question?
“Yes, thank you”.
Would there be further questions here? Very good energies here extremely good we could go all night here but we won’t. (Laughter)
“Do you have a message from Ashtar”?
Ashtar, my brother yes. He also has said the same thing that was given by the Sananda. He has said also that there are changes coming directly in terms of even time period here. But understand that we are very reluctant to give time frames because in times past when times have been given these have not been met, but also understand that there are points of no return, there are points where these things are written in stone, so there is going to be great change coming very shortly here and the Ashtar himself is a part of this great change, as is Sananda and many, many others. For many of us, all of us have been waiting for this time period for a long time because you see, as you ascend,you will be moving into our place and we can move further on you see? So as you are of service to us, we are of service to you. It is a synchronicity, a relationship rather, you see? Does this answer your question?
“Yes”. Is there an opportunity to see our star brothers come to Phoenix or some place in Arizona?”
Are you talking about your galactic family? Yes, certainly you will be experiencing that in many different ways and many of you in this room and again many who read these words, you will be experiencing incredible times here. You will be reuniting with old friends and family from long ago that you have forgotten here in your three dimensional understanding at this time, but you will be reuniting with many of them. And many of you here will be on ships and experiencing those levels of expression that you once had at that time, and there are many who are ready and waiting to welcome you with open arms, and as has been said before by other sources, there is a great ceremony planned, great ceremony indeed to welcome you back to the higher dimensions once again out of your duality. It;s been a tough road, has it not? (Laughter) Aren’t you ready to get out of this?
“The earth herself, will she not be present in third dimesion anymore?”
There will be time, an expression of time here, where there will be a three dimensional earth and the higher dimensional earth at the same time in terms of those who go on early in the ascension process will be coming back to assist those who lag behind. You might say, in terms of a race, if you were to be in a marathon race, there are those who jump out to the front and make it all the way in high speed and they are the ones who finish first, you see? There will be those of you who will do that. Then there will be those of you, who will kind of chug along but they will finish the race, they will come after those that move into the forefront. And there will still be those who will at times stop and walk and at the last second, at the last moment when they can, they will be ready to kick down the door of ascension and move into that because they do not want to be left behind you see? But it is important for those who do not even know about ascension and that is many, many people here, do not even know what ascension is, no idea except in terms that which Jeshua went through, had to die on the cross and then to ascend in that way. But they have no idea that it is not necessary to die anymore to have this expression, you see?
“So the earth will remain in the third dimension”?
There will be a portion of it, yes that will, but it will not for long. It is only enough to allow the others to move forward. Those that are not ready to move forward and there will be those who have not chosen either through their soul contracts or through their conscious knowing self at this time, they will choose to remain in three dimension you see, and they will be acclimated into a new understanding a new expression for themselves in a sense a new planet you might say.
“So whats the difference between those that stay behind and those that choos to go forward, whats the main difference?”
The main difference is that they will be at a higher frequency vibration they will be experiencing what you call nirvana, you see. And you will be out of that which is the duality expression that you are used to here, which you have been doing for many lifetimes here. Anything further here?
“Yes, is an encounter with the galactic family is that ascension portion or is that just a welcome or a visit or encounter of our galactic family?”
Are you speaking in terms of going up on ships and that is your ascension? That is not correct. You will not be beamed up on ship and that type of thing and that is your ascension. You see, you must ascend first, you must have a higher frequency vibration to then be with your galactic family. But you who are asking this question, certainly that is your expression, that is what you come from and that is what you will be returning to with your galactic family.
“Well I’ve had experiences before with the fourth dimension, but now in the three dimension, is it going to take me to fifth dimension, the ascension?”
Yes the ascension process is to move from the 3rd dimension to the 4th and 5th dimensional frequencies but understand that those that do go on in experiencing this ascension process, there will be times when they will be drifting back and forth you see? They will go on and experience higher frequencies and at times be pulled back because the body tends to pull you back the sense of that which you know will tend to pull you back a little bit but be ready to let go. This is why we say, let go, be with the current be in love and then you will experience all you want to hear you see.
“What will happen with our bodies, our three dimensional bodies?”
Your three dimensional bodies will be converting or changing into a more crystalline body to be able to take the light in more fully. The more light that you can take in the higher your frequency vibration moves. Is this understood?
“Uh sounds really difficult”.
You will not be doing it in terms of a classroom and you have to follow the teacher, it is not that type of thing, and it cannot be done wrong. There is no wrong or right here, that is why we say go with the flow. Your Higher Self, your Higher God Self knows how to do this process and there is a portion of you that is part of that, of course and you have done this process before. You see, each one of you here in this room, or you would not be here, you have each ascended previously in other time and many of you are what are called the system busters. You have gone through time after time, lifetime after lifetime, experience after experience, planet after planet, system after system, and you have gone into those systems and changed things and you are doing it again. Here now, the question will come, when the time comes, do you want to do it again and many of you now would say, “Hell No” (Laughter) you see, not just “No” but “Hell no” not doing this again, time to move on and you certainly have earned that right to do so. Anything further here?
“ I have a quick question in reference to November 4th. I don’t see anything in the mainstream”.
And that is a good thing.
“Is that going to matter, as far as what I hear about the changes? Will we still get word about what is happening?
Yes, because you will not be able to not know it. It will not be possible to not know what is happening. Anything further here? Then we will release the channel. Understand now as you continue on in your journey, in your experience, in your expression of love, find more and more that expression within yourself because that is what is going to catapault you onward. Find it within your heart, open your hearts to the light and let that light flow in and you will have a grand experience and we will be here waiting for you when you come, when you cross the threshold. Shantee, Peace be with you. Be the ONE.
Channeled by James McConnell
www.meetup.com/ancient-awakenings
Article may be reproduced in its entirety if authorship and authors website is clearly statedEasy 1 Bowl Vegan Gluten-Free Cinnamon Cake made with just 8 ingredients (+ salt) that is perfectly sweet, moist and topped with an incredible cinnamon caramel glaze! Dairy-free and oil-free!
Ahhhh, cake! It’s one of my favorite things to create. Borderline, obsession. This cake and glaze….I could not stop running back to the kitchen for more bites. Cinnamon is my #1 favorite flavor and this entire cake is loaded with it!
I love creating cakes that everybody can enjoy. And since I create cakes that are all vegan, mostly gluten-free and oil-free, most everybody can! To top if off, they are 8 ingredients only!
My husband declared this cake a huge win. This is coming from a guy who hates to eat cake. He wanted seconds. It’s just heaven in a bite.
HOW TO MAKE A VEGAN BUNDT CAKE
Can you believe it? Only 8 ingredients for this entire cake, including the glaze! Not only is this cake easy, but it’s vegan, gluten-free AND oil-free! You’ll need the following for this amazing Vegan Gluten-free Cinnamon Caramel Bundt Cake:
Full-fat canned coconut milk
Ground flaxseed
Brown rice flour
Potato starch
Tapioca starch
Ground cinnamon
Baking powder
Light brown sugar
For this post, I’m excited to say I was asked by Sprouts again to create a very special dessert for their special Thanksgiving event, Sprouts Virtual Friendsgiving! It’s a large event to get us all ready for the holidays.
There is just 11 bloggers and they asked me specifically to be the one to bring the vegan dessert to the table! Of course, I was thrilled. I love dessert and I wanted to create a holiday-worthy cake and hopefully, I’ve done that. This event supports the Thanksgiving sale with Hain Celestial Products. They are the American Food Company for numerous brands, including Arrowhead Mills, Simply Organic, Sunspire, Alba, Dream, etc. For this event, I was sent some amazing products from them.
Y’all know I’m a huge fan of tapioca starch in my baked goods, so of course I knew I would use this item, too.
They sent me a whole box of products, but since I knew I wanted a cinnamon cake, I was so happy to see the cinnamon in the box. I buy Simply Organic spices all the time, they are so fresh and fragrant.
THE PERFECT VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE BUNDT CAKE
I have to say, this Cinnamon Caramel Bundt Cake is dynamite in all areas. It is really rich in cinnamon flavor and gets an amazing depth of sweetness and flavor by using light brown sugar. I tried it with just regular coconut sugar and sorry, folks, it doesn’t cut it, as coconut sugar is a very dry sugar and this cake, being oil-free, nut-free and fruit-free, it needs moisture. It was too dry with plain coconut sugar. Using full-fat coconut milk, a good dose of flaxseed and light brown sugar did the job, amazingly. The brown sugar has molasses in it, which contributes hugely to the moist and amazing flavor. I make my own homemade brown sugar blend from coconut sugar too, if you prefer to not use regular brown sugar.
I tried really hard to create this holiday cake nut-free. Nearly killed me, but I did it, lol. I like to use almond flour a lot, but finally nailed this recipe without it! Hope all you nut-free peeps appreciate it. There was no getting around the no-coconut in addition to nut-free though. I needed a good amount of fat so it wouldn’t be dry as a hockey puck. Good thing though, is there is NO coconut flavor. It is completely masked by everything else going on in the cake.
Do you want to know how to ensure you have a good quality cinnamon? Taste a bit on your finger…it should taste very warm and sweet and fresh. Cheap or old cinnamon doesn’t have any sweetness and doesn’t taste very good.
Can we just talk about this Sticky Cinnamon Caramel Glaze for a bit? HEAVEN. It is what completes the cake. The cake is good on it’s own, but it’s a very simple cake and the glaze is what always completes a bundt cake like this. It just doesn’t have the same effect without it.
Also, as beautiful as this bundt pan is, I have to admit, I wasn’t a real fan of how it baked up in it, versus a more dome-shaped bundt pan. It just doesn’t cook really even, especially when dealing with vegan and gluten-free. So, I’d recommend a more rounded dome bundt pan.
Hope you all love this Vegan Gluten-free and Oil-free Cinnamon Caramel Bundt Cake!
For this recipe, I used this bundt pan for this beautiful design.
Guess what friends?? I tested THREE versions for you all, so there is something for everybody! See the options below on the recipe!
Thank you to Sprouts for sponsoring this post!
[mpprecipe-recipe:1228]The fundamental problem facing oil markets at present it this: while present supplies are sufficient to meet present weak demand, these sources of production face rapid decline. The current low oil prices are not sufficient to support the long term investment in future supplies, conservation, and consumption efficiency that will be necessary to mitigate the impact of this decline. Because of the time-lag between a sufficient price signal and oil reaching the market (or demand being reduced), and because of the impact of the recent price collapse on producer psychology, volatility will rapidly incrase as the market's price signal must make increasingly exaggerated moves to bring supply and demand into equillibrium.
I previously examined the interface between peaking oil supplies and oil price volatility as a predator-prey system. With the rapid drop in oil prices, it’s time to add another wrinkle to that story: widespread acceptance (psychosis?) about the stability of high oil prices acted as a damper on oil price volatility. Now that a collapse in oil prices is more than a mere theory, oil markets are poised for a long-term increase in price volatility.
Without ongoing investment to support present production levels, production decline rates will accelerate
There are two key issues here:
1) The market’s price signals react over much shorter time-spans than new supplies or investments in conservation or efficiency can be brought to market. Depending on the specifics, it can take anywhere from 2 to 10+ years to bring a new oil-field into full production. Therefore, even when oil was at $147/barrel, oil producers couldn’t immediately realize profits from oil that would only cost $100/barrel to produce. The same is true with many efficiency and conservation measures—while the most elastic demand (e.g. Summer driving vacations) can be reduced rapidly, other conservation and efficiency efforts take much longer. Electrified rail takes years to fund and build out, and the gradual upgrade of the fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet (or the replacement with electric vehicles) requires years of consistently high fuel prices or efficiency regulations that generally don’t take effect until several years in the future.
2) Our recent market experience—a rapid crash in prices—undermines efforts at long-term investments in supplies. At $150/barrel, oil companies were willing to invest billions in new projects that, several years in the future, would bring production on line at a cost of $50, $60, or even $80/barrel. Because of the time-value of money, and because our energy futures markets are incapable of economically hedging entire oil megaprojects a decade or more into the future, oil companies needed to leave a large price cushion. $150/barrel oil did not justify a ten-year lead time to produce oil that would cost $140/barrel, even under the assumption that oil would remain at $150/barrel. This cushion shrank some during the (relatively) steady increase in oil prices from 2001 – 2008, and oil companies’ willingness and ability to finance these projects increased. But now that the price of oil has crashed from $150 to $40/barrel, the prospect of a sudden drop in price is more than a mere possibility.
The result of this will be long-lasting: if oil prices again reach $150/barrel, there will be much greater reluctance to invest in long-range projects to produce oil at even $50 or $60/barrel. Similarly, the cost and availability of financing such projects has been dramatically reduced by the credit crunch. The result is that the more aggressive producers—those with the least cash and greatest incentive to take risks—are the least able to finance such projects. Those with the greatest ability to undertake such projects—select oil majors and many national oil companies—are also the most conservative and least willing to risk embarking on long-term, expensive production projects.
Continually Increasing Price Volatility
The principle results of this time-lag and shift in producer-psychology is that price signals must become increasingly over-exaggerated to create the desired market effect. The level of interest and willingness to invest in oil production that was spurred by 2008’s $100+ oil prices will not be regained if oil again hits $100 or $150—it may be necessary for oil prices to hit $200, $250, or more to provide an adequate incentive for oil companies to invest in oil with a $50+ cost per barrel.
And, even when the price level necessary to spur sufficient investment is reached, the resulting production will not come on line immediately. Instead, it will take several more years to reach the market. During this time-lag period between sufficient price signal and new oil reaching the market (or new demand being destroyed), prices will continue to move and push this market signal. If oil at $100/barrel is sufficient to incentivise investment in oil production to meet then-current demand, the market will continue to push the price signal past $100/barrel, especially as geological depletion continues to grind and the incentives for geopolitical disruption continue to rise.
As a result of the price rise during this time-lag, more production investment decisions will be made, and more demand will be destroyed, than was actually necessary to reach an equilibrium point. The result will be an inevitable overcorrection and price crash, restarting the price cycle. With each successive boom and crash cycle, the market psychology will become increasingly resistant to a given move in the price-signal, and the degree to which the price signal must move to create an equivalent market effect will increase. This will result in continually increasing price volatility as the market swings wildly to reconcile the ever moving targets with production and demand.
A Flubber Cobweb
The time-lag between market and fundamentals is exacerbated by inadequate futures markets and our own psychology. On a general level, this is a common process in economics, described by the cobweb model:
This model shows a supply/demand spiral characteristic of a market searching for equilibrium in a steady-state environment—it is NOT characteristic of oil prices in a post-peak environment. Rather, once oil production has peaked, the spiral will work in the opposite direction with increasingly divergent P and Q brackets.
Under peak oil theory, Q must gerally decline, even if there is significant noise present. From a civilizational-perspective, I think there will be a great deal of information carried by what happens to P as Q approaches zero: If P1 and P3 diverge or generally trend higher as Q approaches zero, this may show a sign of fundamental economic strength in the face of |
to prevent anticompetitive practices in their incipiency. That regime started with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the first Federal law outlawing practices considered harmful to consumers (monopolies, cartels, and trusts). The Clayton Act specified particular prohibited conduct, the three-level enforcement scheme, the exemptions, and the remedial measures.
Like the Sherman Act, much of the substance of the Clayton Act has been developed and animated by the U.S. courts, particularly the Supreme Court.
Background [ edit ]
Since the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, courts in the United States had interpreted the law on cartels as applying against trade unions. This had created a problem for workers, who needed to organize to balance the equal bargaining power against their employers. The Sherman Act had also triggered the largest wave of mergers in US history, as businesses realized that instead of creating a cartel they could simply fuse into a single corporation, and have all the benefits of market power that a cartel could bring. At the end of the Taft administration, and the start of the Woodrow Wilson administration, a Commission on Industrial Relations was established. During its proceedings, and in anticipation of its first report on October 23, 1914, legislation was introduced by Alabama Democrat Henry De Lamar Clayton Jr. in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Clayton Act passed by a vote of 277 to 54 on June 5, 1914. Though the Senate passed its own version on September 2, 1914, by a vote of 46–16, the final version of the law (written after deliberation between Senate and the House), did not pass the Senate until October 5 and the House until October 8 of the next year.
Contents [ edit ]
The Clayton Act made both substantive and procedural modifications to federal antitrust law. Substantively, the act seeks to capture anticompetitive practices in their incipiency by prohibiting particular types of conduct, not deemed in the best interest of a competitive market. There are 4 sections of the bill that proposed substantive changes in the antitrust laws by way of supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In those sections, the Act thoroughly discusses the following four principles of economic trade and business:
Comparisons to other acts [ edit ]
Unilateral price discrimination is clearly outside the reach of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which only extended to "concerted activities" (agreements). Exclusive dealing, tying, and mergers are all agreements, and theoretically, within the reach of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Likewise, mergers that create monopolies would be actionable under Sherman Act Section 2.
Section 7 of the Clayton Act allows greater regulation of mergers than just Sherman Act Section 2, since it does not require a merger-to-monopoly before there is a violation. It allows the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to regulate all mergers, and gives the government discretion whether to give approval to a merger or not, which it still commonly does today. The government often employs the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) test for market concentration to determine whether the merger is presumptively anticompetitive; if the HHI level for a particular merger exceeds a certain level, the government will investigate further to determine its probable competitive impact.
Section 7 [ edit ]
Section 7 elaborates on specific and crucial concepts of the Clayton Act; "holding company" defined as "a company whose primary purpose is to hold stocks of other companies",[1] which the government saw as a "common and favorite method of promoting monopoly"[1] and a mere corporated form of the 'old fashioned' trust.
Another important factor to consider is the amendment passed in Congress on Section 7 of the Clayton Act in 1950. This original position of the US government on mergers and acquisitions was strengthened by the Celler-Kefauver amendments of 1950, so as to cover asset as well as stock acquisitions.
Pre-merger notification [ edit ]
Section 7a, 15 U.S.C. § 18a, requires that companies notify the Federal Trade Commission and the Assistant Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division of any contemplated mergers and acquisitions that meet or exceed certain thresholds. Pursuant to the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, section 7A(a)(2) requires the Federal Trade Commission to revise those thresholds annually, based on the change in gross national product, in accordance with Section 8(a)(5) and take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. (For example, see 74 FR 1687 and 16 C.F.R. 801.)
Section 8 [ edit ]
Section 8 of the Act refers to the prohibition of one person of serving as director of two or more corporations if the certain threshold values are met, which are required to be set by regulation of the Federal Trade Commission, revised annually based on the change in gross national product, pursuant to the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act. (For example, see 74 FR 1688.)
Other [ edit ]
Because the act singles out exclusive dealing and tying arrangements, one may assume they would be subject to heightened scrutiny, perhaps they would even be illegal per se. That remains true for tying, under the authority of Jefferson Parish Hospital District No. 2 v. Hyde. However, when exclusive dealings are challenged under Clayton-3 (or Sherman-1), they are treated under the rule of reason. Under the 'rule of reason', the conduct is only illegal, and the plaintiff can only prevail, upon proving to the court that the defendants are doing substantial economic harm.
Exemptions [ edit ]
An important difference between the Clayton Act and its predecessor, the Sherman Act, is that the Clayton Act contained safe harbors for union activities. Section 6 of the Act (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 17) exempts labor unions and agricultural organizations, saying "that the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce, and permit[ting] labor organizations to carry out their legitimate objective". Therefore, boycotts, peaceful strikes, peaceful picketing, and collective bargaining are not regulated by this statute. Injunctions could be used to settle labor disputes only when property damage was threatened.
The Supreme Court ruled in the 1922 case Federal Baseball Club v. National League that Major League Baseball was not "interstate commerce" and thus was not subject to federal antitrust law.
Enforcement [ edit ]
Procedurally, the Act empowers private parties injured by violations of the Act to sue for treble damages under Section 4 and injunctive relief under Section 16. The Supreme Court has expressly ruled that the "injunctive relief" clause in Section 16 includes the implied power to force defendants to divest assets.[2]
Under the Clayton Act, only civil suits could be brought to the court's attention and a provision "permits a suit in the federal courts for three times the actual damages caused by anything forbidden in the antitrust laws",[3] including court costs and attorney's fees.
The Act is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, which was also created and empowered during the Wilson Presidency by the Federal Trade Commission Act, and also the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
See also [ edit ]
a b Martin, David Dale, Mergers and the Clayton Act, University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959 ^ California v. American Stores Co., 495 U.S. 271 (1990). ^ Kintner; Joelson (1974). An International Antitrust Primer. New York: Macmillan. p. 20. ISBN 0-02-364380-3.
Further reading [ edit ]Product information:
S2716DG 27" 2560x1440 TN G-Sync 144Hz Gaming Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey
More links for "S2716DG 27" 2560x1440 TN G-Sync 144Hz Gaming Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey"
Serious gamers can discover unrivaled gameplay with a smooth and responsive view. The S2716DG is designed to provide an uncompromising gaming experience with sharp and undistorted moving images, thanks to NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology and the fastest refresh rate at 144Hz. Its swift 1ms response rate offers virtually no input lag. The Dell 27 Monitor is also packed with uncompromising performance features to further enhance gameplay, including:Features:- Nvidia’s G-SYNC support feature synchronizes GPU and monitor to minimize graphic distortions and screen tearing- Quad HD resolution of 2560 x 1440 with close to 2 times more onscreen details than Full HD- A full range of adjustability features, like tilt, pivot, swivel and height-adjustable stand allow for long hours of comfortable gameplay- A wide range of connectivity features, including DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 1.4, four USB 3.0 ports, USB 3.0 upstream, Audio line-out & Headphone-outSpecification:- Screen Size: 27" (68.47cm)- Pixel Pitch: 0.233mm- Resolution: 2560x1440 WQHD- Panel: TN- Response Time: 1ms- Refresh Rate: 144Hz- Brightness: 350cd/m- Contrast ratio: 1000:1- Colour: 16.7M (Real 8-Bit)- Connectivity: 1x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI (Display Cable and USB cables included)- USB 3.0 Hub- G-Sync Enabled- VESA: 100x100mm- Warranty: 3yr (On-Site with DELL)On May 10, 2005, Columbia Records and the WWE released You Can't See Me, the debut (and to date, only) album by John Cena. Cena, though it seems like a distant memory now, came to prominence and first gained his immense popularity by being a "white thug" who rapped disses to his opponents. He had previously released one track, "Basic Thuganomics," on the thoroughly terrible album WWE Originals, which featured wrestlers singing and rapping original songs.
You Can't See Me was a bonafide success. The album (which was actually by John Cena and Tha Trademarc, who is Cena's first cousin, Marc Predka) sold 143,000 copies in its first week and was eventually certified gold by the RIAA. It peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard 200 and at No. 3 on Billboard U.S. Rap Albums.
Now, nine years later, SB Nation has assembled a dream team of sportswriters to listen to this album and figure out whether the time is now. We have painstakingly gone through this landmarc landmark LP, track by track. Click below to begin your journey.
Tracks 1-4:
Tracks 5-8:
Tracks 9-12:
Tracks 13-17:The A-Z (sort-of) of stuff you’ll want to pack. It’s a long, hot summer, kids. Be prepared.
Anything you need to bathe. Except for privacy. You’re not going to see that again until you go home. Sorry. (Allegedly, you will feel lonely in the shower when you get home. Maybe it’s rumor. Maybe it’s true. You’ll know pretty quick.)
Bedding: You’re going to want an air mattress. Most people go through several. Pack a couple. Pack a few pillow cases. Be prepared for hard gym floors. And the desperate need for a clean sheet (or pillowcase). At least the pillowcases don’t take up much space (and a spritz of Febreze will make it seem new when it’s totally not).
Booze. But only if you are over age 21 or on staff. Use responsibly. And watch the dehydration. You’ve been in the sun all day, every day. Be careful.
Bug Spray. You’re on a field all the time. Mosquitos love people. Spray accordingly.
Caribiner Clips: These are “gold,” according to one pro. You never know when you need a caribiner clip. So pack some. (If you’re hyper cheap and pack scissors, one supposes you might make do with zip ties.)
Change (Spare): You will eventually need to do laundry. Pack some quarters.
Clothes: Okay, you’re not going to forget those.
Coffee Press and Coffee: If you love coffee (need coffee, and who doesn’t?), it can be difficult to come by. With a French press, all you need is some coffee grounds and hot water. 8 cups of delicious coffee can be yours, no standing in line or begging required. (PRO TIP: You can also make friends with the food truck staff. They will sometimes hook you up.)
Equipment: This includes your weapons, your flag, your horn, your drumsticks, your gloves, your music, your drill, your spare bottles of valve oil. You’re not going to forget these. So…
Febreze: You can’t begin to imagine how bad everything’s going to smell. And that’s just on Day 2.
Glade: Seriously. You stink. Your bus stinks. Your seat mate stinks. Everything smells bad.
Gold Bond Powder. Devil, thy name is ‘chafing.’
Hand Sanitizer: Because you don’t always have soap. Or water. And germs are everywhere. Google it.
Lysol: Have you smelled the bus? It stinks. Spritz it. Spritz it good.
Mobile Phone. And all Charging Supplies. Obviously.
Snacks: Swedish fish, candy bars, and beef jerky are popular choices, according to the corps veterans who participated in the research for this article. Pack some dried meat, some gummy/fruity, and some chocolate. And cheese flavored. You’re going to want snacks. Pack ’em.
Sun Care: You’re going to need max SPF, waterproof, sweat-proof. You’re maybe going to want zinc. You’re going to want lip balm with SPF. You’re going to be sunburned anyway (yes, tan person, you too). So pack aloe. It’s a long summer. Try not to end up in the hospital or with blisters covering your skin. Sunglasses? Yes.
Toilet Paper: You’re occasionally pee-ing into a Gatorade bottle. You’re peeing in over-crowded restrooms, strange cities, and bus bathrooms. You don’t want to sacrifice a sock. You don’t want to be without a spare roll of TP or two in your backpack. Save the socks. And your dignity.
Water Jug: Yeah, you can’t imagine the thirst. A water jug will hold more than one of those dumb Dixie cups someone will try to hand you. So, you know. Thermos. Or whatevs.
You can always order from Amazon for these things. If you join Prime, shipping is free. (We’re an affiliate.)LAUSANNE, Switzerland — After marathon negotiations, the United States, Iran and five other world powers announced a deal Thursday outlining limits on Iran’s nuclear program so it cannot lead to atomic weapons, directing negotiators toward a comprehensive agreement within three months.
Reading out a joint statement, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini hailed what she called a “decisive step” after more than a decade of work. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif followed with the same statement in Farsi. US Secretary of State John Kerry and the top diplomats of Britain, France and Germany also briefly took the stage behind them.
President Barack Obama was to speak at midafternoon at the White House.
In Lausanne, Kerry said in a tweet that there was agreement “to resolve major issues on nuclear program. Back to work soon on a final deal.” He was expected to brief reporters later Thursday.
Mogherini said the seven nations would now start writing the text of a final accord. She cited several agreed-upon restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of material that can be used either for energy production or in nuclear warheads.
Crucially for the Iranians, economic sanctions related to its nuclear programs are to be rolled back after the UN nuclear agency confirms compliance.
Zarif told reporters the agreement would show “our program is exclusively peaceful, has always been and always will remain exclusively peaceful,” while not hindering the country’s pursuit of atomic energy for civilian purposes.
“Our facilities will continue,” he said. “We will continue enriching, we will continue research and development.” He said a planned heavy water reactor will be “modernized” and that the Iranians would keep their deeply buried underground facility at Fordo.
“We have taken a major step but are still some way away from where we want to be,” Zarif said, calling Thursday’s preliminary step a “win-win outcome.”
Israeli leaders, deeply concerned about Iran’s intentions, were much less positive.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a final agreement “must significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and stop its terrorism and aggression.”
Mogherini said Iran’s heavy water reactor wouldn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium and that Fordo wouldn’t be a site for enrichment of uranium, which can be used for nuclear weapons.
The officials spoke following weeklong talks that were twice extended past a March 31 deadline for a preliminary deal. Although the US pushed for concrete commitments, the Iranians insisted on a general statement of what had been accomplished. Negotiators worked concurrently on documents describing what needs to be done for the final agreement.
The US and its five partners want to curb Iran’s nuclear technologies so it cannot develop weapons. Tehran denies such ambitions but is negotiating because it wants economic sanctions imposed over its nuclear program to be lifted.
Washington, in particular, faces strong domestic pressure. Critics in Congress are threatening to impose new sanctions over what they believe is a bad deal taking shape and the Obama administration needed to make as many details public as possible to sell the merits of its diplomatic effort.
The final breakthrough came after a flurry of overnight sessions between Kerry and Zarif, and meetings involving the six powers.Gil Fronsdal is the co-teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California and the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. He has been teaching since 1990. Gil has practiced Zen and Vipassana since 1975 and has a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford. He has trained in both the Japanese Soto Zen tradition and the Insight Meditation lineage of Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia. Gil was trained as a Vipassana teacher by Jack Kornfield and is part of the Vipassana teachers' collective at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 he received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He has been the primary teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California since 1990. He is a husband and father of two boys.Get the biggest politics 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
More than 23,000 social homes have been sold off under the Tories in the last year, official figures reveal today.
The statistics are an embarrassing dose of reality for Philip Hammond - just a day after his Budget.
The Chancellor made a pledge to build 300,000 more homes a year the centrepiece of his statement to MPs.
Yet he failed to say how many of them will be affordable.
And today's figures show England gained just 12,000 socially rented homes overall in 2016, once sell-offs were taken into account.
The increase would have been higher if the number of social homes sold off had not risen by 5%.
(Image: Getty)
The number of social housing sell-offs is now at its highest level for a decade, fuelled by a rise in sales under the Right to Buy.
Critics fear they are not being replaced "like-for-like" after the Mirror revealed dozens of councils failed to replace a single home sold under Right to Buy in a one year period.
Lib Dem Housing spokeswoman Wera Hobhouse said: "Philip Hammond is letting down a whole generation by neglecting the building of social housing.
"Thousands of homes are being sold off, but councils aren’t being given the resources to replace them.
"Instead of spending billions of pounds preparing for a Tory Brexit, the government should invest in affordable homes."
Gavin Smart, deputy chief executive at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), said: “Social rent is the only truly affordable option for many people on lower incomes.
"These figures emphasise just how much further we need to go to make sure we have enough social rented homes available.
"If the government is going to meet its new target to deliver 300,000 homes a year, councils will have to play a major part."
Mr Hammond announced yesterday he would lift councils' borrowing limits to allow them to build more homes.
But his flagship £670m-a-year plan to scrap Stamp Duty for most first-time buyers fell apart after experts said it would push up house prices.
Figures last week showed England had 217,350 net additional homes in 2016/17, up 15% in a year, but they were not broken down by private and social housing.By David Dolan and Gulsen Solaker
ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish authorities rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters on Saturday and ordered thousands of judges detained after thwarting a coup by rebels using tanks and attack helicopters to try to topple President Tayyip Erdogan.
For several hours overnight on Friday violence shook Turkey's two main cities, as the armed faction which tried to seize power blocked a bridge in Istanbul and strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in Ankara.
At least 265 people were killed. An official said 161 of them were mostly civilians and police officers, while the remaining 104 were coup supporters.
But the coup attempt crumbled as Erdogan rushed back to Istanbul from a Mediterranean holiday and urged people to take to the streets to support his government against plotters he accused of trying to kill him.
"They will pay a heavy price for this," said Erdogan, launching a purge of the armed forces, which last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago. "This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army."
Among those detained were top military commanders, including the head of the Second Army which protects the country's borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran, state-run Anadolu news agency said.
Hundreds of soldiers were held in Ankara for alleged involvement in the coup, leaving police stations overflowing.
Some had to be taken under armed police escort in buses to a sports stadium. Reuters footage showed some of the detainees, hand-cuffed and stripped from the waist up, sitting on the floor of one of the buses.
The government declared the situation under control, saying 2,839 people had been rounded up, from foot soldiers to senior officers, including those who formed "the backbone" of the rebellion.
Authorities also began a major crackdown in the judiciary over suspected links to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, removing from their posts and ordering the detention of nearly 3,000 prosecutors and judges, including from top courts.
Erdogan has blamed the coup on supporters of Gulen, who he has frequently accused of trying to foment uprising in the military, media and judiciary.
Ten members of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors and two members of the Constitutional Court have already been detained, officials said.
OBAMA'S SUPPORT
A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country of about 80 million people since 2003, would have marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprisings erupted and plunged Turkey's southern neighbor Syria into civil war.
However, a failed coup attempt could still destabilize the NATO member and major U.S. ally that lies between the European Union and the chaos of Syria, with Islamic State bombers targeting Turkish cities and the government also at war with Kurdish separatists.
U.S. President Barack Obama expressed support for Turkey's government and called on all sides to avoid action that would lead to further violence or instability.
French President Francois Hollande said he expected a period of repression in the aftermath of the failed coup.
Erdogan, who had been holidaying on the southwest coast when the coup was launched, flew into Istanbul before dawn on Saturday and told thousands of flag-waving supporters at the airport that the government remained at the helm.
A polarizing figure whose Islamist-rooted ideology lies at odds with supporters of modern Turkey's secular principles, Erdogan said the plotters had tried to attack him in the resort town of Marmaris.
"They bombed places I had departed from right after I was gone," he said. "They probably thought we were still there."
Erdogan's AK Party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism although it has not seized power directly since 1980.
His conservative religious vision for Turkey's future has also alienated many ordinary citizens who accuse him of authoritarianism. Police used heavy force in 2013 to suppress mass protests demanding more freedom.
He commands the admiration and loyalty of millions of Turks, however, particularly for raising living standards and restoring order to an economy once beset by regular crises, which grew 4.8 percent year-on-year in the first quarter.Residents of an impoverished Nigerian village have held a parade to honour a British missionary who died after being kidnapped from the eye clinic he had set up in their neighbourhood.
Dressed in black, hundreds of villagers from Enokhora, a remote community in Nigeria's southern Delta region, turned out to mourn the death of Surrey optician Ian Squire, 57, who was kidnapped by a criminal gang last month.
Three other British missionaries who were held with him were freed last week, but Mr Squire is understood to have died after being unable to access medication for an asthma condition.
His death has brought both sadness and anger among the local community, who now face the closure of the clinic that the missionaries ran, one of the few health facilities in the area.
One placard held up by the demonstrators read: "Ian, you live, you never die, because we cherish you in our hearts."
Local TV news reports also showed footage of the missionaries' clinic - now padlocked - and their nearby living quarters, where the locks on the doors had been smashed open when the kidnappers struck just after midnight on October 13.Basu, however, had been brought up in Delhi and could make sense of the journals. She read through 13 volumes of the Queen writing about Hindustani lessons in Balmoral, visiting Abdul when he was ill, and visits to take tea with his wife - who she had granted permission to come from India to join him - and see their cat’s new kittens. Her passion for India was obvious, from her desperate wish to eat a mango and her view of the Karims as her equals. It showed a completely different side of the Queen’s life that had been previously recorded.
After the Queen’s death, Abdul returned to Agra and it was here where Basu found a ruined mausoleum which would have once been studded with gems and rubies. His inscriptions still lay engraved on the tombstone.
“It was a big moment,” says Basu. “I felt, now I’ve found his grave, this man’s story had to be told. It became a passion. Within a few months, it had taken over my life. I mean, it was the Queen, a young Muslim man - what’s not to be curious about? The more and more I got into it, it became more and more gripping.”The Resolution Foundation/IPPR new report into the living wage does an impressive job of addressing many of the basic questions which often come up about the living wage.
Here are some of those, in my words, along with extracts from the report which answer them. You can read the report on the living wage in full at the end of this post.
What’s the difference between the living wage and the national minimum wage?
“Living wages … by explicitly focusing on living standards, they look beyond the minimum wage, which focuses on what the labour market can bear without a significant effect on employment.”
So does getting a living wage guarantee a decent minimum standard of living?
“A large part of the allure of the living wage – for activists, the public and politicians of all stripes – has been the power of its apparent simplicity: an hourly wage rate that guarantees a basic but acceptable standard of living. In fact, living wages cannot promise this. Family circumstances vary and no realistic hourly pay rate can ever lift every family to an adequate living standard. Importantly, both UK living wages are premised on the full take-up of tax credits and other in-work benefits; without state support, they would be far higher.”
What about jobs? If the minimum wage is meant not to damage job numbers, does that mean the higher living wage costs jobs?
“Far more extensive living wage coverage could be achieved without risking jobs, with many large firms facing an impact on their wage bill as a result of introducing the living wage of less than one per cent. Evidence also makes clear that firms adapt to higher wage costs in a number of ways that are less damaging than disruptive changes to employment or hours. This is not to suggest that the living wage can be adopted by all.”
Is the living wage mainly a public sector or private sector issue?
“The overwhelming majority of low-paid workers in the UK work in the private sector.”
If there’s a roll-out of the living wage more widely, who would that help?
“Modelling an extreme scenario in which the living wage is guaranteed to all UK employees we find that the workforce would see their gross earnings rise by £6.5 billion. These gains would not all flow down to the poorest working households. In fact, households around the middle of the income distribution would gain disproportionately from the living wage as lots of low earners live with others who are not necessarily low paid.”
(As an aside, as with child benefit and similar support, it’s worth remembering that how income is divided between different members of a household can be crucial. Different splits within different households can mean that the same total level of household income results in different levels of money being spent on bringing up children, for example.)
Doesn’t raising wages also help the Treasury?
“The biggest beneficiary of the living wage would be HM Treasury, which would see income tax receipts and national insurance contributions rise, while spending on tax credits and in-work benefits would fall. We estimate that the Treasury would achieve gross savings of around £3.6 billion if the living wage was universally applied. Spending on in-work benefits, particularly in the form of tax credits, grew significantly between 2003 and 2008 and it is unlikely that similar growth can be repeated in these fiscally straitened times. As such, the projected fiscal gains associated with living wages, alongside the material benefits that would flow to low earners, are an important part of what makes the living wage attractive.”
(This also means that there is room for a cost-neutral package of financial support for firms that would otherwise struggle to afford to pay a living wage, such as reducing their national insurance costs in return for them guaranteeing to pay a living wage. Cost neutral but still bringing the other benefits of a living wage including tackling the idea of ‘making work pay’ with the carrot – better pay – rather than the stick – worse benefits.)The Coalition’s Technical Director, Mike Rayner was recently on stage at E3 Coliseum in an interview with Microsoft’s Larry Hryb. He talked about their development experience for the Xbox One X and how much time it took them to port the game there.
According to Rayner, the developers were able to get the game up and running on the Xbox One X within a single day. All of the basic functionality was up and running for them including the multiplayer and when they made the game run at 4K on the Xbox One, they still had additional performance headroom to improve the core visuals, which they did.
Rayner then explains the new additions to Gears of War 4 on the Xbox One including improved screen space reflections, improved dynamic shadowing system and 4K textures. While the game still runs at 30 FPS on the Xbox One X, these are still significant improvement especially the resolution which has increased from native 1080p from Xbox One to native 4K on the Xbox One X. The game also supports Dolby Atmos for those who have the necessary setup for it.
Rayner also talked about the development difficulty of porting a game to something like PC where there are multiple configurations to keep in mind compared to something like Xbox One X with a closed hardware and single configuration. While the game runs at 4K and 30 fps on the Xbox One X for single player, the developers are sticking with 60 fps for the multiplayer due to competitive gaming and e-sports making it a necessity.Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy — in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.
“It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”
Characterizing the GOP’s presidential nominee as an unprincipled waffler is strong stuff from the man who oversees governmental affairs and is the chief lobbyist of the 30-million-member Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Evangelicals. But Cizik — named this year by TIME magazine one of the world’s 100 most influential people — is no stranger to controversies that come from strong convictions.
Over the past several years, Cizik, whose organization represents 45,000 churches from 59 denominations, has emerged as a passionate leader in the Creation Care movement — efforts by Christian evangelicals to respond to the perils of global change.
Suffice to say, Cizik’s efforts have rocked much of his world — including the minds of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and a phalanx of other old-guard evangelicals like Tony Perkins, Paul Weyrich and Gary Bauer who tried last year, unsuccessfully, to get Cizik fired from his job of 26 years for sounding the global warming alarm.
Dobson and the others, you see, would prefer to keep the evangelical focus on what they call “the great moral issues of our time,” specifically abortion, man-woman-only marriage and “the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”
They have disparaged Cizik for having a “preoccupation” with global warming and other related issues, including poverty and overpopulation. In 2006 Dobson even head-butted Cizik in the press for supporting international regulations of emissions, calling his views “anti-capitalistic and [having] an underlying hatred for America.”
Cizik, who takes the long view of winning converts to the global warming battle though biblical truths and employing what he describes as a “winsome, non-argumentative spirit,” was in Colorado Springs last week for a two day speaking tour with an unlikely partner in crime, the populist commentator Jim Hightower (who has detailed Cizik’s work in his latest book, “Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go Against the Flow”).
The first night the two addressed a crowd of 500 congregants of the Vanguard Christian Church and the next spoke to a crowd of hundreds of Colorado College students and environmental activists. And yes, during his speech Cizik made a joking reference to “people” who say he should be fired. He also expressed hope that Colorado Springs — headquarters to Dobson’s ministry and media empire Focus on the Family — would become ground zero for a renewed “focus on the Earth.”
“We live in the same world, but some people see through different glasses,” Cizik said of critics. “We have to move them.”
In an extensive Colorado Independent interview shortly after his Colorado stop, Cizik spoke more specifically about his views of the presidential election,including his thoughts on McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin — who rejects the science of human induced climate change — as his running mate.
Cizik tells of an encounter he had with McCain a year ago, after the candidate had been the target of loathing from evangelical leaders — most notably from the very same James Dobson who has gone after Cizik. In McCain’s case, Dobson let it be known in no uncertain terms: “I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances … he’s not in favor of traditional marriage and I pray that we don’t get stuck with him.”
McCain, says Cizik, wanted to know what to make of these declarations. Cizik’s response? Where else are people like Dobson really going to go? Ultimately, he says, the criticism may have given old-guard leaders like Dobson leverage over McCain’s vice presidential choice. And lo and behold, since Palin was picked, Dobson has been gushing over the ticket, indicating he will in all likelihood “pull the lever” for Palin, er, McCain.
“It is pretty obvious that the Palin nomination plays to identity politics and cultural war issues,” says Cizik. “Her selection is more than an acknowledgment that evangelicals are an important part of the Republican base, and everyone knows that John McCain is not that exciting to religious conservatives.”
Palin, Cizik says, has certainly excited the Republican base, and picking her was certainly a deft, if cynical, political move by McCain — at least in the short term. However, in the longer view, his running mate may do just as much to energize the opposition and prove a turn-off to independents.
“Not everyone in the evangelical movement is fawning over Sarah Palin,” Cizik says.
Let’s review the conflicting messages: Just as hurricanes like Katrina and Rita and Ike have laid devastating wakes, McCain has selected a doubter of human-caused global warming as a running mate. Palin’s record as a drill-baby-drill-for-oil advocate, including in Alaska’s National Wildlife Reserve; supporting shooting wolves from low-flying airplanes; and de-listing polar bears as an endangered species doesn’t exactly resonate among evangelical Christians who have embraced a commitment to caring for God’s creation.
And, sending perhaps the most important signal of all, McCain himself has chosen not to not to speak out on the issue of climate change, Cizik notes. His campaign instead has opted to play identity and culture-war politics.
“He’s playing that card, and many of us thought he didn’t need to do it — it just polarizes the country,” Cizik says. “The irony of it is that John McCain can’t speak with an evangelical voice of faith — let’s face it, it’s just not his thing — so I guess the substitute is this other [Palin]. I guess that’s pretty cynical, but |
happen through incompetence. And that pisses me off.It is with great sadness that we here in the UK have heard that one of our dearest and most ardent SAAB enthusiasts has fallen terminally ill. Many of you will know of Mark, better known by most as Parish, from meeting him at numerous events both here in the UK and abroad. The prognosis of his illness shows that Mark may only be with us for a few more months at best.
It is for that reason I write this article, with the permission of Marks’ wife, to call for as much support as possible from our community at what will almost certainly be the last SAAB event Mark will attend. I hear Mark is very much looking forward to this day where hopefully he will get to see many old faces and friends.
The event which is here in the UK promises to be a fantastic but somewhat poignant day taking into account the circumstances. Sadly Mark has had to sell his beloved Saab which in itself was a very emotional experience for him.
It is our intention to make this event a very special one for both Mark and his family and ask that all SAAB owners who can attend to please come along to this FREE event. The date is the 30th August at Castle Coombe race circuit ( Chippenham, Wiltshire SN14 7EY),where, as part of the event, there will also be a special parade lap of the circuit for all SAAB cars that wish to partake. I am certain that Mark will be up there right at the front riding with somebody!! So please, if you can make it, bring your SAAB or any other make of car and join us for this very special day and show how our community is still as strong as ever!
I thank you in advance for your support.
Please add your name at the link below or email me at [email protected]
Event details http://castlecombetrackday.bristolpegasus.com
Please add your name here: http://gwsforum.proboards.com/thread/1894/saturday-30th-august-2014-interestingBernie Sanders block party coming to City of Coachella
COACHELLA, Calif. - Update: Senator Bernie Sanders will not be attending 'Berniechella' or the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Regional Press Secretary Vivek Kembaiyan told KESQ & CBS Local 2 Wednesday afternoon.
Kembaiyan also noted that his campaign isn't involved with Berniechella.
According to berniesanders.com, there are no mentions of the Democratic presidential candidate visiting the Coachella Valley during a planned block party on Thursday and Friday, leading up to the second weekend of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, where it was rumored Bernie Sanders would possibly make a surprise appearance.
With his loss to Hillary Clinton in the New York primary, Sanders is setting his eyes on Pennsylvania, where voters hit the polls on Tuesday. On Thursday, Sanders' website listed three campaign events in Pennsylvania at 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 4:30 p.m.
There were no listings for Senator Sanders' schedule on Friday, or through the weekend -- as of Wednesday afternoon.
'BernieChella, as it's being called, is a two-day event set for Thursday and Friday on Grapefruit Boulevard and Vine Street in Coachella, which will lead into the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival's second weekend.
BernieChella Block Party:
California may very well get a big say in the selection of the presidential nominees with the races in both parties up in the air. It's less than two months until the June 7 primary and that's adding fuel to the idea that one of the candidates may be ready to show up in the Coachella Valley.
A"Bernie Sanders for President Block Party" is set for April 21 from 5 p.m. to 12 a.m. and April 22 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in downtown Coachella. The free event in front of City Hall on Sixth Street will lead into the second weekend of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, to shine light on the issues and bring exposure to old town Coachella.
"I was contacted by a group of artists, performers that are supporters of Bernie Sanders. They wanted to do what they can in support of Bernie Sanders and wanted to do it in Coachella," said block party organizer Tizoc DeAztlan.
DeAztlan said the line up is already set. Performers such as Ozomatli, Shepard Fairey and Zoe Kravitz volunteered to take the main stage at the block party to support Sanders. But will the Democratic presidential candidate attend?
"Obviously California is a very important state when it comes to electoral votes. At this point, we don't know yet. But we'll certainly welcome him and be ready for him," Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez said.
Sander's opponent Hillary Clinton will campaign in Los Angeles this weekend ahead of the primary, discussing her plans to raise wages and break down barriers she says are holding Americans back.
"If the Hillary campaign wants to come through town, we're very supportive of her coming up and pulling into Sixth Street," Hernandez said.
More information on the Bernie Sanders for President Block Party is located on Facebook.India & China are bound by history, connected by culture, and inspired by rich traditions - @PMOIndia pic.twitter.com/HXYDoABoPv — Syed Akbaruddin (@MEAIndia) September 16, 2014
Interacted with Chinese journalists. I shared- India & China are bound by history, connected by culture & inspired by rich traditions. — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 16, 2014
NEW DELHI: India and China are bound by history, connected by culture, and inspired by rich traditions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday in an interation with Chinese media "If I have to describe potential of India-China ties I will say — INCH (India & China) towards MILES (Millennium of Exceptional Synergy)!" Modi tweeted after the meeting."The arithmetic and chemistry of our relations convince me that together we can script history," Modi told Chinese reporters during the meeting adding, "When India and China strengthen relations, almost 35% of the world’s people come closer and their lives undergo qualitative change.""Arithmetically, when India and China gain, a significant percentage of world's population gains. But, our relation is beyond plain arithmetic," PM said.Tigres' Guido Pizarro was added to Argentina's squad for October World Cup qualifying.
Argentina rounded out their squad for October World Cup qualifying on Wednesday by adding Tigres' Guido Pizarro and other Argentina league-based players, including San Lorenzo's Emmanuel Andujar, Estudiantes' Mariano Andujar and Lucas Alario, of River Plate.
Pizarro, who will get his first call-up, was added to Atletico Madrid midfielder Augusto Fernandez, who is injured. Lazio midfielder Lucas Biglia will also likely sit out also due to injury.
Two weeks ago, Edgardo Bauza named 24 players to the team who see action outside of the Argentina league.
Lionel Messi was removed from that list after the Barcelona star suffered a torn adductor on his right leg and the club announced he would need three weeks rest.
Biglia was injured on Tuesday during Lazio's 2-0 win over Empoli. Fernandez, meanwhile, underwent surgery for a torn ACL on his right knee, which he injured during Atleti's 1-0 win over Deportivo La Coruna.
Argentina face Peru on Oct. 6 in Lima and the players will fly directly there for match preparations. On Oct. 11, Argentina host Paraguay in Cordoba's Mario Alberto Kempes stadium.
#Eliminatorias Mariano Andújar, Emmanuel Mas, Guido Pizarro y Lucas Alario se suman a la convocatoria para los próximos encuentros. pic.twitter.com/SKWnLlRTUi - Selección Argentina (@Argentina) September 28, 2016
Complete squad:
Goalkeepers: Nahuel Guzmán (Tigres de México), Sergio Romero (Manchester United), Mariano Andújar (Estudiantes LP),
Defenders: Facundo Roncaglia (Celta), Mateo Musacchio (Villarreal), Ramiro Funes Mori (Everton), Marcos Rojo (Manchester United), Martín Demichelis (Espanyol), Gabriel Mercado (Sevilla), Nicolás Otamendi (Manchester City), Pablo Zabaleta (Manchester City), Emmanuel Mas (San Lorenzo)
Midfielders: Matías Kranevitter (Sevilla), Javier Mascherano (Barcelona), Ever Banega (Inter), Erik Lamela (Tottenham), Nicolás Gaitán (Atlético Madrid), Angel Di Mariía (PSG), Guido Pizarro (Tigres)
Forwards: Angel Correa (Atlético Madrid), Lucas Pratto (Atlético Mineiro), Sergio Aguero (Manchester City), Paulo Dybala (Juventus), Gonzalo Higuaín (Juventus), Lucas Alario (River)
Follow @ESPNFC on Twitter to keep up with the latest football updates.To quote Ed the Sock: “If you don’t have anything good to say, say it often.”
This might explain why the word tax appears more than 1,000 times in last month’s federal budget, while overstretched and out-of-work Canadians receive little meaningful support.
In fact, Stephen Harper’s budget calls for more than $20 billion in “new tax relief”, including “reducing corporate income taxes so that Canada will have the lowest statutory corporate tax rate in the G7 by 2012.”
Responsible governments pay for necessities first. And the budget—apart from promising $500 million to digitize health records—does nothing to improve the quality of our lives through readily accessible, quality health care.
South of the border, Americans are learning the hard way about the long-term costs of neglecting health care.
Last December, after eight years of deep-reaching tax cuts, the congressional budget office reported: “The rising costs of health care and health insurance pose a serious threat to the future fiscal condition of the United States.” It concluded that without government action, spending on health care would increase to 25 percent of the country’s gross domestic product by 2025, up from 16 percent in 2007.
A December 18 New York Times article on the proposed U.S. stimulus package underscored the scale of the problem: “About a fifth of the [up to $1 trillion] Obama package could go toward health care”¦The biggest piece would be up to $100 billion to subsidize the states’ growing Medicaid caseloads of the poor.”
Unfortunately, Canada is on the same trajectory.
From 1993 to 2005, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin systematically underfunded our public-health-care system. The resulting declines in service created a market for private care where none existed before. Private, for-profit clinics like Vancouver’s Cambie Surgery Centre emerged and began drawing much-needed nurses and doctors away from the public system.
Now, with Liberal backing, the Harper government is pushing us closer to the health-care brink. And neither party is listening to Canadians.
A January 14 Nanos poll asked Canadians how important it was for the government to increase investment in public services such as health care and education during an economic downturn. Of those who responded, 70 percent ranked it important (25.3 percent) or very important (44.5 percent). Nine percent felt it was unimportant.
These results prompted James Clancy, president of the National Union of Public and General Employees (which commissioned the poll) to say in a release: “It’s not all about tax cuts and bailouts in the minds of Canadians. It’s about people, jobs, and protecting our social safety net during tough times.”
Investments in health care would constitute an economic stimulus, creating jobs while protecting those without employment. As Kathleen Connors, chair of the Canadian Health Coalition, pointed out in a January 13 release: “More than one in 10 Canadians work in this third-largest sector of the economy, and our public health-care system protects Canadians from one of the most devastating consequences of economic downturn in the United States, the loss of health care.”
Connors also opposed the turn toward private health care, noting that “Privatized, for-profit health care has become an increasingly serious threat that forces people to pay more”¦ and receive less.”
In the United States, a family of four lucky enough to have access to an employer-supported health plan pays more than $12,000 per year for coverage. Many millions of less fortunate Americans are uninsured. It’s a terrible model to emulate, and yet the Canadian Independent Medical Clinics Association has just launched a suit in B.C. Supreme Court asking to have patient-access restrictions at their private, for-profit clinics struck down.
The clinics—led by the ubiquitous Dr. Brian Day—base their argument on a 2005 Canadian Supreme Court judgment known as Chaoulli v. Québec (Attorney General). That court held that a Quebec ban on private insurance for medically necessary services violated the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms because long wait times in the public system endangered life and personal security.
The argument would fail if the public system were adequately funded.
Adequate funding would also save money by creating a healthier, happier, more productive population. The market might be good at some short-term decisions, but—as the economic crisis has demonstrated—it cannot be trusted with long-term public policy. Privatizing health care divides societies into those who can and cannot pay. It undermines communities by promoting selfishness and inequality.
Nobody should have to choose between putting food on the table and accessing quality, timely health care. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
Harper’s tax cuts are the wrong prescription for Canada. Let’s build up the country instead of running it down.34 SHARES Share Tweet
The rumor mill is spinning out of control in relation to outlandishly powerful Xperia devices that could see daylight at CES in January.
Game over, Samsung, and for you, Apple, the gargantuan tablet Olympics are done before they could even begin. There’s no way Cupertino can out an iPad Pro as impressive as Sony’s rumored Xperia Z4 Tablet Ultra, and the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 is a joke next to the unreleased 13 incher.
Emphasis on “unreleased” and “rumored”, as Sony is yet to confirm the existence of said Z4 Tablet Ultra powerhouse, not to mention its beastly specs. It doesn’t help the publication “leaking out” the information today is a fairly shady Chinese news outlet, and the image used as “corroboration” is so very obviously fabricated.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Z4 Tablet Ultra isn’t real, coming soon, and looking to destroy the Note Pro with twice its RAM count. Yes, 6 GB. Unbelievable? Out of this world? Common sense-defying? You could say that, and much more, but as long as it’s not physically impossible (and it isn’t), we can allow ourselves to dream.
Also ridiculous but short of impossible is the 13 incher’s purported 3,840 x 2,400 pix res LED screen, Carl Zeiss 8 MP rear camera, HDMI 1.4 input for Quad HD video recording at 30 fps, 8.6 mm profile, and 12,100 mAh (!!!) battery.
A more down-to-earth alleged feature is, believe it or not, the 2.86 GHz Snapdragon 810 processor inside, although if legit, that means the gigantic slate is probably not on deck for a CES 2015 intro in January.
What Sony may instead be prepping to showcase in Las Vegas in a matter of weeks is a Z4 flagship phone, as well as a Z4 Compact and Z4 Ultra phablet. The last two made headlines earlier this week for the first time, with top-level specifications closer to those of the Z4 handheld than the Z4 Tablet Ultra.
We’re looking at a 4.7-inch 1,080p display, 3 GB RAM, Snapdragon 810 chip, 20.7 MP main snapper, 5 MP front cam, stereo speakers and 3,000 mAh battery for the Compact, obscure sources say, and a 6.44-inch ensemble with 2K resolution, an inferior 16 MP camera, 3,500 to 4,000 mAh cell and otherwise identical specs for the Ultra.
Apparently, the road from underdog to big dog may not be as long and convoluted as history suggested thus far.
Sources: Digital Trends, Padnews, Pocket-Lint, Android OriginMany are stunned today at the speed in which western civilization is collapsing. Coinciding with this is the post-conciliar crisis within the Church, the fourth great crisis of Christendom as it has been described by that great defender of orthodoxy, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan. What may not be as clear too many is the connection between the destruction of the Mass and of the collapse of the Christian west.
One man who understood this connection was Dr. John Senior, professor of English, Literature, and Classics and co-founder of the very successful Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. Dr. Senior taught for decades at the university level. He was also a convert to the Catholic faith, devoted to the traditional Mass and an attendee of Immaculata Chapel (SSPX) in St. Mary’s, Kansas.
Senior has been credited with inspiring a generation of young men and women who, having studied under him at Kansas, converted to Catholicism. As Michael Matt of the Remnant has noted, “under his tutelage, (his students) had learned to love the old Faith as he did and thus desired to serve the Church as loyally as had their revered teacher.”
Early in his book The Restoration of Christian Culture, John Senior speaks to the inseparable nature of civilization and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:
Whatever we do in the political or social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ Himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of 2,000 years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature ―all these things when they are right are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Understanding this, is it any wonder why a growing number of Catholics today (sometimes derisively dismissed as ‘radical traditionalists’) speak of the need for liturgical restoration? Is it any surprise that we are seeing a cultural collapse in the west considering the anthropocentric and profane Masses offered for much of the last fifty years?
Reading the above quote by Senior recently I was immediately reminded of another occasion when esteemed laity highlighted the inseparable connection between the Mass and civilization.
On the eve of the implementation of Pope Paul’s new Mass in the U.K. back in 1971, a group of learned English signatories wrote the Holy Father a letter, an appeal. Many of the distinguished signers were not even Catholic. They included such artists and thinkers as Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Robert Graves, Ralph Richardson, Kenneth Clark, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Yehudi Menuhin to name just a few. In total nearly sixty people signed.
Their letter today, and the subsequent response of Rome, are referred to as the Agatha Christie indult, named after its most prominent signer. Put simply, the letter argued for the preservation of the Roman Rite as the jewel of western civilization. They began:
If some senseless decree were to order the total or partial destruction of basilicas or cathedrals, then obviously it would be the educated -whatever their personal beliefs- who would rise up in horror to oppose such a possibility. Now the fact is that basilicas and cathedrals were built so as to celebrate a rite which, until a few months ago, constituted a living tradition. We are referring to the Roman Catholic Mass. Yet, according to the latest information in Rome, there is a plan to obliterate that Mass by the end of the current year.
Next, the signatories argued (as John Senior did) that the traditional Mass is foundational to, and inseparable from, western civilization:
We are not at this moment considering the religious or spiritual experience of millions of individuals. The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts -not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians.
The implication is clear. If the “rite in question” has inspired the culture and lifted the human spirit in such a manner “in all countries and epochs”, then what happens when it is distorted and diminished. If western civilization exists for the Mass, then what happens when the Mass is changed? Consistently profaned? Modernized?
The letter concludes with both an appeal, and a filial warning, to the Holy Father:
The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and nonpolitical, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere. They wish to call to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the Traditional Mass to survive…
Cardinal Heenan delivered the letter to Pope Paul VI, resulting in the granting of the Latin Mass indult for England and Wales in November 1971.
What is sad today, nearly fifty years after the “reform” of the Roman Rite, is that many within the Church still do not see what John Senior and the signatories of the Agatha Christie letter so clearly recognized. History has proven them to be truly prophetic. We can view these last fifty years as our Babylonian exile. Our captivity, merited through pride and disobedience.
Surveying the ecclesial and cultural landscape near the end of his life, Senior held nothing back in his assessment:
The crisis is over; we have lost. This is no longer just a prediction, it is a simple observation: Rome has been desecrated. We are in the age of darkness. Triumphalist reactions are in vain. The modern world and the Church deserve the punishment that God is raining down on us.
Despite this current punishment we cannot despair. In the end, we know Who is victorious. We do not, however, participate in this victory if we fail to reassert the fundamental connection between the Mass and western civilization.
The Mass must first be the foundation of the family before it can be the foundation of the culture. All of life must flow from Our Eucharistic Lord, present in our churches, on the altars, in the hands of our priests. The Social Kingship of Christ must once again be proclaimed as well.
We must also reject the nonsensical notion of the Mass as an ecumenical experiment. As a laboratory for innovation. As an expression of the secular instead of an encounter with the eternal. This must all be rejected. It is offensive and it is not Catholic.
Western civilization, or more accurately Christendom, exists for the Mass. We have seen the fruits of secularism, of rejecting this fundamental truth. We have seen both the culture and the Church teeter (and in some places fall) due to the loss of understanding of this foundational truth. Even where the culture fails to grasp this notion, it is still true never the less.
In the end this is why so many fight for the liturgy, despite the scorn of some and the indifference of many. This truth compels us. Father John Zuhlsdorf (Fr. Z) likes to say, “Save the Liturgy, save the World.” Indeed.
Photo credit: Gonzague BridaultDEFENDING CHAMPION RONNIE O’Sullivan eased into the world championship semi-finals on Wednesday and, true to his unpredictable nature, said he had only returned after a self-imposed exile because he needed the money to pay his children’s school fees.
The 37-year-old — who had not played all season after winning last year’s world title — outclassed fellow Englishman Stuart Bingham 13-4 to set up a semi-final with Judd Trump, who had edged former world champion Shaun Murphy 13-12 in a thrilling match earlier on Wednesday.
O’Sullivan, who looks well set for a fifth world title, said this would be his ‘final farewell’ at the championships, although he is contracted by his sponsor to play 10 tournaments next season.
It is not the first time that the engaging but temperamental Englishman has alluded to retiring full-time from the sport he has lit up but he said that, while some enjoyed playing, he suffered too much and was tired of not being happy.
“It’s nice to be in the semi-finals but I didn’t really miss snooker,” he said.
“But I missed having something to do and I was struggling for a bit of money.
“I’ll be honest, I still owe the school money for my children’s school fees, I haven’t paid the last two or three terms.
I didn’t know what was going to happen here but I’ve made a little bit of money now so I can go and pay the school fees now for the next two years.
“But really I don’t think snooker is for me. This could be my last proper major event.
“As far as putting my heart and soul into snooker, I don’t think that’s what I want to do anymore but I had to give it a go. I needed some money quick.
“I have signed a contract with my sponsor to play in 10 events so I’ll play in those.”
But O’Sullivan stated those events could include Legends tour events, and low-profile tournaments, and stressed there was no stipulation that he should appear at events such as the UK Championship, Masters or World Championship.
Asked if he would be in Sheffield for next year’s World Championship, O’Sullivan added: “I’ve no intention to come back.
“If I find something else to do you definitely won’t see me. I’ve kept my cards close to my chest but there’s no reason to keep them close now.
“This is my last farewell, it’s my swansong. I’m happy; I’m done. I can’t keep putting myself through being unhappy.
I wish I could just smile it off, shrug it off but it’s not like that for me. I wish I had the attitude of players who come here and smile and enjoy it. I just beat myself up too much and it’s not healthy.”
Trump and (right) Murphy. Credit: Lynne Cameron/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Trump, 23, showed great character to come from 7-2 down to beat Murphy and move a step closer to what would be his second world final after a previous appearance in 2011.
“Everyone had written me off at 7-2 down and were saying it was the story of my season because I was enjoying myself too much off the table,” he said.
However, I am delighted I proved them wrong. Now Ronnie will have all the pressure on him and I will just go out there and attack him.”
The other semi-final will be another all English affair between Barry Hawkins and Ricky Walden, who beat Welshman Michael White.
Hawkins ended Chinese player Ding Junhui’s hopes of becoming the first player from China to win the title, rattling off the first four frames of Wednesday’s session to win 13-7.
Ding, 26, said that he might seek advice from experienced former professionals to see if they can help him get nearer to winning the title.
“It might be good to get help from an old player’s experience, but I haven’t got anyone to help me, so I do everything myself,” Ding said.
“I’d like to listen if they could tell me something I’m doing wrong.”
© AFP, 2013Final Countdown
With just over four weeks remaining until the world premiere of Justice Is Mind on August 18 at the Palace Theatre in Albany, the last bits of post-production are underway. The film is edited, scored, the special effects have been built and two hours of sound mixing are complete. That just leaves that last fifteen minutes to mix then off to color correction with the last action being the pressing of the exhibition DVDs.
Earlier this week I was contacted by another sales agency that is interested in reviewing Justice for distribution and sale. As I mentioned in my last post, it’s really key to have a proper IMDB set-up as that’s how they found me. Now let me be clear on something, the number of independent films seeking distribution is staggering. Yes, every filmmaker wants the best deal for their project, but when a sales agency or distributor comes knocking you simply drop what you are doing and address the opportunity at hand. And don’t make it difficult for them to contact you. I promise you they have other films they are considering and will just move on to the next film. With five agents already reviewing Justice prior to our industry screening, participating in a film market or even showing at festival, I’m very encouraged by this early interest.
Speaking of this week’s activities, I was delighted to learn that my friends, backers and partners in Justice Is Mind, Mary Wenninger and Stefan Knieling were coming up to visit. It was so great visiting with them yesterday. When I showed them parts of Justice Is Mind on my laptop one of the first things they said was, “We really need to thank all these people for their work.” Indeed, as I have endeavored to do throughout the process of the development of Justice, you can never thank people enough for their work and contribution.
Producing a feature film is not easy and it takes long term view for anyone involved in the process. As I’ve said before I’ll say again, shooting the film is the easy part it’s pre and post that has the most challenges. Recently I was at the gym and someone walked up to me and asked “When is the film coming to theatres?” and “why is it taking you so long to finish it?” You know when I hear comments like this, sometimes I just want to scream. Instead, I launched into a filmmaking 101 lecture on how this business works that occupied at least fifteen minutes of his time. I didn’t care if his workout was being affected or if he felt insulted. He asked a question and he got an answer. To create a quality film takes time. By all accounts post-production generally takes about a year, we are doing it in less. More importantly, we haven’t had to reshoot anything.
The one thing that I believe worked for Justice throughout the entire process is that we had a locked script and the writer was on set (me). Where you see films get into “trouble” is when writing is done on set and suddenly a plot hole or continuity issue is created. With Justice there were a few occasions when I had to create a scene due to actor schedules or some other unforeseen situation that came up. But because the actors and crew knew the story so well, everything was pretty seamless. And as a writer, you also need to be flexible to make adjustments when needed.
T-minus 35 days.How many more rounds of this must America take?
How many more times must the economic neck of the nation have a knife pressed against it by Republicans demanding a ransom?
It seems the answer is at least once more — or twice.
Washington is still wrangling over a way to avoid a government shutdown next week, while Republicans are already gearing up to refuse to raise the debt limit — something that no Congress under any other president has ever refused to do.
But those presidents were not Barack Obama, the bane of the far right’s existence, and those Congresses were not as infested with members who saw disruption as part of their duty.
As long as Obama is president, these folks will be flush with fever. Opposition to Obama is their raison d’être. America’s national interests are subordinate to their selfish ones.It’s been well-documented over the last few weeks that the Big 12 is looking to (finally) add two to four schools to their conference. The main schools we seem to see mentioned as candidates to join the conference are BYU, Houston, Cincinnati, Memphis, UCF, and UConn. We don’t hear all that much about the Colorado State Rams, and it makes me cry inside as CSU is my alma mater.
But, if you really think about it, CSU should have at least a decent case. Just a few things about CSU that would immediately stand out:
1. Geographically, they make much more sense than most of the schools in the conversation, and could get the Big 12 back into the Denver market.
2. A brand-new on-campus football stadium that opens in 2017.
3. Football and basketball programs that have spent time in the top-25 over the last few years, and are usually competitive.
If the Big 12 is taking two schools, it’s hard to see CSU beating out BYU and Houston, at least. But if the Big 12 goes with four schools? I think CSU’s argument is pretty good. That’s not saying I think they are one of the four schools — I don’t; I’m a realist and understand the national appeal of the other schools is higher — but that they have a pretty good argument.
Well, CSU president Tony Frank, is “optimistic” about their chances, saying that CSU has “been in discussion” with the Big 12 over the last few weeks. Of course, he said he’s always optimistic because he’s a Cubs fan:
Ask CSU President Tony Frank about his optimism for Colorado State University moving to the Big 12, and he’ll have a four-word joke for you: “I’m a Cubs fan.” “I’m always optimistic,” he continued. “I’ve been that way for the past century. Hard-luck baseball fandom aside, Frank said in an interview at the Board of Governors meeting on Thursday in Pueblo that CSU has been in talks with the Big 12. “The Big 12’s made their process pretty clear,” Frank said. “We have been in discussion with them and we’ll see where that takes them over the next few weeks.”
So, while Frank is possibly just optimistic regardless of reality, the school is still talking with the Big 12 and would still appear to be in the picture. It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds in the coming weeks.
[Coloradoan]BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Lithuania could block Russia’s road and rail access to its enclave of Kaliningrad if Moscow keeps pressuring its neighbors over their ties to the European Union, the Baltic state’s foreign minister said.
Lithuania's Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius (L) listens to Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague during an European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels May 27, 2013. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
Vilnius, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, will host a summit in November between the bloc and six states in eastern Europe and the Caucasus that are negotiating closer trade ties with Brussels.
All six are ex-Soviet republics that Russia views as part of its sphere of influence. It has been blocking some of their exports and threatening to limit Russian gas supplies in an effort to persuade them not to turn away from Moscow.
Lithuania, which joined the EU in 2004, has had its transport trucks held up at Russian customs for up to 20 days at a time in recent weeks, causing heavy losses for its sizeable trucking industry.
Asked whether Vilnius might retaliate, Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius said: “We could also apply the same measures.”
“As you know, the Kaliningrad region is isolated, geographically isolated, so we could apply some measures also to cut something,” he told Reuters late on Tuesday, adding that no discussions along those lines had taken place.
“Transport, we could cut off trains, but not only trains, also the supply of goods, whatever. It is theoretically possible. It was not discussed, it’s not our way of thinking, it’s not our methods,” he said.
The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, with around 430,000 people, is enclosed by Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east but it has a large port on the Baltic.
Aside from sea shipments, it relies on road and rail links with Russia that cross Lithuania and Belarus.
GEORGIA WAR
The EU is locked in an increasingly tense stand-off with Russia over its Eastern Partnership policy, which is designed to draw six countries - Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia - more closely into the European fold.
At the Vilnius summit on November 28-29, the EU is expected to sign a free trade deal with Ukraine and take further steps towards free trade agreements with Moldova and Georgia. No substantial progress is expected with the other partnership states, which remain more closely aligned with Moscow.
Russia, meanwhile, wants several of the countries to sign up to its own customs union, launched with Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2010. Armenia, which relies on Russia for support in a long-standing dispute with Azerbaijan, agreed in September to join the Russian-led trade bloc.
The biggest bone of contention between the EU and Russia is Ukraine, a country of 46 million people that is bordered by four EU member states and is determined to move closer to Europe.
If that happens, Russia has said it will have no choice but to defend its interests.
“We would somehow have to stand by our market, introduce protectionist measures,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month when asked about Ukraine signing an EU trade deal.
Asked how far he thought Russia might go in retaliation against Ukraine and others in the Eastern Partnership, Linkevičius said cutting off gas supplies was a possibility.
“They are very concrete,” he said of Russia’s actions.
“We are not confronting Russia or structures where Russia belongs. We would just like to see this free competition of ideas and arguments,” he added.
In 2008, Russia and Georgia fought a brief war and there are still Russian troops stationed on some Georgian territory. Asked if that was on the minds of EU member states and others in the Eastern Partnership, Linkevičius said it should be.
“It was a precedent,” he said. “It can happen again.”The waiting periods’ most egregious toll, pro-choice advocates argue, is the amount of hassle and cost that comes with them, especially in the 11 states that require counseling before the wait begins. Abortions are already too expensive for some |
or fear radiation because they do not understand it. In some specific cases, they have been turned off from nuclear energy because of their own experiences of being rejected by nuclear employers or because they have had to deal with arrogant, self-important, spoiled nuclear professionals who do similar work for a significantly higher salary.
Aside: That last sentence above comes from my own discussions with non-nuclear trained engineers and officers in the US Navy. Until having those conversations, I admit that I might have been one of the spoiled nuclear professionals that they disliked. End Aside.
The established coal industry may be one of biggest beneficiaries of a rapidly developing nuclear industry in North America and Europe. Coal has been demonized for decades despite its enormous and continuing contribution to human development and economic prosperity. Some of the criticism may be deserved, but the rhetoric applied against the fuel source has been dramatically exaggerated by competitors seeking additional market share.
Burning raw coal in primitive furnaces is harmful to the environment, especially when the consumption rate overwhelms the air exchange capability of the discharge area. Technology has been developed that significantly reduces coal pollution, but there are several additional technologies that could be employed to produce cleaner coal or to use coal as a raw material input for producing clean burning distillate fuels that would compete directly with petroleum-based equivalents.
Some people might question why I advocate investing capital into systems that would convert coal into clean-burning liquid fuel. Please consider how much better it might be from a variety of perspectives to keep mining already open coal mines than to keep exploring ever more remote areas of the world — including the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the deep ocean — in search of petroleum resources.
Well-capitalized companies in the energy business might find it beneficial to redirect their annual capital investment programs into developing nuclear energy resources instead of investing more and more money and other resources into the diminishing returns of finding and extracting more oil.
Though the prices of individual units of energy will decrease in a world with growing abundance from actinide fuels, the overall sales of the energy business should increase as more and more people have access to the kinds of products that North Americans, Europeans and other developed nations have taken for granted. The trajectory will not be the same as it was in digital communications, digital data storage or microprocessor computing power, but those industries show that it is possible to make more money with ever cheaper, more abundant products.
Scarcity, real or perceived, is a well understood way to concentrate wealth, but widely distributed access to prosperity also provides ways for high levels of success.
Bottom Line
Building a world where people are valued and enabled to become affluent without harming their shared environment is a worthwhile endeavor that can attract a broad coalition. There will be opposition from people who believe they will be relative losers in such a world, but that should not inhibit action or prevent success.
The energy that naturally resides inside the atomic nuclei of actinide materials is available for use. It can provide the power and the prosperity for a growing population and it can enable people to live more abundant lives. Unlocking that energy will help us to achieve abundance without excessively fouling our nest and without rapid depletion of irreplaceable raw materials.
Let’s start and move forward with due haste. Our children and grandchildren will thank us.Sols 869-870: Broken rock
14 January 2015
The "mini-drill" test on the Mojave rock target completed successfully, but MAHLI images taken after the test showed that the rotary-percussive drilling fractured the rock. This was not expected, so the tactical team had to quickly change the Sol 869-870 plan. While we were hoping to drill a deeper hole and acquire a sample of the drill cuttings before the upgrade of the software onboard the rover next week, the rock fragments dislodged by the mini-drill activity provided a rare opportunity to examine freshly-broken surfaces. Field geologists usually carry rock hammers so that they can break rocks and examine the fresh surfaces. On Mars, the drill has served as MSL's rock hammer! So the Sol 869 plan includes ChemCam measurements of the fresh chunk of rock and the bottom of the mini-drill hole, followed by MAHLI close-up images of the dislodged rocks, both during the day and at night (illuminated by the LEDs). On Sol 870, the brush will be used to clean off another potential mini-drill target, dubbed "Funk Valley." MAHLI images of this new target will be taken before and after the brushing, then the drill will be "preloaded" (pushed down) against Funk Valley and a potential full drill target to determine whether the rock is strong enough to safely drill. Finally, MAHLI images will be acquired to see the results of the preload tests and the APXS will be placed on the brushed spot for an overnight integration.
by Ken HerkenhoffJune 24, 2010
Skilling v. United States: Supreme Court Rules Against Broad Use of Honest Services Statute; Does Not Grant New Trial on Pre-Trial Publicity Grounds
Posted by Christine Hurt
So, I'm sure we'll all have a lot more to say here, but the opinion in Skilling v. United States has been released. For the corporate law folks among us, the Court seems to have narrowed the theft of honest services statute to activity such as bribery and kickbacks, and says Skilling did not violate the statute. However, the Court did not reverse and remand on all counts, leaving to lower courts to decide whether that count unfairly colored the any or all of the other counts in his conviction.
Skilling was also hoping for a new trial on the grounds of pretrial publicity, but the court did not agree either that the venue was unfairly prejudicial or that voir dire did not ensure a non-prejudiced jury.
This is all from the quick read. More later.
UPDATE: Forgot to link to the opinion. I deprived you of some honest services there, but hey, it's not a federal crime.
Enron, Supreme Court | BookmarkBACK in 1992, in his book "The End Of History and the Last Man", Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy had triumphed. The return of authoritarianism in Russia, and the growing power of absolutist China, has undermined the argument at the geopolitical level. And events in recent years have caused questions on the ability of liberal democracy to flourish in some countries where it seemed established. The new nationalists that have emerged in Turkey, Poland and Hungary tend to regard disagreement with their policies as unpatriotic and are quick to brand opponents as being in the pay of foreign powers.
What used to be called "the Whig theory of history" saw civilisation steadily moving in a more open, liberal direction. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, countries became more democratic, first allowing most men and then women to vote. There were setbacks in the 1920s and 1930s with the emergence of fascism and, of course, the imposition of communism in eastern Europe and China after the Second World War.
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But in a broad swathe of the world - North America, western Europe, Australasia and Japan - democracy seemed well established. And that democracy was accompanied by the growth of welfare states, higher taxes on the wealthy and a general decline in inequality. The period from the 1940s to the 1980s was known as the "Great Compression". The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 brought a range of new countries into the sphere; Latin America also moved in a democratic direction.
But all was not completely well, as I outlined in a 2013 book "The Last Vote". The respect held by voters for politicians fell sharply; turnout (and party membership) also dropped. People became both cynical and complacent about democracy. Cynical in the sense that they felt politicians were all the same; complacent in that they did not really fear the loss of their rights. The financial crisis that began in 2007 has, by creating an additional degree of voter dissatisfaction, further undermined democracy.
If we go back to the growth of democracy in 19th century Britain, one can see the gradual extension of the franchise through the reform acts; broadly speaking to the middle classes in 1832, to the better-off urban workers in 1867; agricultural workers in 1884; and to all other men (and women over 30) in 1918. As those classes joined the electorate, parties tailored their policies to appeal to them. Education for children after 1870, for example and old age pensions in 1909. The emergence of the welfare state and managed economies after 1945 arose from the demands of working-class voters and were also seen by the better-off as a price worth paying for avoiding either fascism or communism.
In that sense, then, it might seem as if economic power followed political power; once given the vote, ordinary people backed policies that would redistribute income in their favour. But what if the sequence of events was reversed? The economic power of the middle classes helped get them the vote in 1832; the power of industrial workers, though strike action, earned them the vote later on; the mass mobilisation of women in the First World War turned into female suffrage. Citizens demanded the political status to match their economic power.
By the same extension, then, we could see the rise of inequality since 1980s and the threats to democracy as two sides of the same coin. The wealthy used their economic power to fund politicians and bend the legislative agenda in their interest; the decline of manufacturing industry and trade unions in the west weakened the economic power of workers. The wealthy are more likely to vote and far more likely to have their voice heard. In his book "Unequal Democracy", Larry Bartels compared the voting patterns of US senators with the view of their voters, by income. He found that the views of those in the upper third of the income distribution received 50% more weight than those in the middle third. The view of those in the bottom third received no weight at all. Senators did not meet these people socially, or at fund-raisers.
The potential feedback process is clear. The rich back politicians, allowing the latter to pass policies that favour the wealthy, giving them more money for political funding. The poorest voters are appeased with nods to cultural issues, as Thomas Frank argued in "What's the Matter with Kansas?". The rise of populism will not redress the balance; Donald Trump's cabinet, packed with billionaires, is pushing for a tax-cutting package that will mainly help the rich. The main economic impact of Brexit so far has been a squeeze on real wages thanks to a fall in the pound.
Admittedly, the immigration issue does not fit easily into this template. Business owners tend to favour liberal immigration rules so they can attract the best workers. Still, note that those on the right may favour restrictions on movement of people but not on the movement of their capital.
Perhaps we are not heading to the totalitarian nightmare pictured in George Orwell's "1984". But we could be moving close to the Roman model, under which in theory the system allowed for expression of the popular will, but in practice, rule by the rich occurred. The masses were kept happy with "bread and circuses"; the modern equivalent being junk food and reality TV shows.Britain is facing its most severe terror threat in a generation, the head of the country’s domestic intelligence service has warned.
Reflecting this year’s recent attacks in London and Manchester, MI5 chief Andrew Parker said the UK had seen a dramatic upshift in the threat from Islamist terrorism.
Parker also said the spy agency is currently running 500 live operations on more than 3000 suspected extremists and warned more strikes were inevitable.
“It’s clear that we are contending with an intense UK terrorist threat from Islamist extremists. That threat is multi-dimensional, evolving rapidly and operating at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before. We’ve seen a dramatic upshift in threat this year, it’s at the highest tempo I’ve seen in my 34-year career.”
The rare public comments by Parker, come as pressure mounts on MI5 to show its effectiveness in the wake of recent attacks.
The spy chief insisted that twenty plots had been foiled in the last four years, including seven in the last few months.Alice Birch’s play/polemic about radical feminism resists Company One’s earnest-to-the-max interpretation.
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. By Alice Birch. Directed by Summer L. Williams. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts. Boston, MA, through November 19.
By Ian Thal
Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. isn’t so much a play as a series of sketches, each preceded by imperative projections, such as “REVOLUTIONIZE THE LANGUAGE. (INVERT IT)” or “REVOLUTIONIZE THE WORLD. (DO NOT MARRY).” These shout-outs are presumably excerpts from a manifesto, but they also recall the linguistic practices of conceptual artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who came to prominence in the late 1970s. Most of the characters in these short pieces are unnamed, and Birch largely leaves it up to the director (Summer L. Williams in the Company One production) to determine how the dialogue and actions are distributed among the actors. Much of the dialogue sounds as if it was taken from an ideological tract or lifted from an arch-parody of this kind of propaganda.
In the first sketch, a heterosexual couple returns home from a date that involves cheese, watermelon, and human rights abuses in North Korea. When the man (Jeff Marcus) talks about the sex he has fantasized about all evening, the woman (Becca A. Lewis) analyzes his rhetoric. For example: Why not “make love with” instead of “make love to.” She parses his fantasies as if he is the subject and she is the object of the verb (or, at best, the subject of a passive verb) in each sentence. She then counters with a fantasy where she is the active subject. There are some funny bits (including a humorously choreographed coitus designed by Misha Shields). Ultimately, though, I was reminded of the point made by an article about feminist erotica in (I believe) The Village Voice circa 1990 – a quaint time before high-speed internet, when people actually read pornography.
Along with old-fashioned prejudices, women are oppressed in all sorts of new and different ways because of their gender. But Birch seems to be pretty well stuck in time, engaging with ideas popular in an earlier era of feminist thought, particularly the call for a ‘womanist’ revolution whose goal would be a utopia sans men (no transgender people either).
In dramaturg Jessie Baxter’s program notes, she notes that Birch has drawn inspiration from Valerie Solanas’ 1967 SCUM Manifesto (“SCUM” being an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men”). Baxter places the SCUM Manifesto in the tradition of feminist utopian thought – imagining a perfect world without men – but she ignores the one time Solanas put her philosophy into practice: her failed 1968 assassination attempt of Andy Warhol (dramatized in Mary Harron’s 1996 film, I Shot Andy Warhol) that left the pop-artist and gay icon severely wounded. Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was sentenced to three years in prison, including treatment in a mental hospital. The notoriety created a cult-following for her book. Upon release she returned to stalking and harassing Warhol – and she was arrested again.
This is not the only crucial piece of historical omission in Baxter’s survey: she mentions Wonder Woman and her Paradise Island homeland, but leaves out that Wonder Woman was the creation of Boston University psychology professor and inventor of the polygraph test, William Moulton Martson (writing as Charles Moulton), a bondage enthusiast who lived in a ménage-à-trois with his wife and his former student. (Incidentally, the image of the heroine used in the program is from 1975’s Wonder Woman #216 – written by Elliot S! Maggin, illustrated by Nick Cardy.) The history of a feminist utopia, like most dreams of paradise, has been unruly and paradoxical, to say the least.
Easily the most powerful moment in Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. is the soliloquy (ably delivered by Lewis) at the end of “REVOLUTIONIZE THE BODY (MAKE IT SEXUALLY AVAILABLE. CONSTANTLY).” Grocery store managers catch a woman lying down in aisle seven exposing herself. Their inquiry ends with a crescendo of fat-shaming insults (though only by the standards of Hollywood and the fashion industry is anyone in the C1 cast “fat”). The woman speaks, describing her personal history of body dysmorphia, of radically attacking her skin, hair, her internal organs. She is obsessed with erasing the line “[w]here [her] body stops and the air around it starts,” of eradicating her selfhood and sexual agency. She is obviously psychotic.
Lewis takes all of this rhetoric head-on and right-on, but it could be argued that Birch’s play resists Company One’s one-note, earnest-to-the-max interpretation. Are these commands to REVOLT a serious instigation for political change or symptoms of madness? Birch’s play suggests that these violent messages, whatever political inspiration they give, are also more than a little disturbed, even unhinged. In other words, Birch is satirizing these extreme ideas, in much the same way she lampoons the patriarchy. She offers no alternatives, only a scathing dismissal of both radical polarities. Christa Brown summarizes the show’s desire in the final soliloquy – “we stopped watching and checking and nurturing the thought to become the action.” The irony is that no plausible thought has been uttered.
Company One irons Birch’s ironies flat, leaving the production of this fascinatingly weird but flawed script floundering, the actors often left high and dry. Why would a feminist rhetorician be more alarmed about her paramour’s use of prepositions than his confession he can’t take his mind off of sex during a discussion of human rights violations in North Korea? What sort of person rejects a marriage proposal by gas-lighting her lover with a critique of the institution as chattel slavery? Maybe the same sort of person who proclaims “our bleeding heart liberalism [has greater] empathy towards [..] suicide bombers” than towards the people they murder and maim.
The script is messy, anarchic, and I can’t help but wish I had seen it staged by a different company, one whose director and dramaturg had read the text more deeply, had been more appreciative of its rabidly sardonic qualities. Prop designer Nick Robinette supplies the most creative engagement with the text, coming up with a nicely comic riff on the line ‘hymens for sale’ in a manner that evokes photographer Cindy Sherman’s early ’90s work.
Ultimately, the most telling (and radical?) irony comes at the show’s end. Three women echo Solanas’ call to “dismantle the monetary system […] overthrow the government [ … and] eradicate all men.” At this point in time, radical feminism mainly exists as a paranoid fantasy evangelized by insecure misogynists (Rush Limbaugh’s ‘feminazis’). When it comes to the real world, a different sort of feminist is staking a claim to genuine power, its figurehead a self-proclaimed cool-headed pragmatist who is now very likely to become the next president of the United States.
Ian Thal is a playwright, performer, and theater educator specializing in mime, commedia dell’arte, and puppetry, and has been known to act on Boston area stages from time to time, sometimes with Teatro delle Maschere. He has performed his one-man show, Arlecchino Am Ravenous, in numerous venues in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. One of his as-of-yet unproduced full-length plays was picketed by a Hamas supporter during a staged reading. He is looking for a home for his latest play, The Conversos of Venice, which is a thematic deconstruction of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Formerly the community editor at The Jewish Advocate, he blogs irregularly at the unimaginatively entitled The Journals of Ian Thal, and writes the “Nothing But Trouble” column for The Clyde Fitch Report.Buy Photo U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, middle, hosts a copyright listening session Tuesday at Belmont University in Nashville. (Photo: Shelley Mays / The Tennessean)Buy Photo
A co-writer behind the international smash hit "All About That Bass" said he was only paid $5,679 in streaming revenue, crystallizing the plight of songwriters as he spoke to key members of Congress during a roundtable discussion Tuesday about music copyright.
The roundtable was hosted at Belmont University on Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee, which is taking a listening tour after nearly two years, 20 hearings and more than 100 witness testimonies in Washington, D.C.
U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, the committee chairman, said the goal is to escape Washington and hear from Nashville stakeholders about how they're affected by the current music copyright climate. Goodlatte began by asking the 21-member panel representing record label executives, publishers, songwriters, music industry advocacy groups, attorneys and broadcasters about where there is agreement on what changes are necessary to the copyright system.
Producer and songwriter Kevin Kadish, one of the first speakers, zeroed in on financial challenges songwriters face with music streaming services.
"I've never heard a songwriter complain about radio royalties as much as streaming royalties," Kadish said. "That was the real issue for us, like 1 million streams equals $90. For a song like 'All About That Bass,' that I wrote, which had 178 million streams. I mean $5,679? That's my share. That's as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career and No. 1 in 78 countries. But you're making $5,600. How do you feed your family?"
Five Republicans, including four members of the Judiciary Committee, were on hand for the listening tour. They were Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California; Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas; and Rep. Doug Collins, R-Georgia. Brentwood Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn was also in attendance.
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Collins is the lead sponsor of the Songwriter Equity Act, legislation designed to improve royalty payouts to publishers and songwriters such as Kadish. Collins told The Tennessean afterward that he believes the listening session served to highlight the points of agreement between the splintered factions of Nashville's music industry.
Collins said it was useful to hear from creators on the impact of the fast-growing streaming marketplace. The Recording Industry Association of America reported on Monday that streaming revenues have eclipsed $1 billion. But songwriters and publishers argue they're not getting their fair share of the pie.
"The thing I felt the best about was there is common ground on a number of issues," Collins said. "And the (agreement was that) there is inequity at this point — how you solve that inequity there may be some disagreement. But we're moving to some ideas that would remove the governmental barriers. Almost everyone said, except for the ones who want status quo, that the government part of it is something that could be removed, and there's a better way to fix that."
Music copyright reform is a complicated, tangled issue that pits business partners on opposite sides of some proposals and in agreement on others.
Representatives from the radio broadcast industry made clear their opposition to the creation of a performance royalty for terrestrial radio, which is a proposal on the table with the Fair Play, Fair Pay Act. Questions of whether a single federal judge or private arbitrators should settle royalty rate disputes bogged down the conversation.
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Buy Photo The listening session Tuesday at Belmont University focused on how many in Nashville are affected by the current music copyright climate (Photo: Shelley Mays / The Tennessean)
One idea that gained traction during the discussion was the creation of a centralized music copyright database, which would be used to improve transparency and to simplify licensing. That suggestion was made earlier this year in a report by the U.S. Copyright Office. Many stakeholders at the roundtable discussion echoed the need for improved transparency on how royalty revenues are distributed.
Collins told The Tennessean he is unsure if a government-run or privately run database would be preferable. He said he's been impressed with Copyright Office Director Maria Pallante and is considering possible reforms to give her office more clout. Right now, the Copyright Office is under the Library of Congress. Collins said he is not ready to go into specifics for what that proposal may look like.
"There's some ideas we're thinking about," Collins said. "There's some others who want to move it completely. I'm not sure we're on board with moving it completely. There's a model I've sort of played with, and we're not ready to get there."
For now Collins has set his sights on pushing the Songwriter Equity Act, which seeks to create a willing buyer, willing seller arrangement for songwriters and publishers. Copyright owners would be able to offer the fair market value of their songs, including synchronization licensing, as evidence when arguing the digital royalty rates at the federal Copyright Royalty Board.
Participants in the roundtable included executives and influencers from most corners of the music industry — though representatives from Nashville's growing music technology and entrepreneurship sector were largely absent. The 21-person roundtable was, with the exception of two women, mostly affluent, middle-age, white men.
Reach Nate Rau at 615-259-8094 and on Twitter @tnnaterau.
Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1FdML6MA Jacksonville group has purchased four buildings downtown, including the historic Laura Street Trio.
SouthEast Holdings, a real estate investment trust, paid $3 million for the trio - Florida Life, Bisbee and Florida National Bank, also known as the Marble Bank, at Laura and Forsyth streets - and the Barnett Bank building at Adams and Laura streets.
Steve Atkins, who leads the purchasing group and has been involved for years with efforts to buy the buildings, said the Barnett building will become a university-level education center with student housing and that a parking garage will be built in the area. But he said he could give no more details - other than that the entire project will be mixed-use - before a major unveiling in two weeks.
The money was lent to the group by Stache Investments Corp., which is headed by Jaguars owner Shad Khan.
The four buildings all date back to the first part of the last century, with the Marble Bank building the oldest at 111 years. Atkins said the Trio has been vacant for about 15 years and the Barnett building about 10 years.
The project will be developed by a separate corporation, SouthEast Development Group, formed by Atkins and general contractors Woody Garner and David Searcy, who merged several real estate and construction companies - Atkins Group Inc., AGI Equities, Dav-Lin Construction and Linea LLC.
SouthEast Holdings has a variety of investors, said Atkins, who is principal and managing director of SouthEast Development Group and president of SouthEast Holdings.
He said the four buildings are solid structurally but merely shells with just walls and floors remaining. The exteriors will be restored to their historic origins at a cost of about $6 million, he said.
How much the interior renovations cost depends on the use. He said he has some tenants lined up, but would not name them yet.
Asked about public money for the project, Atkins said only that he has had active discussions with the city.
Louis Nutter, who handled the sale for real estate firm CBRE, said he had gotten verbal commitments for city incentives in the past, but nothing in writing. He had multiple written offers and two contracts since he started to handle the buildings in 2010, he said. But they all fell through for multiple reasons.
"It feels good to sell it, and not just because we're going to get paid," Nutter said. "I'm more excited to see what's going to happen, and that it's going to happen downtown."
Atkins also said he intends that the SouthEast Holdings trust become a catalyst for further development.
"We intend to roll out a new initiative in the private sector for downtown," he said. "The last I read, there are close to 3,000 people living downtown. The city has a goal of 10,000, and we want to do everything we can to help."
It's been a long road to find a buyer.
Orlando developer Cameron Kuhn's plans fell through and Chicago-based JDI Realty Inc. foreclosed on the properties in 2008 after Kuhn defaulted. The Private Bank then took them over from JDI Realty.
Last year, Don Shea of the Jacksonville Civic Council and Jerry Mallot, president of JAXUSA Partnership, brought the buildings to Khan's attention.
Wednesday, Khan released a statement about his involvement:
"As you know, I have not been shy to express my commitment to Jacksonville. Stache Investments was established specifically to help identify and potentially provide financial support to like-minded groups with an actionable vision for Jacksonville, and particularly downtown. Stephen Atkins has that vision, which is why we were happy to fund his purchase of the Barnett Bank Building. We'll have more to discuss on this in the weeks ahead."
For Atkins, it's the end of the purchase phase and the beginning of the developmental one.
"Part of the criticism is that it took so long," he said. "But when I first started negotiating, the price was over $6 million."
roger.bull@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4296Slaughterhouse One
It’s been over two years since I originally planned on writing this story and I’ve struggled with it for a very long time. The butchery of animals is a necessary component of our modern day food chain. But few ever get to experience the reality of seeing a walking, living animal going from breath to death in an instant. Witnessing a beef slaughter (or any other animal for that matter) is a visceral experience – and it’s not for everybody. Having the opportunity to see that very same animal be processed in under an hour takes it to another level. I’ve reflected on this event often and it still has a profound impact on me today.
I worked in fish markets for several years through college and I’ve seen my fair share of nasty bits. I have dealt with things like the great displeasure of gutting a shark only to find other, formerly living fish half-digested in its belly. Nothing will cure your hangover at 6 am quite like it! None of that prepared me for the journey I was about to take out to Chimacum on the Olympic Peninsula to visit with Phil, Doyle and the rest of the crew at Egg and I farm.
The Journey
I took the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston in January and typically rainy and medium grey on the way over to the farm. The drive from the landing out to the farm was filled with creepy, almost medieval looking forests filled with emerald greens brightly contrasting colors of vibrant, dangling lichen hanging off the branches just over the road.
Looking out the car window at my surroundings I could grasp the reason grunge music came from Seattle. To me, it captures the sounds and general feeling of greyness, malaise, rain, solitude – it all comes through in the music. The voices of Kurt, Eddie and Chris accompanied me on this trip to see the slaughter of an angry cow named Artemis.
The phrase “know where your food comes from” has gotten a lot of play over the past several years and it’s only a matter of time before ‘Big Food’ begin to use it in a way that makes it become cliché if it hasn’t already. I’ve written and spoken these words many times and I have done my best to put my money where my mouth or pen is. I had been offered the opportunity to meet Phil Vogelzang after writing an article on Staging at the Fatted Calf in Napa Valley that he saw in Seattle Weekly. He’d reached out to the editor and she put us in touch which set the wheels in motion for the journey.
The Moonlighting Pig Farmer
Phil is a city-dwelling Radiologist by day and a part-time cattle and pig farmer on the side. He raises Scottish Highland cattle and Tamworth pigs with his business partner Doyle who runs the day-to-day operation. Phil told me that he raises the Highlands as they are about as close as you can get to a wild Scottish cow. They are a very old breed, are sturdy and they don’t need much care or meds. Bonus – they are very cool looking with their long hair and are known to be a little leaner on cover fat and they marble up nice. Tasty.
Phil’s ranch is in Chimacum, Washington and it was once owned by author Betty MacDonald of The Egg and I fame. On that same property he has a communal abattoir which can be used for free by the local community with only a promise to keep it clean. He’d offered to meet in early January for the planned slaughter of a cow and, of course, I jumped at the chance. This was an experience I wanted first-hand and I felt compelled to go.
I purposefully didn’t eat before arriving as I was unsure about how the event would affect me. I don’t know if it was nerves or excitement. The killing of an animal for food does not frighten me. Nor am I some Pollyanna thinking that my food comes from a factory or ‘some other place’ that I don’t have to think about. I know what happens to animals and I’ve worked on butchering them extensively. None of that experience prepared me for seeing an 800 pound animal being killed right before my eyes. It was essential for me to earn my badge of honor by watching the beef slaughter process to even begin to credibly say I knew anything about meat.
A Peaceful Prelude
When I arrived on the farm there were several stunningly beautiful shaggy brown cows in a paddock with a mother and daughter calf in a separate pen. Apparently, the cow was fittingly named Artemis though she had an issue with one eye which made her a bit ornery. She was also just over 5 years of age (ancient in cattle terms) – so it was agreed that she would be slaughtered for ground beef as she’d passed the point of being tender enough for steaks and other cuts.
Almost immediately, I was struck by the connection between the mother and her calf and it was clear that even though the younger one had been weaned – she was still dependent on her mother for companionship. They strode together, looking on as they knew something was up.
As the process got started, James, Matt and Phil worked to corral both mother and calf into a pen. I’d asked Phil if he thought it would be appropriate to move the calf away from the mother prior to slaughter to which he agreed noting that the added stress on the animal would be unnecessary. However, the mother was shot in front of the calf which was a bit disturbing to me – and likely the calf.
A Shock to the System
After much cajoling and general chasing around the pen, the men finally coaxed Aretmis close enough to the edge of the pen so that she could be shot. While Doyle held a.22 caliber rifle behind the corner of a building, the others prompted her up to the rail. I positioned myself to take a photo and snapped the shutter just as the gunshot rang out. Even though I’d expected it, I still bit my tongue as the gun fired.
Artemis went right down and Phil went to work severing the jugular vein with a short knife. It was a struggle that was difficult to watch as I was unsure if the cow was brain-dead given all of its writhing movement. Phil and Doyle assured me it was though the cow seemed to still be breathing even as Phil severed the jugular on the other side of its neck. Bright, red blood flowed to the ground in spurts as the heart continued to beat until finally it seemed she was dead.
The rest of the men readied a pulley to hang the cow from as Phil went about the task of cutting a slit between its leg bone and Achilles’ tendon so that it could be hung. Artemis was still kicking and everyone now seemed unsure whether it was dead. Doyle put another shot in its head and I bit my tongue again at the sound of the shot and the smell of gunpowder. At that point, she seemed to finally stop kicking and Phil could make the necessary cuts to continue the slaughter.
The Beef Slaughter Process
The team went about hanging up the cow on the pulley so that it could be lowered and rested on a sawhorse-type of contraption for skinning.
The crew worked on making incisions to remove the hooves while Doyle cut off the animal’s head.
The cow was then skinned to a point where Phil would work on breaking open the chest cavity for removal of the organs.
Once the cow’s skin had been removed, Phil broke down the middle with a Sawzall and Matt positioned garbage can for the innards while the cow was hung from a lintel on the outside of the abattoir.
Doyle and Phil worked to tie the bung was tied to prevent leakage from the intestines as it was pulled through the body and out of the cow.
The liver and heart were put into bucket for me to take home (the latter of which I made into an awesome pastrami). The rest of the edible offal was given to woman named Jeane down the road who had some dogs. The non-edibles, including the head, were dumped into a nearby compost pit to decompose and use down the road to start the cycle of life all over again.
I was amazed to see that even after 45 minutes of the cow being taken down, small muscles were still twitching all over its body. It was surreal to watch this happen with miscellaneous electrical impulses firing out from the spine. I was waiting in anticipation for the cow to somehow become reanimated and to seek vengeance on us all.
Sensory Overload
At one point, someone accidentally punctured the stomach and the odor wafted out in waves of sour, fermented grass that took me to the brink of nausea. As the cow was quartered, Doyle split the stomach of the cow to show me the varied, rugged surface area inside. It was interesting to see the structure of the internal organs as well as the trachea and windpipe which reminded me of almost PVC-like plumbing. All this amidst the varying aromas emanating from the cow, blood being everywhere and several men working together rapidly in unison.
The men were using knives which seemed out-of-place and odd for the task. I know my knives and I have several suitable for such a task. I couldn’t figure out why these guys were using such dull, short knives for the job. There was also a camaraderie established between the group. They were working hard in dreary wet weather on what would be deemed by many as a |
They would just yawn and turn off the TV. Now they love it, because they can understand it.” There’s evidence that the general public will agree: The following race, in Newport, Rhode Island, earned a 0.9 Nielsen rating—beating out the same weekend’s Tour de France coverage.
But for sailing to make it as a true spectator sport, Ellison must appeal to both a broad audience and the old hands at the yacht club. Multiboat pileups make for lousy racing but pretty good TV—and that is the bind that Ellison finds himself in today. He can dial up the carnage with crazy course designs worthy of pachinko. Or he can go classy and trust that yacht racing, newly comprehensible, will find a mass audience on its own.
No one, not even Stan Honey, knows where Ellison is going to take the America’s Cup World Series when it gets to San Francisco. But Honey does know one thing for sure. “Our shit is on schedule and on budget,” he says, to the sound of walnuts cracking between his frontal lobes, “and it works.” If the new America’s Cup does not find its way, it won’t be the fault of the navigator.
Adam Fisher (adamcfisher@gmail.com) is covering the America’s Cup for Wired until the finale in 2013.1. Aerial Hunting of Wolves
This is one of the most disturbing acts that Palin supports. Being an animal lover, supporter, and advocate I am sickened that she supports aerial hunting of wolves.
After a multi-year court battle, the Bush administration recognized in 2008 that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming. Announcing Alaska’s suit to block the listing, Palin said, “We believe that the listing was unwarranted and that it’s unprecedented to list a currently healthy population based on uncertain climate models.” [Reuters, 5/22/08]
In 2007, Palin illegally established “a $150 bounty to the state sanctioned airborne wolf hunters as an added incentive to increase their kills,” soon overturned by the Alaska State Court. [Alaska Wildlife Alliance; Anchorage Daily News, 3/31/07]
Some information on Aerial Hunting:
Aerial hunting occurs when hunters use airplanes to track an animal in the snow, chase them to exhaustion and shoot them from the air, or when hunters in airplanes track animals in the snow, herd or chase them to exhaustion, land the aircraft and shoot them from the ground.
The use of aircraft to shoot or harass animals from the air is illegal under the Airborne Hunting Act, enacted in 1972. The act was passed after a nationwide outcry against the aerial hunting of wolves in Alaska.
The circumstances surrounding Alaska’s program make it clear that the state is allowing aerial hunting, which is banned by federal law. The state exploits a loophole in the AHA to allow private hunters and private pilots.
As recently as July, a known wolf den site was staked out -- a practice that is illegal under Alaska law -- and, using helicopters, gunned down 14 adult wolves from the air. When they landed, they found the 14 helpless pups in the nearby dens -- just weeks old -- and methodically shot each one in the head. 28 wolves gunned down in all.
Rep. George Miller (CA) has introduced the Protect America's Wildlife (PAW) Act, legislation to close a federal loophole and curb Alaska's brutal aerial hunting program -- and prevent programs like it from spreading to places like the Greater Yellowstone region. Support the PAW Act
2. Women's Rights
Watch this video on Aerial Hunting (Warning: not for the faint at heart):Rep. George Miller (CA) has introduced the Protect America's Wildlife (PAW) Act, legislation to close a federal loophole and curb Alaska's brutal aerial hunting program -- and prevent programs like it from spreading to places like the Greater Yellowstone region. Support the PAW Act here
Sarah is pro-life. I do not have a problem with that, except for one thing. She opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. In 2006, Palin said that even if her daughter were raped, “I would choose life." In my opinion, I think that is a horrible way to think. I am generally against abortion, but I think if a woman is the victim of rape or incest, she should be able to decide to have an abortion. I do not believe anyone, especially the government, has the right to tell you what you can and can't do with your own body. I think what is most disturbing is the comment she made regarding her daughter.
Earlier this year, Palin used a veto to cut funding for a state program that benefits teen mothers in need of a place to live. Funding for Covenant House Alaska, which provides transitional housing for teen mothers, was cut by 20 percent — from $5 million to $3.9 million. [Washington Post, 9/3/08]
Sarah Supports Abstinence-Only Policies. In 2006, the Eagle Forum Alaska asked Palin whether she would “support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education.” Palin replied, “Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.” [Politico,9/1/08]. An abstinence-only policy will not teach young adults the importance of protection, the risk of STD's, and the risk of pregnancy. Many teens choose to have sex. If the policy she supports became the primary teaching, teens would not learn important issues regarding safe sex. She is said to be against birth control and sex-education. Did she not teach her daughter about the importance of birth control?
Watch these videos about Palin's views on birth control, sex education, and abortion.
I cannot ignore one rumor. I don't know the truth, nor am I going to speculate. However, I decided to include a video questioning who is the real mother of Trig. Is Sarah or Bristol the mother? There is even speculation that Bristol is pregnant now with her 2nd child.
3. Energy
One major event I am protesting right now is the possibility of drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge (which can be seen in my previous post.)
Palin Is A Top Arctic Wildlife Refuge Drilling Advocate. Palin said she thinks McCain is “going to evolve into, eventually, supporting ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) opening also” and “I’d like the opportunity to get to change his mind about ANWR.” [Kudlow & Co.,6/25/08]-- As I have said before, development in this habitat would threaten numerous animals, including polar and grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, migratory whales and many species of birds.
Palin said she thinks McCain is “going to evolve into, eventually, supporting ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) opening also” and “I’d like the opportunity to get to change his mind about ANWR.” [Kudlow & Co.,6/25/08]-- As I have said before, Palin Opposes Lieberman’s Bill To Prevent Arctic Refuge Drilling. In a letter to Congress opposing the Arctic Wilderness Act (S. 2316), Palin wrote that “as a citizen of the United States” she believes “development [of the Refuge] should be authorized.” [Letter to Sen. Akaka, 11/0/07]
In a letter to Congress opposing the Arctic Wilderness Act (S. 2316), Palin wrote that “as a citizen of the United States” she believes “development [of the Refuge] should be authorized.” [Letter to Sen. Akaka, 11/0/07] Palin Dismisses Alternative Energy. Palin said that “Congress needs to lift the ban on drilling” because “alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop.” [Charleston Post and Courier, 8/16/08]-- Last night I listened to John McCain make his speech at the Republican National Convention. In his speech he mentioned his desire to seek out alternative energy. I hope Sarah doesn't change his mind.
Palin Is Suing To Lift Protected Status For Polar Bears. After a multi-year court battle, the Bush administration recognized in 2008 that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming. Announcing Alaska’s suit to block the listing, Palin said, “We believe that the listing was unwarranted and that it’s unprecedented to list a currently healthy population based on uncertain climate models.” [Reuters, 5/22/08] Sarah believes we "need the oil."
Watch the video of Palin being interviewed regarding her polar bear law suit so oil can be drilled. "We need that oil!" No, what we need is to stop depending on oil:
A video condemning oil drilling
*** Update: Read Part 2
Stay tuned for "The Real Sarah Palin" Part 2. I will be writing this over the weekend and hope to publish it Saturday night.*** Update: Read Part 2 here
As you may know, the polar bear is the most threatended species in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. It is the most important onshore denning habitat for America's vanishing polar bears. Sarah's response to this issue:After a multi-year court battle, the Bush administration recognized in 2008 that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming. Announcing Alaska’s suit to block the listing, Palin said, “We believe that the listing was unwarranted and that it’s unprecedented to list a currently healthy population based on uncertain climate models.” [Reuters, 5/22/08] Sarah believes we "need the oil."Watch the video of Palin being interviewed regarding her polar bear law suit so oil can be drilled. "We need that oil!" No, what we need is to stop depending on oil:A video condemning oil drillingIf you like this post, please social bookmark (digg, reddit, stumble, etc) it below:
Before really knowing who Sarah Palin was, I was quite happy that John McCain decided to choose her as Vice President. However, my views have changed. Sarah stands for many things I advocate against. This post is not an attack on John McCain, nor is it to support Barack Obama. It is simply to show who Sarah Palin really is, and my dislike for her. I can only hope that you read what I have found and do your own research. This analysis of Sarah Palin will be done in two parts. This is post number 1.I want to mention if you find that Palin has written the opposite of what I researched, please be aware that she wrote a campaign booklet for her 2006 gubernatorial bid. Her co-author, Sean Parnell, is now Alaska's Lieutenant Governor. As we all know, politicians have a tendency to say and write whatever is necessary to get elected. What she wrote in the booklet does not reflect what she really ended up doing.DOVER — Details remained sketchy Monday about a two-victim shooting that occurred early Sunday morning at a Dover nightclub, police said.
Two men ages 25 and 22 were each wounded in the right leg during an incident at approximately 1:25 a.m. at Allure Night Club at 865 N. DuPont Highway, Dover Police spokesman Master Cpl. Mark Hoffman said Monday.
The men, suffering non-life threatening injuries, were taken to Bayhealth-Kent General Hospital in Dover via private transportation afterward.
According to Cpl. Hoffman, investigators talked to the wounded men and “[a]s far as we can tell, they provided some information about the incident.”
While a crowd numbering in the hundreds was at the scene when five or six shots were fired, the police spokesman said, “[n]one have come forward as of yet. Officers attempted to interview people that night, without success.”
Thus, police said, there was no updated information to provide about a suspected shooter or shooters.
On Monday, police were checking to see if surveillance video was available at the site that was formerly Bubba’s nightclub.
No property damage was reported to police.
Authorities said at least one shooting victim may have been released from the hospital and the other, in stable condition, may have needed surgery to repair an injury.
Police asked anyone with information to call 736-7111. Callers may remain anonymous.
Tips can also be submitted to law enforcement through tip lines maintained by Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-TIP-3333, online at www.tipsubmit.com or through the Dover PD MyPD Mobile App.
Reach staff writer Craig Anderson at canderson@newszap.comEveryone loves a good blooper, but this scene from Tuesday's "The Price is Right" may just take the cake.
CNBC reports that on an episode that aired Tuesday, a woman named Danielle was called down to play. She won two prizes — great job, Danielle! — but while the first prize, a sauna, seemed like an awesome freebie, the second didn't make too much sense for Danielle, who uses a wheelchair.
It was a treadmill.
Here's how the scene unfolded:
Folks on Twitter were left a little dumbfounded by the whole thing:
And CNBC's Eli Langer reports "viewer Chrissie Johnson asked whether this was a 'producer fail, insensitive or nah?'" on Twitter.
If Danielle was unimpressed with her prizes, she didn't show it.
"I'm just so excited right now!" she exclaimed to host Drew Carey.God does not exist. However, let’s grant for a moment that God is real. Religious texts and practices show that God is wicked, cruel, and immoral, and totally unworthy of affection by moral human beings.
For the sake of brevity, we’ll exclusively consider the God of the New Testament, and ignore the God of the Old Testament, Koran, and other books. This God is often portrayed as hip, cool, and loving. If we dig deeper into some of the basic tenets of Christianity held by mainstream Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, we’ll see that it’s an elaborate smoke screen. The God of the New Testament is a beast.
The Problem of Evil
Christian churches usually portray God as all powerful, all knowing, and all benevolent. Long ago, freethinkers discovered the silver bullet to prove that God is not a moral agent. The problem of evil, in its simplest form, goes like this, “If God is good, why does he let evil exist in the world?”
Some Christian apologists sidestep this argument by simply conceding that God is not all powerful, or all knowing, or all benevolent, or any combination of the three. Any one of these three concessions is in itself a strong argument why God does not deserve our worship.
But following the standard Christian line that God is powerful, can see all, and loves everyone, the problem of evil should make every believer reconsider his or her faith. Allowing suffering to occur, although not as wicked as actually inflicting the suffering, is still an evil.
It’s difficult for us to account for this in our daily lives because human morality is infinitely complicated by the fact that we do not have infinite resources. Choosing to help one person or group over another person or group, and by how much, is an extremely challenging moral decision. It is vastly complicated by the fact that we cannot see the future and we don’t know what the results of our actions will be.
If we had limitless resources and perfect knowledge of the consequences of our decisions, however, we would have a clear moral imperative to start correcting the world’s ills. Granted, not everyone agrees on what a perfect world should look like, but surely we can all agree to strike murder, rape, starvation, and war from the table. God, on the other hand, is content to let these evils continue to ravage humanity. That makes him partially responsible for them, and that should disgust us.
The Vanity of Worship
If a man did something nice for you and then insisted you kneel and worship him regularly for the rest of your life, would you have any respect for that man? Even if he paid you the ultimate favor of saving your life, would that earn him eternal supplications? It certainly wouldn’t be moral for him to make that demand, or accept the worship.
You’d think that an entity as powerful as God would be above petty requests like this. It’s incredibly vain. As bad as this is, however, God manages to escalate it to wildly absurd levels. The New Testament repeatedly reminds us that the punishment for failing to entertain God’s vanity is eternal damnation. It’s not enough for God to puff up his feathers and make narcissistic demands on our behavior; he has to threaten us with unending torture if we don’t.
Reasoning people know that Hell is fictional, but for the sake of argument let’s grant its existence. If the Hell narrative is true, then yes, it is totally rational to bow down to the patronizing spirit in the sky. But if this is true, please do not claim that God is good. If this is true, God is nothing more than a gangster extorting “protection fees.” He’s Kim Jong Un sending people to the gulag for not publicly revering him. He is a vile thug, deserving our contempt.
Many Christians today reject this particular aspect of Christianity and do not seriously believe that decent non-Christians will burn in Hell (of course, we all know that millions of people do believe this repulsive proposition). We can applaud their evolution, but we can’t pretend that the New Testament doesn’t make this threat.
Prayer
Most Christians pray. Prayer comes in many forms, and one of the more common is to pray for something. “God, I pray for peace on Earth. I pray for my sick Aunt Suzy to recover.” More selfishly, “God, I pray for a better job. I pray to win the lottery.” A basic review of day-to-day reality shows that these prayers are never fulfilled (or at least not with any greater frequency than basic, everyday chance).
And yet, people wouldn’t make these requests unless they had some expectation that they might be fulfilled. What does that say about God, if he could actually be swayed by prayers? It would be reprehensible behavior to grant and withhold benefits based on the number of prayers issued for each request. Why is dear Aunt Suzy more worthy of divine intervention, simply because she has lots of Christian friends, than someone who is friends mostly with non-Christians?
Granted, maybe God thinks all these prayers are ridiculous. If so, it would be polite of him to simply inform us that our prayers are vain and we’d be better off focusing on real solutions to our problems. If he doesn’t have the time to inform every believer individually, he could at the very least tell his clergy members to stop encouraging the practice in their congregations.
The Dehumanization of the Cross
The most offensive aspect of the New Testament God is his attempt to strip us of the most important thing of all – our humanity.
The primary quality distinguishing us from every other known living creature is our awareness of our own consciousness and decision making. This awareness is what makes us responsible for our actions. When we make unethical decisions, we are held accountable for them, either by formal punishment, social pressures, or simply inner turmoil. These stresses are an important part of what pushes us to consider the ethical implications of our decisions, and to eventually improve ourselves. It’s a heavy burden, but it’s what makes us human.
God wants to take that away from us. He wants us to recognize Jesus Christ as our savior and thereby transfer responsibility for our sins to him. We never have to improve ourselves morally in the here and now because, according to the New Testament, our sins were paid for two thousand years ago when a man got nailed to a cross. Moral behavior is merely a recommendation, because salvation awaits us the moment we confess our belief in Jesus (and, perhaps, follow the arbitrary guidelines set by whichever denomination we choose).
Moral responsibility is non-transferable. We should be outright disdainful of any deity that asks us to bargain away our autonomy.
What Does This Have to Do With Politics?
Politics is inseparable from morality, and politics and religion in America are tightly interwoven. Promoting secularism, atheism, and agnosticism are valuable ways to enhance both the moral and political health of our country. Pointing out that God is not good is a useful first step toward showing believers that God does not, in fact, exist.The U.S. will deploy F-22 fighter jets to Europe "very soon" as part of the "European Reassurance Initiative," says the Air Force. (Reuters)
The Air Force is set to deploy a small number of F-22 fighters to Europe, the first deployment of its kind, as a part of the continuing effort to reassure allies in the region, a senior Air Force official announced Monday.
“Russia’s military activity in the Ukraine continues to be of great concern to us and to our European allies,” Deborah Lee James, Secretary of the Air Force told reporters.
James, who called the deployment “the strong side of the coin,” in the United States’ approach to Russia noted that the aircraft’s presence in the region is rotational and specifically for training.
While James did not say when the aircraft would deploy for operational security reasons, she did emphasize that they would be deploying “soon.”
The announcement to send the additional fighter comes less than week after the Air Force announced that it would be sending an additional dozen A-10 Thunderbolts to Europe in support of a training exercise scheduled there.
The F-22 and A-10 are markedly different aircraft. The F-22’s primary role is for air-to-air combat against other fighters, while the A-10’s job is mainly for close air support for troops on the ground.
The F-22 deployment will be for a relatively short amount of time and will not be supporting the current air policing efforts in the region, according to Pentagon Spokesman Maj. James Brindle.
Russian incursions into European airspace has skyrocketed since the conflict in Ukraine started last year, with NATO reporting more than 150 Russian intrusions in 2014, more than four times the amount in 2013.
In the instance of both the F-22 and A-10 deployments, the Air Force has reiterated that the main purpose of the aircraft’s presence is to help train and familiarize the United States’ European allies.In a recent interview, anti-violence video game crusader Jack Thompson addressed censorship, how youth respond differently to video game violence than adults, and how he varies from Feminist Frequency critic Anita Sarkeesian.
Thompson and Sarkeesian have been viewed by many as an example of how the political spectrum comes full circle, with radicals on both the far-left and far-right intersecting on authoritarian censorship of culture.
When asked about censoring video games, Thompson replied, “I’m opposed to censorship, which is prior restraint, which is unconstitutional in our country. All I have ever tried to do regarding GTA (Grand Theft Auto) or any other age-rated game is get the industry to abide by the age ratings. That is the way it works in the UK. That is all I have tried to do here.”
But alongside “abide by,” Thompson could have added “change.” In the past, the activist has called for games like Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas and Killer 7 to be re-rated “Adults Only” (AO) instead of “Mature” (M). Whether Thompson realizes it or not, this reclassification is backdoor censorship for video games, as retailers are extremely reluctant to sell games with the “AO” label. Comparing the rating systems for video games and movies shows why.
Rating systems used by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).
Many popular Hollywood blockbusters, such as The Hangover (2009) and American Sniper (2014) are packed with violence and sexual content and assigned the “R” rating. Similarly, top-selling video games like the Call of Duty and BioShock franchises are rated “M.” Both ratings essentially say that the media text should not be experienced by those under the age of 17. Both ratings have become the accepted standards in America for identifying adult material.
Both the MPAA and ESRB have ratings that permit only adults to experience content: “NC-17” and “AO.” But think about it: when was the last time you saw an “NC-17” movie? Played an AO-rated game? Never? Even if you have seen or played an adults-only film or game, I can almost assure you it wasn’t a financially successful one.
By saying a film or game is for 18 and up instead of 17 and up, ratings boards effectively punt this media out of the market. When the ESRB changed the rating on Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas from “M” to “AO,” Target, Walmart, GameStop, and other big retailers pulled the game from their shelves; the developer lost $28.8 million during that fiscal quarter.
Thompson apparently justifies this market destruction by stating that “teen brains are neurobiologically different than adult” ones. The activist states that “the brain scan studies at Indiana University and Harvard that show violent entertainment is consumed in a different part of the brain in young people than in adults–the party [sic] that leads to copycatting. It’s simple neuroscience.”
When pointed to contradicting research conducted by Associate Professor Christopher J. Ferguson, who has guest edited for an American Psychological Association magazine issue involving mental health and video games, and asked if “we need to consider different research models before drawing conclusions,” Thompson simply said “the science is settled,” without elaborating or providing a rebuttal to Ferguson’s work.
Similarly, when asked what he thought about a study showing that playing violent video games could reduce real-life violence by allowing gamers to “blow off steam,” Thompson responded “bull crap.” The activist’s abrupt dismissal of research that is not in favor of his view, instead of logically arguing the issue, is reminiscent of Sarkeesian’s own refusal to debate those who disagree with her (even when offered $10,000 to donate to a charity of her choice). This construction of an echo chamber in which only one point of view is disseminated and received is not conducive to the public sphere of debate on which Western democracy has thrived.
On Anita Sarkeesian, Thompson said, “She’s liberal politically. I am a conservative. She also is all bent out of shape about female stereotyping. Not a big problem when it comes to the more grotesque consequences of kids consuming games. She also tries to curry favor from the industry, as if she were some kind of flirt, speaking of stereotypes. If you are fighting with an industry, you don’t accept their awards and try to be some sort of heroine to that industry. Pathetic, really. She’s not a warrior on the issue. She’s a self-promoter, and I think everyone has pretty much figured that out.”
Thompson also addressed the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California could not ban the sale of violent games to children. He said “Justice Scalia, who wrote the opinion, has been a libertarian whacko. He said there is no evidence that games have any harmful effects on young people. I think he must have consumed the evidence in a medical marijuana case before he wrote that opinion. He is out of his mind on that issue.”
Follow Rob Shimshock on Twitter.SHOUYANG, China — Jin Peisheng, a drilling rig foreman, knows the challenges of trying to extract natural gas from a coal seam under the cornfields here in north-central China.
Cracks in the subterranean coal are flooded with water that needs to be pumped out before the gas will emerge. The coal seams are so cold that gels injected into the well, which are meant to help release the gas, sometimes become gummy and block the flow instead. And there is constant concern about hitting the labyrinths of active coal mines that honeycomb the area.
“The big uncertainty is what’s underground — if there’s a tunnel, that’s a big danger. It would be dangerous for the miners,” Mr. Jin said.
Faced with severe air pollution from coal and a rising dependence on energy imports, China has been eager to follow the United States by rapidly increasing natural gas output. Replacing coal with natural gas has also been central to Beijing’s hopes to limit emissions of global warming gases in China, the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide by a wide margin.Sean Hannity is a piece of shit. I know I’m not reinventing the wheel here, and it would be equally obvious to say something like “water is wet” or “Donald Trump is a moron”, but I feel that an internet dogpile may actually be helpful right now because Sean Hannity’s job status with Fox News seems as precarious as it’s ever been.
If you haven’t been following Hannity’s latest grift, congratulations—your life is better than mine. To catch you up: a former DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was murdered in Washington D.C. in what police concluded was a botched robbery. Because everyone on the unhinged right (I have decided to stop using the term far-right, because that connotes actual policy beliefs, and these people have none) believes that Hillary Clinton is the kind of person who would run a child sex ring out of a pizza shop, a conspiracy theory instantly took root that she and the DNC murdered Seth Rich to cover up documents that he was passing to Wikileaks. Julian Assange fulfilled his duty as an agent of chaos and injected his “credibility” into this narrative, and Hannity was off.
Julian Assange all but identifies the 27 year old DNC worker as a source and we are to ignore this? https://t.co/PhnIJu4zEt — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 18, 2017
Despite D.C. police confirming Rich's death as a botched robbery, as of 1:20 pm EST yesterday, Hannity was still pushing this bullshit line.
Shortly after these tweets, Fox News sent out the following statement about their “news” article that pushed this conspiracy theory:
On May 16, a story was posted on the Fox News website on the investigation into the 2016 murder of DNC Staffer Seth Rich. The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting. Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed.
Fox News staffers vented their frustrations with Hannity's nightly updates on a conspiracy theory that has been debunked by every reasonable outlet out there. Seth Rich's brother—Aaron Rich—wrote a letter to Fox News asking Hannity to stop covering this lie. His plea can be summarized by this line:
“We appeal to your decency to not cause a grieving family more pain and suffering by allowing your platform to be used by someone to drag our family name through the mud.”
Aaron Rich expressed his decency, class and humanity through this letter, but it was lost on someone bereft of any of those qualities. Sean Hannity has the cognitive ability of a single-celled organism and a personality that is an amalgam of all internet commenters ever. He is a parasite that other parasites are embarrassed to be seen with. His mere presence on the roster gives Fox News the same credibility as Infowars.
Soon after Fox News retracted their story, Sean Hannity pretended to give a shit about the Rich family, responding to an op-ed written by Seth Rich's parents in The Washington Post.
When I saw this story after radio & some personal convos I had 2 day, as a father this really tears at my heart. https://t.co/09pUz9bF7C — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017
I will address this suffering family tonight at 10. It breaks my heart. Know this, I will pursue the truth wherever it may lead, 4 justice. — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017
That feigned empathy lasted less than an hour, as he was back to torture the Rich's and push this debunked theory.
One last point before air. I have so much more I know than I can discuss at this time. I CANNOT wait to share with all of u Please patience https://t.co/9OBfqUedWR — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017
Ok TO BE CLEAR, I am closer to the TRUTH than ever. Not only am I not stopping, I am working harder. Updates when available. Stay tuned! — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017
If there was any confusion in those statements, Hannity clarified when he responded to @TrumpGirlStrong's tweet that said “Do NOT give up on @seanhannity. He's not giving up on #SethRich. I can guarantee you that!! #SethRichMurder #Justice4Seth #StandWithHannity”
Not giving up at all. I'm working harder than ever to get to the truth the family wants and deserves. Stay tuned. https://t.co/dVjWT6PZyh — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) May 24, 2017
Sean Hannity doesn’t care about Seth Rich. He doesn’t care about getting “to the truth the family wants and deserves.” He only cares about saving his tanking ratings and moving to the front of the line of Pepe le fascists suckling at the teat of Dear Leader Donald. Every time Black Lives Matter makes the news, Sean Hannity gets up on his racist soapbox and declares for all to hear that “Blue Lives Matter!” Except when those blue lives come to a conclusion that doesn’t fit his propaganda, then they’re part of the evil liberal machine.
This lie is designed to knock the very real Trump-Russia stories off the front page, and it’s not going to work. In the span of a few weeks, Bill O’Reilly went from Fox News’ chief sexual harasser to the unemployment line because his advertisers abandoned him. In America, the almighty dollar is the final arbiter, and we have the power to influence where those dollars go. Media Matters compiled a list of Sean Hannity’s advertisers, and if you are loyal to any of these brands, let them know that if their money continues to flow towards someone who is publicly tormenting a grieving family by slandering their murdered son, then you will find a competitor who is not giving their cash to a sub-human creature who will exploit anyone and anything for his own personal gain.
Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.The NFL season is brutal, poignant, and unforgiving, akin more to a harsh snow storm than a run on the beach. One mistake along the way, and teams are forced into must win games to recover. Last week, the Kansas City Chiefs saw their second ‘must win’ game against the Los Angeles Chargers. Based on the Chiefs play, hope for the playoffs was waning. Yet, they won as the offense pivoted with efficiency underlying their modus operandi. This last week against the Miami Dolphins did not fit the ‘must win’ narrative due to the juxtaposition of overall talent. However, to win the AFC West, beating the Dolphins was a necessity.
And beat the Dolphins they did, finally accomplishing momentum and showing resiliency when it mattered. The overt narrative on the game is the Chiefs first AFC West championship in back-to-back seasons in franchise history while being the second team since 1981 to have a 4,000-yard quarterback, a 1,000-yard tight end and wide receiver, and a 1,000-yard running back. But creeping under those lines is the Chiefs arising from the snow storm due to efficiency preserving their life. Under the scrutiny that is the NFL season, the Chiefs dug to their roots of efficiency and came out alive – the Kansas City Chiefs week 16 stats reveal that notion, and provide a spectrum of equal hope and concern for the playoffs.
Kansas City Chiefs Week 16 Stats and Charts – Efficiency and Resiliency
Chaos Theory
(At this point in the season, it might be a good time to revisit the concept of chaos theory. In week one, the mathematical debauchery was explained as essentially a fractal graph that assigned value to outcomes in a game, defining which team had more momentum or chaos control.)
The Chiefs spent Christmas Eve in their regular season finale at Arrowhead Stadium. Under the jovial Christmas spirit, the Chiefs fans supported their team, and the defense did not disappoint. The Chiefs continued a trend of aggressive tilt off the bat by forcing a fumble on the Dolphins first drive, continuing a trend which saw landing sacks in the opening of the past two weeks.
Derrick Johnson hammered Jarvis Landry on a third and six, forcing a fumble, with Marcus Peters right on point to recover. The most resounding point on this play may have been the fumble, but its causation only came thanks to the entire Chiefs defense swarming to the ball and being ready to play, a theme that continued for part of the afternoon.
The Chiefs offense took the football and only managed a field goal. Again, a repeating theme of an offense that has a hard time capturing momentum. No matter, the next time the Chiefs got the ball, Alex Smith was not only efficient, but proficient. Using Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill, Smith punctured the Dolphins directly over their most refined unit – safety Reshad Jones. Kelce continued the aggressive theme by catching a nine-yard pass directly over Jones.
Although the Dolphins managed a field goal on their next drive, the Chiefs responded again to take a 17-6 lead and force chaos into their hands. Kareem Hunt not only was running, but forcing the Dolphins into disarray everywhere of the field. Ndamukong Suh finished the day with no tackles, implicating the ferocity the Chiefs offensive line set early in the first half.
However, the Chiefs defense gave up an eye-rolling touchdown right as the offense began to assert chaos. Wide receiver Jakeem Grant caught a short screen pass, broke two tackles, and ran 65 yards for the score. The underlying implication is the rapid succession of events that occur within the Chiefs defense. A failure to tackle and thus the propagation of explosive plays has dampened the offense, and forced them into a corner.
The Chiefs offense, even when not intrinsically able to play from behind due to the importance calling running plays, has been overwhelmingly efficient under Matt Nagy’s control. Having the ball five times in the second half, the Chiefs netted field goals on three of those, and missed another.
The one drive the Chiefs failed to score on was important for the chaos model. The score was 23-13, and the Chiefs had the ball on a fourth and inches after failing on a third and short the play before. With the ball on the Dolphins 19-yard line, Nagy opted to attempt another run.
Modeling this play is an intriguing experiment in modeling possible playoff decisions from the Chiefs staff. A field goal could have put the Chiefs up 26-13 with roughly three to four Dolphins drive opportunities left – or, a 60-percentile win window. Converting the fourth down would have taken the Dolphins drives opportunities down to three due to time of control, or a 55-percentile win window.
Failing the conversion, which the Chiefs did, however, would be more |
Google Fiber. That's an expensive marketing stunt. But it's not so much to spend to figure out how to shore up a $256 billion company if broadband providers started charging Google a toll to deliver its product.
Even then, Google would still have a steep climb to broadband independence. To get Google Fiber into 20 million homes—or slightly more than 20 cities the size of Austin—would cost between $10 billion and $15 billion, Kirjner estimates. Then again, that's in the range of what Google spent to buy Motorola Mobility in an effort to gain greater control over the other major platform for delivering its ads. Still, the wisdom of that decision is far from proven. Until then, it's doubtful Google will place a multibillion-dollar bet to guarantee you never have to wait for a YouTube video to buffer ever again.Contributed By Andy Wei
For more in depth information on these topics and more, download the full iPhone 6s teardown report.
To our surprise, we have found two different A9 application processors!
It had been industry speculation prior to the iPhone 6S launch that Apple would be dual-sourcing the A9 and A9X from Samsung and TSMC, respectively. The A9 would have gone into iPhone 6S/6S+ and the A9X would have gone into iPad Pros, giving Samsung a large edge in volume for the A9 product family.
It was thus a surprise to find two different application processors in two otherwise identical iPhone 6S smartphones. As pictured below, there is a difference in the die size for the APL0898 (Samsung) and the APL1022 (TSMC).
Benchmarking Point of View
From a benchmarking point of view, the smaller die size shows a leadership in technology scaling for Samsung.
On the other hand, for Apple to go through all the trouble of dual-sourcing a custom designed part and launching on day one with both parts, suggests major sourcing problems. For cost and power reasons, there is little reason to run a larger die, unless the smaller die was not available at the right volumes.
With the same exact SoC design implemented in two different technologies, it just doesn’t get any better than this for us at Chipworks to benchmark the technologies!
Additional technical information
This blog as well as our initial teardown blog on the iPhone 6s contains some of our initial findings on the new smartphones.
For more in depth information on these topics and more, download the full iPhone 6s teardown report.If last season is any indication, Indianapolis Colts wide receiver T.Y. Hilton knows what to expect Sunday from the New England Patriots defense.
In two meetings last year, New England was able neutralize the Pro Bowl receiver, holding him to four receptions for 60 yards.
Although star cornerback Darrelle Revis has since moved on to the New York Jets, Hilton said he’s prepared for Bill Belichick’s team to defend him the same way, which includes help from a safety.
Article continues below...
"I know they’re going to double me, triple me, do whatever they can to take me out of the game…In order for us to be successful, I’ve got to make plays,” Hilton said, per the team’s official website.
If the Patriots do indeed give extra attention to Hilton, the onus will be on the Colts other receivers to make plays. Indianapolis receivers managed just two catches in last January’s AFC title game loss to New England, including one by Hilton.
In effort to upgrade at the position, the Colts added Andre Johnson in free agency and selected Philip Dorsett in the first round of last April’s draft.
Even if he’s double covered however, Hilton said he’s expecting a different outcome on Sunday.SEATTLE -- If you were a brave soul who decided to plan an outdoor event in mid-November in the Northwest, it looks like Friday the 13th is going to live up to its unlucky reputation because a rather potent Pacific storm is on the way, complete with Flood Watches, High Wind Warnings and Wind Advisories.Technically it begins on the 12th, but the 13th will be no picnic, especially if a picnic was what you were aiming to do (in which case, you had to know what you were getting yourself in to.)Rain will begin to develop around mid morning to midday Thursday and it'll begin a 48-hour period of fairly stormy weather. The steady, moderate-to-heavy rains are expected to continue through the rest of Thursday, through Friday and into early Saturday morning.While the lowlands are expected to get about 1-2 inches of rainfall (clear those storm drains! That's plenty of rain for urban leaf/street flooding), the mountains are expected to get between 5-8 inches, with perhaps some spots in the North Cascades getting a full 10-12" of rain.Thus, Flood Watches are in effect for all mountain-fed rivers in Western Washington. This storm is what's known as an "Atmospheric River" -- a long train of moisture coming off the Pacific, but in a minor saving grace, it's aligned more due west-east than southwest-northeast, so it's not tapping into super warm tropical air (so not really a Hawaiian "Pineapple Express"), and thus the snow levels aren't super high, just relatively high.Bottom line for that is some of the higher mountain peaks could get snow instead of rain -- all rain in the passes, but anything that falls as snow means it won't run off into a river, so every snowflake counts.Still, plenty of water for some river flooding so those who live in flood plains need to prepare now, especially those next to rivers off the north and central Cascades. The rains won't really taper off until Saturday morning or midday.The second factor is the wind. Overall, wind speeds are looking fairly "routine" for a November storm -- gusts to 40-45 mph in the Puget Sound region, and 55 mph along the coast -- enough to prompt a Wind Advisory for much of Western Washington. However, the exception now is the Northwest Interior where a High Wind Warning is now in effect from 10am-10 pm Thursday for potential gusts to 60 mphThis storm is also a bit different in that the winds are expected to last considerably longer than usual -- perhaps as long as 24 hours between Thursday late afternoon and Friday late afternoon.So while this storm won't win any trophies in the "peak gust" category, it will be more persistent than the usual 3-4 hours a windstorm typically lasts around here. So have a plan for power outages, especially during Thursday night's darkness.And just to top things off for those on the coast, we're looking at some very high surf as the massive parent low pressure center to this storm sweeps through the Gulf of Alaska.Seas along our coast will build to 15-18 feet Friday afternoon, then swell to 19-22 feet on Friday night before subsiding Saturday. (Could be worse -- models indicate 40-45 foot seas up farther north in the Gulf -- and you wonder why the Alaska cruise season ends in September.)The front will gradually sink south of the region on Saturday, switching things up a bit to a cooler, showery pattern. For the lowlands, this means a showers and sunbreaks and don't-forget-the-coat kind of weekend with temperatures barely reaching 50.But more importantly, snow levels crash to around 2,000 feet, meaning we go back to accumulating snow in the mountains -- even the passes. Not a lot to start-- about 2-4 inches, but skiers need to hope the long range models are correct for the middle of next week.Another storm rolls in on Tuesday and it's a much colder storm, expected to bring FEET of snow to the Cascades -- perhaps even more than 2 feet in the low passes and 4 feet (or more?) in the higher elevations by late Wednesday.Maybe "Wednesday the 18th" will become synonymous with luck for skiers and snowboarders?Dukes of Hazzard star Tom Wopat has been arrested and charged with indecent assault after he allegedly put his finger between a woman's butt cheeks.
The 65-year-old actor, who played Luke Duke in the television series, has also been accused of cocaine possession.
He was cuffed on Wednesday in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he is starring in a production of the musical '42nd Street.'
According to the police report, on July 23 during rehearsals, Wopat walked behind a woman on set. She claims she felt his hand grab her butt and felt his fingers go between her butt cheeks, according to TMZ.
Tom Wopat, 65, who played Luke Duke on 'Dukes of Hazzard,' was arrested for cocaine and indecent assault
Left to right: John Schneider, Tom Wopat and Ben Jones as Bo Duke, Luke Duke and Cooter in the TV series 'The Dukes of Hazzard.' Wopat was arrested Wednesday on indecent assault
Left to right: John Schneider, Catherine Bach and Tom Wopat in a promotional portrait for the TV show 'The Dukes of Hazzard' circa 1980
Wopat is expected to be performing in the '42nd Street' production at the Reagle Music Theatre of Greater Boston Thursday
Cops say when one of the honchos confronted him about his behavior he denied touching the woman and said 'F*** them all.'
There are two other incidents involving Wopat and women during rehearsals. In the police report one woman says he came up from behind her and wrapped his arm around her waist, and another woman says he peeled sunburned skin off her arm.
When Wopat was arrested Wednesday he denied the claims but told police there was on incident with a woman where he 'lightly touched her hip' and said to her, 'I like the way you work.'
Waltham Police told DailyMail.com when they searched Wopat's Ford Bronco they found two baggies with white powder they believe is cocaine.
Police were actively looking for Wopat Wednesday night and pulled him over in his Bronco. Police found him and placed him under arrest at 10:53pm.
The cocaine charge is a misdemeanor and the indecent assault is a felony.
Wopat was released on $1,000 bail and plead not guilty in court Thursday to the drug and indecent assault charge,.
He is expected to be performing Thursday night in the '42nd Street' production. It is the show's opening night.Ultranationalist group hold man dressed as Santa Claus at gunpoint to protest Christmas celebrations
AYDIN
A group of men from the youth group of the ultranationalist Alperen Hearts protested Christmas and New Year’s celebrations in Turkey by holding a man dressed as Santa Claus at gunpoint on Dec. 28 in the Nazilli district of the western province of Aydın.The men were dressed in “efe” traditional clothes and danced to the traditional “zeybek” dance, while the locals were watching in shock.The provincial head of the Alperen Hearths in Aydın, Burak Yaşar, said they were aiming to “bring people back to their roots.”“Our purpose is for people to go back to their roots. We are Muslim Turks and have been banner-bearers of Islam for a thousand years. We cannot see why there is such sensitivity for Christian traditions and not for our traditions like Hıdrellez, Nevruz and other religious and national holidays. We organized this protest against Christmas celebrations, reminding people that we should be celebrating our own national holidays instead,” he said.Everyone loves animals in little outfits. But couple that with an environmental campaign and you’ve created an unstoppable craft monster
Thanks, everyone, but the koalas have enough mittens now
There is little that is likely to stir readers more than photos of adorable animals dressed up in funny clothes. Add the element of a vulnerable species rescued from the brink of death and destruction and you have clickbait gold.
Such was the case earlier this month when one of the world’s largest animal welfare and conservation charities, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), put out a call for assistance with crafting mittens for koalas whose paws were burned in wildfires across southeastern Australia.
“Our supporters are always asking what they can do to help,” says Josey Sharrad, native wildlife campaigner for IFAW’s Australia chapter. “So [when this wildfire hit] we put a little campaign together and sent it to our supporters and local media and we posted it to Facebook.”
More than 150 media outlets – from The Guardian to Good Morning America, not to mention scores of blogs – posted irresistible IFAW photos of koalas with burned paws wearing cotton mittens. The photos were accompanied by appeals to readers to pitch in and help.
In short order, the IFAW offices were flooded with mittens. Very quickly, supply well outpaced demand. Koala-loving sewers had sent handmade mittens from as far away as Europe, Canada and the United States. Sharrad says the staff has not yet counted, but they’ve received thousands of pairs, and in response politely issued a cease and desist order to followers.
“Mitten Accomplished!” proclaimed a blog post.
Koala mittens needed to help bushfire victims with burnt paws Read more
Despite that, smaller outlets continued to publish the koala mitten appeal days and even weeks later.
A few large media outlets, including the Washington Post and Huffington Post, published updates that repeated the IFAW’s “thanks, but we’re good” message. But the number of these updates was small compared to the initial blitz, and most of them came a week later, when the IFAW was already inundated.
A pattern for an embarrassment of riches
It was not the first time a campaign seeking to clothe stricken animals spiraled out of control.
Two oil spills that struck “little penguin” habitats in Australia and New Zealand, in 2000 and 2011 respectively, resulted in calls for tiny homemade sweaters for the diminutive species. In each case, rescue groups solicited knitters to craft jumpers that would be used to keep the birds warm and prevent them preening and ingesting oil while they awaited a bath.
The penguin sweater pattern and accompanying story were shared far and wide.
The winning entrants in a competition by Spotlight, AAT Kings and Phillip Island Nature Parks to knit sweaters for penguins as part of the Penguin Foundation’s conservation efforts. Photograph: The Penguin Foundation
According to Mike Dickison, curator of natural history at New Zealand’s Whanganui Regional Museum, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust alone collected 15,000 sweaters. The Penguin Foundation on Phillip Island is storing its donated sweaters in a shipping container.
The rescuers who responded to the 2011 oil spill did not use the hundreds of donated sweaters. Rather, they washed the oil from the animals and put them under heat lamps to get warm and dry (the washing removes some of the animal’s natural oils which help it stay warm).
Some of the biologists even argue that putting a sweater on an oil-soaked penguin would only serve to mat the substance into its coat and further stress the animal.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An oil-soaked penguin wears a sweater whilst housed in a ware-house in Salt River, in Cape Town. Photograph: ANNA ZIEMINSKI/EPA
Perhaps the bigger issue is that thousands of generous handicrafters around the world may think they’re helping rescue animal species while actually doing very little – and perhaps even contributing to waste and carbon emissions. Oil slicks are only one of many threats – including death by fishing nets, predation from dogs and cats, and choking on plastic bits washing up on the beaches – that are hurting little penguin colonies.
Turning mittens to pouches?
Meanwhile, well north of the penguin rookeries, rescue workers are still caring for injured koalas, and Australia’s wildfire season is far from over. Sharrad says it’s likely than hundreds of koala have been affected.
Regardless, the IFAW’s stock of mittens will last well beyond this summer’s fires – not just because of the quantity but because, as with the penguin sweaters, rescue workers are at odds about the efficacy of homemade accessories. The Australian Marine Wildlife Research and Rescue Organization, which cares for injured koala in its wildlife clinic, had to turn away the mittens, explaining that they inhibit the animal’s ability to use their claws (instead, the group uses bandages).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Australian Marine Wildlife Research and Rescue Organization released a video demonstrated that bandages, not mittens, were the way to treat burned koalas.
“Different people have different approaches,” says Sharrad, “But we’re working with carers who do use the mittens.”
Due to the overwhelming mitten response, the IFAW has made two pivots. It is asking supporters to consider making a donation or joining their mailing list, instead of sending mittens. But it has also put out another plea for volunteer crafters, asking those who are so inclined to make cotton pouches of various sizes, which IFAW says rescue organizations use to keep juvenile (or “joey”) kangaroos and wallabies, orphaned from the fires, in a warm, clean environment, similar to their mother’s pouch. As with the mitten campaign, IFAW has included a pattern for the would-be pouch makers.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sam the koala, who became a worldwide celebrity after she somehow managed to survive the devastating Australian bushfires in 2009. She died the same year due to complications from chlamydia, a disease that has ravaged the species. Photograph: Rebecca Michael/Newspix / Rex Features
Is this the beginning of a pouch windfall? Sharrad says she does not think they will see a repeat, because IFAW has asked that only Australian residents should be making the pouches, to save on postage costs.
But it’s impossible to control where the story might be picked up.
A decade from now, IFAW and other conservation groups will likely still be storing thousands of mittens and sweaters and pouches, instead of benefiting from more valuable contributions from volunteers, such as money or advocacy for policies that help vulnerable species. The biggest threat to most species is likely a combination of habitat destruction, pollution and climate change - none of which will be solved by crafting.
Releasing a campaign into the interwebs, especially when it calls for sewing outfits or mittens for charismatic animals in need, is a great way to get outfits or mittens or pouches – all shipped via carbon-emitting parcel services.
In response to the IFAW post asking supporters to stop sending mittens, one supporter commented: “My kids spent their whole weekend making these [mittens]. You’re getting them whether you need them or not!”As a relatively young global city, Vancouver can play up to its brash, breezy image. But some of its most celebrated books are rooted in harder times, as it struggled to find its place in the world, and to deal with racial tensions. Tyler Stiem takes a closer look
“Are we going to be a resort town for the super-rich from all around the world, or a functional, integrated city?” wonders the essayist and comedian Charles Demers near the end of Vancouver Special, his witty and deeply anxious meditation on the past, present, and future of Canada’s “most livable” city. To live in Vancouver right now is to accommodate yourself to the slightly uncanny feeling that your future here depends less on anything you do than on the invisible hand of the global market.
Or not so invisible: from the pretty west-side neighbourhoods where Teslas practically outnumber Toyotas, to the humbler precincts where a crappy bungalow will still set you back a million and a half dollars, just about every corner of Vancouver bears the imprint of global capital. The flood of foreign investment since the late 1990s — mainly in the form of property speculation, first from nervous Hong Kong residents, pre-handover, and, much more intensively over the past few years, from newly prosperous China — has transformed the city. Forget the Vancouver Canucks and the ski hills whose clean, well-lighted slopes beckon from the North Shore suburbs; real estate, as Douglas Coupland observes in City of Glass, his wry hometown homage, is “Vancouver’s biggest sport … disturbingly central to the civic psyche”.
If this particular anxiety doesn’t much concern novelists and poets, remaining for now the imaginative domain of elegant worriers like Demers (as well as noted urbanists the Real Housewives of Vancouver), it’s because Vancouver, at barely 130 years old, has always been a city in transition.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alice Munro … came to a sober provincial town in the 1950s. Photograph: Rex/Sipa USA
Nobel laureate Alice Munro, arriving in the 1950s, found a sober provincial town that little resembled the shiny not-quite-metropolis of luxury condos and esoteric sports cars we know today. Its moody weather and mountain vistas, as commanding then as they are now, weren’t much to her taste. Some of that chilly perspective can be found in the beautiful and melancholy stories of The Love of a Good Woman (1998) and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). She decamped to nearby Vancouver Island in the early 60s, on the cusp of a breakthrough in her writing just as the city was on the cusp of the countercultural era from which its popular image as an easygoing mecca of progressive politics and potent pot first took root.
The image endures, even as the Vancouver brand, now global, thanks to the Economist and the 2010 Winter Olympics, has evolved to include yoga, dim sum, and the entertainment-industrial complex. Timothy Taylor’s novel Stanley Park explores the tension between local and global through the travails of Jeremy Papier, a chef determined to make a mark on the city’s gastronomical scene with his “radically rearguard” locavore cuisine. To keep his struggling restaurant afloat, Papier sells a majority stake to the owner of a global coffee conglomerate, flames out, and finds redemption in an illegal pop-up restaurant. If that sounds a little on the nose, Taylor enlivens the material with a restless curiosity and knack for well-turned phrases.
Madeleine Thien chronicles the lives of immigrant families in the brilliant, subtle stories of Simple Recipes. Coupland’s Hey! Nostradamus imagines a Columbine-like school shooting in the sleepy suburb of North Vancouver. Doretta Lau’s fresh and funny collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? includes a story where people are assailed by text messages from their future selves and another that turns a gang of stereotype-flaunting Asian teenagers loose on Vancouver’s unsuspecting suburbs. On the nonfiction front, Alisa Smith and JB Mackinnon’s locavore manifesto The 100 Mile Diet merits mention for its quintessential Vancouverness.
But the city’s progressive politics and proud multiculturalism belie a darker, troubled history. From the rise of the racist Asiatic Exclusion League in the early 1900s, to the brutal crackdowns on organised labour during the Clutch Plague and internment of Japanese-Canadian residents during the second world war, to the ongoing neglect of First Nations communities, Vancouver has been shaped by class and cultural conflict, by its successive, anxious encounters with otherness.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joy Kogawa … witness to one of Vancouver’s shameful chapters.
In her autobiographical novel Obasan, Joy Kogawa recreates one of these shameful chapters from the perspective of a Japanese-Canadian girl called Naomi Nakane. Hers is one of the thousands of families forcibly relocated from the city and interned as “enemy aliens” in camps hundreds of miles from home. Told in a restrained, lyrical style, the novel traces with tenderness and dawning trepidation Naomi’s childhood journey from innocence to tragedy. A staple of high school English classes, Obasan still has the power to turn this reader into a hot mess of tears.
The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy, offers a different perspective on the same era. An intergenerational tale set in Chinatown during the 1930s and 40s, it follows Jook-Liang, Jung-Sum, and Sek-Lung, siblings who are Canadian by birth but second-class citizens by the laws of the day. Resented but less reviled than their Japanese neighbours, the trio are torn, to various degrees, between the “old ways” of their parents and grandparents and the contradictory promises of assimilation.
Lee Henderson’s The Man Game is a sort-of historical novel that conjures 1880s Vancouver, whose opium dens, brothels, and logging camps full of migrant labourers anticipate the depredations of the Downtown Eastside, the city’s still-open wound where poverty and addiction fester in the shadow of gentrification more than a century later. The elegant linked stories of Nancy Lee’s Dead Girls have as their backdrop the arrest and trial of a serial killer reminiscent of Robert Pickton, the real-life predator who in the 90s and early noughties stalked and killed sex workers in the area, many of them First Nations women. Unfolding with frosty precision, these stories unsettle.
Conspicuously absent here is the Great Vancouver Novel. The city has inspired many good books, but no municipal epic — no Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry or Ulysses or even In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje’s great prose poem about Canada’s other “most livable” city (and Vancouver nemesis), Toronto. What seems to unite Vancouver’s literary output is an almost compulsive need to historicise coupled with an aversion to myth-making. Whether this is a function of the extreme youth of the city or a (very) Canadian modesty about grand narratives, I couldn’t tell you. But who knows? Maybe, just maybe, the present real-estate crisis will turn out to be the muse Vancouver needs. Assuming anyone can afford to stay and write the thing.
Tyler Stiem is a Vancouver writer and photographer. His reportage, travel writing, and radio documentaries have appeared in Newsweek, Vice, the Globe and Mail, Walrus, VQR, Hazlitt and on CBC Radio. You can find him on Twitter @strange_shores.
Readers recommend
Malcolm Lowry wrote scathingly of Vancouver development/gentrification, and lovingly of the then-undeveloped Indian Arm, from his Dollarton cabin, in his short fiction and October Ferry to Gabriola. –OldCreoleBonVivant
wrote scathingly of Vancouver development/gentrification, and lovingly of the then-undeveloped Indian Arm, from his Dollarton cabin, in his short fiction and October Ferry to Gabriola. –OldCreoleBonVivant I recently enjoyed Adrian Barnes ’s Nod, set in a post-apocalyptic West End and downtown, with key scenes on the Lions’ Gate Bridge and on a freighter commandeered from English Bay! –OldCreoleBonVivant
’s Nod, set in a post-apocalyptic West End and downtown, with key scenes on the Lions’ Gate Bridge and on a freighter commandeered from English Bay! –OldCreoleBonVivant Douglas Coupland ’s Girlfriend in a Coma is quite a good depiction of 70’s West and North Van. –OldCreoleBonVivant
’s Girlfriend in a Coma is quite a good depiction of 70’s West and North Van. –OldCreoleBonVivant And a favorite kids’ book : Mister Got to Go by Lois Simmie, set in and around the Sylvia hotel to the steady beat of perpetual rain. And raccoons. –OldCreoleBonVivant
: Mister Got to Go by Lois Simmie, set in and around the Sylvia hotel to the steady beat of perpetual rain. And raccoons. –OldCreoleBonVivant Hands down the book Vancouver by the late reporter Eric Nicol. A mixture of humour and history, tells the story of Vancouver from the time when the Whoi-Whoi lived at what is now Lumberman’s arch, through the sixties. –interiorbcUPDATE: Princeton police investigating 'Jews vs. Nazis' beer pong game
PRINCETON -- A photo of Princeton High School students playing a drinking game that pits "Jews vs. Nazis" has surfaced on social media and caught the attention of the school district.
The photo depicts a version of "beer pong" called Holocaust Pong or Alcoholocaust, according to several websites that describe the game. Beer cups are arranged in a Star of David and swastika formation on each end of a table.
The "Jews" are allowed to "Anne Frank,'' or hide, one of their cups. The Nazis are allowed to "Auschwitz" their opponents, requiring one to sit out a round, websites say.
Princeton schools Superintendent Steve Cochrane said the district is talking to the students and their families about the photo and its raised several concerns.
"As an individual and as the superintendent of the Princeton Public Schools, I am deeply upset that some of our students chose to engage in a drinking game with clearly anti-Semitic overtones and to broadcast their behavior over social media," Cochrane said in a statement.
Cochrane said the photo illustrates several lessons. "Underage drinking is not a new problem; nor is the misuse of social media; nor are actions of bias or bigotry," he said. "They are not new problems, but they do not have to be ongoing ones."
The photo was shared on the social media platform SnapChat, where it was discovered by another student.
That student, Jamaica Ponder, wrote about it on her blog in a post that condemned the act. The post had been shared on Facebook over 1,000 times by Thursday afternoon.
"I know I'm not the only one who saw this Snapchat story," Ponder wrote. "Yet here I am, the only one saying anything about it. I am unsure as to what's worse: the static silence from my peers, or the fact that this happened in the first place."
Ponder, a 17-year-old junior at Princeton High School, did not name the students in the post, but identified them as classmates in an interview Thursday with NJ Advance Media.
"They are athletes and student leaders," Ponder said. "They're prominent individuals that everybody knows, captains of sports teams."
Hacker sent anti-Semitic fliers to Princeton U.
Ponder said she recognized the basement room the photo was taken in as one just blocks from her own Princeton house.
"This isn't surprising necessarily," Ponder said. "I"m not astounded at who's in the picture.''
Ponder said she contacted her school guidance counselor before she posted the picture on her blog, as a courtesy to the administration.
Since then, she has met with several school administrators about the photo, including the school Principal, Gary Snyder.
Ponder said the had been some unpleasant reaction to her post at school Thursday, but most of the response was positive.
"A couple of people came up to me using profanities, but a lot of people were very kind and I'd say appreciative of what I did,'' Ponder said. "Someone needed to show what exactly is going on when no one's paying attention.''
Cochrane said the photo has the district's attention.
"As a community we all have a role in teaching our children to make good decisions, to be legally responsible, and to be respectful members of a diverse society," he said.
"An incident such as this one, forces us to take a hard look at our efforts in educating our children in the values that may be most important to their success in life. "
Keith Brown may be reached at kbrown@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @KBrownTrenton. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.Correction: The original article stated that Boyd gave the youth life in prison with no parole. But deeper research indicates that she gave him 10 years in prison for a punch that wasn’t intended to kill anyone. We still consider this to be a life sentence, since research shows that even short periods of incarceration have a lifelong impact on those affected.
Judge Jean Boyd has been in the media lately for letting 16-year old Ethan Couch off the hook after he killed four people. Couch was on a drunken joyride with his friends when he hit four people, causing them to lose their lives. He also paralyzed one of his friends.
The judge said that Couch suffered from “Affluenza,” a condition in which his wealth and privilege kept him from understanding the consequences of his actions. The judge gave the boy no prison time and 10 years probation, sending him to a rehab facility for the rich.
But the judge has a history that some are considering to be racist. There was a 14-year old boy that Boyd sent to prison for over a decade after he punched another child who fell, hit his head and died. So, even though he didn’t intend to kill anyone, this youth will now suffer for life after experiencing the torture, rape, isolation and abuse that occurs in the state prison system. This doesn’t count the fact that he will be labeled a felon for the rest of his life, devoid of job and educational opportunities.
So, even though Boyd didn’t give the young man life in prison, she may as well have.
In another case, a 14-year old African American boy who participated in a robbery was given life in prison without parole. He didn’t even pull the trigger. Boyd wasn’t the judge in this case, but it shows the differential treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system.
Yvette Carnell at BreakingBrown.com speaks on it:
Black teens, however, aren’t nearly as lucky when they come before the courts. Kuntrell Jackson, who is black, was 14 years old when he took part in a robbery that ended with the death of a store clerk. Even though Jackson was not the trigger man, he was tried as an adult sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Evan Miller was 14 when he was convicted of murdering a man he was attempting to rob. He was also sentenced to life without parole
Brothers, this is what black men are up against. You have to fight for your rights.
The million dollar question here is why judges are allowed to get away with destroying the lives of black children and no one says anything? Do we care about our young people, or are we ok with them being herded into prisons so that private corporations can make a profit?
The Corrections Corporation of America is one of the most profitable companies in America and they make their money by housing people in prison, mostly black. If this isn’t a violation of human rights, then what is? Maybe we need to call on the United Nations.The league-leading San Jose Earthquakes have landed another weapon in the race for the Supporters' Shield.
San Jose on Monday acquired veteran playmaking midfielder Mehdi Ballouchy from the New York Red Bulls in exchange for a 2013 international spot and a conditional 2013 draft pick.
“I’ve admired his play over the seven years he’s been in the league,” Earthquakes manager Frank Yallop said in a club statement. “He’s steadily improved since joining MLS. Mehdi’s a good player, a great addition to our team and we’re looking forward to having him here in San Jose.”
WATCH: Ballouchy goal vs. Montreal
The Quakes, who are already the highest scoring team in MLS with 45 goals, add a player who has 13 goals and 24 assists during the course of his seven-year MLS career. He has seen limited action in 2012 for the Red Bulls, with only 10 starts (one goal and two assists). The addition of new designated player Tim Cahill may have made Ballouchy expendable.
"It was a difficult decision to let Mehdi go,” New York Red Bulls GM and Sporting Director Erik Soler said in a club statement. “However, trading him provides us additional roster and financial flexibility moving forward.”
Ballouchy was born in Morocco, but moved to the United States as a teenager and has connections to Northern California. He relocated to the Bay Area for his senior year of high school at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Calif. He also played collegiate soccer at Santa Clara University, where he was a first-team All-American in 2005.
The Red Bulls originally acquired Ballouchy in 2010 in a trade with the Colorado Rapids. Often praised by NY manager Hans Backe for his technical abilities, the midfielder played in 51 regular season games for New York with mixed results in that span. He had four goals and four assists in those matches.
The move is just the latest for a Red Bulls front office that has kept busy all season long. The other transactions executed this year inlcude the trade of Juan Agudelo to Chivas USA in exchange for Heath Pearce, allocation money and future considerations, and the recent deal sending Dane Richards and allocation money to acquire Sébastien Le Toux from the Vancouver Whitecaps.Microsoft has just announced some drastic changes to OneDrive storage in what the company calls “a pursuit of productivity and collaboration.” Microsoft will no longer offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers — instead they will get 1TB of storage. Free OneDrive storage is also being decreased from 15GB to 5GB for all users — it doesn’t matter if you are an existing OneDrive user or new. Here are the details:
No more unlimited storage for Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers. Starting now, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
100 GB and 200 GB paid plans are going away as an option for new users and will be replaced with a 50 GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016.
Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016.
If you are an Office 365 consumer subscriber and have stored in excess of 1 TB, you will be notified of this change and will be able to keep your increased storage for at least 12 months.
If you are an Office 365 consumer subscriber and find that Office 365 no longer meets your needs, a pro-rated refund will be given.
If you are using more than 5 GB of free storage, you will continue to have access to all files for at least 12 months after these changes go into effect in early 2016. In addition, you can redeem a free one-year Office 365 Personal subscription, which includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
Current customers of standalone OneDrive storage plans (such as a 100 or 200 GB plans) are not affected by these changes.
Over the past year, Microsoft has touted OneDrive as the superior alternative to Dropbox, Google Drive, and other storage services, even going as far as offering extra storage space for free just for using the service. This made OneDrive appealing over the competition.
. @onedrive Pathetic |
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